Name: Iran war: Why the new supreme leader is a rebuke to Trump | DW News
Uploaded: 2026-03-09T23:07:09.000Z
Duration: 13 min 48 s
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Its been just over a week now since the conflict in Iran began.

And now the regime has a new supreme leader.

Basic passive voice

56 year old Mojtabah Khamenei will take over from his father Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who was killed last weekend in US And Israeli strikes that started the current war.

In a moment Ben Friedman and I will be discussing what the White House might make of the rise of Khamenei Jr.

But first let's look at listen to how Iran State TV announced his appointment.

This assembly after thorough and extensive deliberations and by utilizing the authority granted under Article 108 of the Constitution and in accordance with its religious duty and belief in being present before Almighty God.

In today's extraordinary session based on the decisive vote of the esteemed members of the assembly of Experts appoints and introduces this is Ayatollah Syed Mojtaba Hosseini Khamenei.

May God preserve him as the third leader of the sacred system of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

And here's what's known about the new Supreme Leader Mojtabah Khamenei.

As I said a bit earlier, he's the son of the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who was killed last weekend.

He's a hardliner and until now a mid level Shiite cleric.

He has close ties to Iran's Revolutionary Guard and so far has never held public office.

It's great to speak to Ben Friedman, Policy Director at Defense priorities in Washington D.C.

ben, the US killed the former Supreme Leader only to have him be replaced by his own hardline son.

What is the White House going to make of this?

It is a strong rebuke and an unsurprising one.

I think anyone probably including the president, unfortunately.

But anyone who's surprised that the Iranians have essentially said, you know, we're not going to let you force us to pick someone moderate or more cooperative is delusional.

I mean it's the normal state of affairs that when you bomb a country and make demands of tends to drive support to the government to hardliners.

Normal countries are nationalistic and that's what we're seeing here from Iran.

And it's completely unsurprising I think that the White House may well try to kill this supreme Leader too.

And I think unfortunately they don't understand that the more they kill the Iranian leadership, the harder line the Iranian leadership is likely to get.

The president doesn't seem to understand that things can always get worse.

They can always get more anti American and more prone to resistance.

I just want to pick up on something you said.

It does seem like the new supreme Leader could have a pretty uncomfortable clock hanging over his head.

Yeah, I mean, the Israelis, for starters, seemed likely to try to assassinate him.

And the president, United States government has shown fealty to the Israelis, unfortunately, in his willingness to sort of go along with what they want and target these regime leaders.

So, you know, President Trump did say that the supreme Leader's son would be an unacceptable replacement.

I hope he doesn't really mean that and he stops with these assassinations.

But it doesn't bode well for anyone who's in the job under those circumstances.

What do you think it means now for how the conflict itself progresses?

Well, I think that it's part of a series of things that are happening, that whether or not they raise the stakes, they show again, predictably, that the Iranians aren't just going to sort of bow down and sign some deal that Trump demands of them, that they're going to resist and they're going to fight.

And the reaction to being attacked and having these coercive demands made of them is going to be to assert their will and show that they can't be bossed around.

The Iranians were very clear before the attack began a week ago that they don't like being told, do this or else we're going to bomb you.

And in fact, that they're much less likely to do those things, you know, make cooperative agreements and so forth.

Under those circumstances, I think they were telling the truth and that the United States is simply making things harder for itself.

If indeed our goal was to get some sort of deal here by making these demands and bombing to get them, we would have been better off a week ago just signing the deal that the Iranians are ready to sign.

Based on what you've just said, from the Iran regime's perspective, is this appointment a gamble or is the whole situation that the region finds itself in a gamble?

I mean, of course, you know, Trump said it's unacceptable to have this guy as leader.

He clearly wants to be able to claim that he got some kind of regime change and got a more placid set of leaders in there, more cooperative set of leaders in there.

But, you know, the Iranians view it as that if they give in to that kind of coercion, they're going to be bullied and coerced forever and that it's unacceptable from a standpoint of pride and I would say domestic politics to be pushed around that way.

In fact, they'd rather be targeted for death than to give in to the United States and Israel like that.

