How Iran’s new regime is so different from its predecessors.

Trump likes to say he will bring about regime change in Iran. Vali Nasser disagreed, but said that this actually worked to Tehran’s advantage.

“A whole new generation has taken over,” he says. “They have a very clear agenda. They have controlled the war and now they are going to control the peace.”

The new leadership was not made up of what Washington used to call “wool-clad apocalyptic ideologues,” says Nasser, but in general, post-revolutionary leaders were ruthlessly focused on protecting the state and willing to take more decisive action than their predecessors.

At 56, the country’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is 30 years younger than his father, Ali Khamenei, who was believed to be in frail health when he was killed at the start of the war.

President Massoud Pezeshkian is old at 71, but the generation that launched the 1979 revolution is over.

Two key figures, parliament speaker and chief negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Revolutionary Guard chief Ahmed Vahidi are both in their 60s.

Like the new supreme leader, both have close ties to the all-powerful Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

“They are children of the revolution,” says Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House in London.

“An 86-year-old man does not steer the ship of the Islamic Republic. The biggest handbrake of the system’s evolution was Ali Khamini.”

For decades, the cautious Khamenei has pursued a sometimes “no war, no peace” strategy. His successors were bold, attacking US military bases in the area, and then a few weeks later, on the face of it, far from humiliating Tehran.

“They have shown a greater willingness to engage in war than previous generations,” Nasser says.

In the year When Trump ordered the 2020 airstrikes that killed former Revolutionary Guard commander Qassem Soleimani, Iran telegraphed that it planned to retaliate before launching 12 ballistic missiles at US bases in Iraq. No US service personnel were killed.