Suzanne Maloney

It's clear that

You know, he has campaigned really, and in some ways he was prescient in appreciating the impact of the quote unquote forever wars on the American people, on the American economy, something that has been a long trend and theme in his own political career from his first bid for the presidency throughout his first term and again in this term.

And yet he has been very prone to using military action in this second Trump term.

but in discrete, limited ways that were intended as decapitation strikes or other, you know, very small-bore efforts.

And it seems that he didn't fully recognize the potential fallout from an Iran strike, that there was no way to decapitate the regime and quickly move to some kind of an alternative power that would be more friendly to the United States.

It simply doesn't exist within the Islamic Republic.

And I think neither of those outcomes happened for very much the same reason, which is that this is a deeply embedded regime and one that has very strong control over all aspects of society, the economy and the government.

It is not a personalistic regime where you can swap out a leader and somehow get one that might have a different view.

This is a regime that came to power through a popular revolution, so it has spent 47 years ensuring that no one can do to it what it did to its predecessor, the monarchy.

which meant that when the decapitation happened on the first day, Ayatollah Khamenei died, there was joy heard from many Iranians, but they were also still terrorized.

They also did not have a political movement that they could turn to that could in fact potentially challenge the system at a moment of vulnerability.

They could go to the streets, but they had done so only a month before, and they had been slaughtered in historic numbers by the regime itself, and they could see that those forces were still out there

Government officials were sending text messages.

The pace of executions of dissidents and protesters has remained high.

They're sending a very clear signal to the population, don't you dare take this opportunity.

And in the aftermath of the massacres that occurred in January, it's understandable that Iranians weren't going to take that risk.

For the same reason, the deeply embedded nature of the regime, this is why we're not seeing a different perspective of

or a more pragmatic or rational perspective from those who are somewhere lower in the ranks of the regime itself.

When the top echelon was killed, their successors in many ways are more radical or more hardline.

That was true of the Supreme Leader himself.