And so, you know, it may be a gamble, but

it's one they've always said they were going to make.

And again, it's just completely unsurprising.

So the new supreme leaders in place, how might the US now try and work with its regional allies to counter what is maybe a more hardline Iranian leadership or as much a hard line as it was before?

Well, I think that the fact that there's a hard line leader in there, as there was a hard line leader before, doesn't preclude in the future some kind of deal where the Iranians would agree to some of the things that the United States had wanted them to agree to.

In fact, that they were ready to sign a deal that was better than the Obama Iran deal, the JCPOA a week ago before we decided to bomb them.

Anyway, the trouble is that now having bombed them for the reasons I was just talking about, I think it's much harder to even get that kind of deal.

So we're actually driving away the sort of deal we say we want and making it harder for the Iranians, I think, to accept that.

So I think the United States should continue to hope that we can get a deal.

And I don't think this supreme leader is the problem exactly.

But probably we're not going to be able to get any deal out of the Iranians in the near future.

And I think we should, the president and everyone else should strongly consider that we should just walk away from this war.

It's not good for the American interests.

So I think, you know, the sooner we stop, the better, even if we don't get a thing out of the Iranians.

When you say we don't work for Israel, could you explain what you mean by that?

Well, I mean, we shouldn't work for Israel is a better way to put it.

I think the, you know, this president has proven that he's just going to do what the Israelis want him to do.

It's, we thought maybe it wouldn't be the case, you know, within the last few months, but, you know, he's gotten dragged into war here with Iran twice now by essentially by the Israelis, by the White House's and the Secretary of State's own account.

We bombed because we thought if Israel bombed, then our bases would get attacked.

Essentially, the Israelis are just pulling strings and Trump is dancing.

I think even domestic, in terms of domestic politics in the United States, it's sort of unnecessary fealty.

So, you know, we should not give the Israelis that much support.

We should tell them, look, you're in charge of your own security.

And in fact, if you want to do these aggressive things in the region, we're not even going to give you all the money we give you.

But we certainly shouldn't just go to war on their behalf while we also fund their various wars and their military.

And I think this sort of ties in, well with something you tweeted a couple of days ago.

You're saying this lamentable war on Iran is a product of both Trump's military adventurism and a misguided consensus that Iran is a problem that Washington needs to solve.

Could you explain that a little bit more?

Yeah, I think the going back for decades in American foreign policy, you know, largely because of Iran's nuclear weapons program, you know, we've had this idea that, you know, we need to, at a minimum, get them into a deal where they agree not to build nukes.

And beyond that, you know, maybe the extreme version, which unfortunately is now governing the United States, reform the Iranian regime, the government, do regime change.

But, you know, I think Iran really is not a threat to the United States.

You could argue that they were in the past to some degree, but

I think that even their nuclear weapons program, which of course they didn't, they've never crossed over into weaponization.

So I think essentially, the more we threaten them and say we're going to bomb you if you don't have nukes, the more incentive we're giving them to have nuclear weapons.

And you can see the way we treat countries like North Korea that have nuclear weapons versus the ones that don't, like Libya, where we overthrow the government.

So I think we've been essentially pushing them to get nukes and to do other things we don't like in order to deter us, to deter Israel.

And in a sense, we'd be better off in terms of Iran if we just left them alone.

So the threat, I think, is something we've basically manufactured through our own misguided foreign policy.

And it's, I think, not too late to just have at least in the future, to have a relationship with Iran where they're just a normal country where we're not trying to tell them how to defend themselves and how to govern their country.

And we essentially can leave each other alone.

As you say, some of the justifications for starting this war from the perspective of the White House have been shifting over the last week or so.

And a couple of days ago, Donald Trump said something to the effect of that Iran was something like two weeks away from developing a weapon.

And, you know, recently, of course, the president was bragging and exaggerating that he had totally decimated and destroyed the Iranian nuclear weapons program with the bombing in June.

The fact is that we did, along with the Israelis, severely degrade their program, which was even then, even in the spring last year, more than two weeks away, significantly more.