3 Men Who Run Iran

U.S. President Donald Trump has extended the ceasefire. Iran has attacked cargo ships in the Strait of Hormuz. The situation remains as fluid as ever.

But certain realities have emerged in sharp relief over the past few days. Among them that the question of power and authority at the top remains murky.

Read more below.

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Quote of the Week

“For now, the system is operating less as a hierarchy organized around a single dominant figure and more as a hardline coalition trying to manage war, diplomacy, and internal competition simultaneously.”

— Hamidreza Azizi, Visiting Fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs

 

TOP OF THE NEWS

Iran’s wartime leadership is not what it appears on paper. The president, the parliament speaker, and the foreign minister are the faces the outside world sees at press conferences, in Islamabad, on X — and yet none of them is making the decisions that matter.

The men making those decisions are Ahmad Vahidi, the IRGC commander-in-chief; Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, the Supreme National Security Council secretary installed under IRGC pressure; and Mohsen Rezaei, the military adviser to the supreme leader, who has publicly ruled out every concession Washington has demanded. All three are IRGC veterans, and none holds elected office.

This matters for the ceasefire. The negotiators the outside world is watching do not have the authority to conclude anything these three have not already approved.

And looming above all of this is the peculiar situation caused by the failure of Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei to show any sign of life, which matters more than it might seem. 

The Vacuum

To understand how bizarre Khamenei’s complete absence from public view is, we need to understand how significant the supreme leader is in the system of the Islamic Republic.

Many countries, such as Ireland, Germany, Italy, India, and the UK, have a ceremonial head of state whose role is limited to the equivalent of opening libraries. That’s not the role of the supreme leader. Under Iran’s constitution, the rahbar (“leader”) has authority over the judiciary, the armed forces, the IRGC, state media, and the Guardian Council — the body that vets all laws and electoral candidates. He delineates the general policies of the Islamic Republic and supervises all three branches of government.

No elected official — not the president, not the parliament speaker — can override him. Iran’s regional policy is controlled directly by the Office of the Supreme Leader. The Foreign Ministry is limited to protocol.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Islamic Republic’s first supreme leader, removed the country’s first elected president, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, in 1981, engineering his impeachment and forcing him to flee the country in disguise. Bani-Sadr had won seventy-five percent of the vote eighteen months earlier.

Two decades later, Mohammad Khatami won the presidency in two consecutive landslide elections on a platform of political liberalization and civil society reform. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the Guardian Council blocked or reversed every significant initiative he attempted during eight years in office.

Ali Khamenei exercised supreme authority throughout his 35-year tenure. He directed the suppression of the 2009 Green Movement and sanctioned the 2015 nuclear deal over hardliner objections.

The system has no mechanism for dealing with a supreme leader who is nowhere to be seen. In its statement following the election of Mojtaba to his father’s vacant position as supreme leader, the IRGC stressed that the system does not depend on a single individual, but this is manifestly untrue. The velayat-e faqih system – the Islamic Republic’s governing doctrine that supreme political and religious authority must rest with a single senior Islamic jurist – requires a present, functioning rahbar to operate.

Into the Breach: The Real Three at the Top

Seven weeks into the war, three men have moved into the space Mojtaba Khamenei seems unable to fill. All three are veterans of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. None holds elected office.

Ahmad Vahidi. Photo: Reuters

Ahmad Vahidi: IRGC Commander-in-Chief. Vahidi ascended to the IRGC’s top command the day after the war began, when his predecessor was killed in the opening strikes. He is the most powerful figure in Iran today.

He is not a man inclined to compromise. As IRGC commander he has pushed relentlessly for escalation, attacking regional neighbors over president Masoud Pezeshkian’s explicit objections, and has rejected every attempt by the civilian government to reassert control over wartime decision-making. He has been wanted by Interpol since 2007 in connection with the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, in which 85 people were killed, and is sanctioned by both the U.S. and the EU.

Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr. Photo: Reuters

Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr: Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council. The SNSC is the constitutional body through which all of Iran’s national security decisions must formally pass. After Ali Larijani was killed on March 17, Zolghadr was installed in his place. It’s been suggested that Pezeshkian was forced to appoint Zolghadr against his own wishes under pressure from the IRGC.

Zolghadr is a founding-generation IRGC figure who served as the Corps’s deputy commander-in-chief for eight years following the Iran-Iraq war, then spent a further eight years as deputy chief of the armed forces general staff. From 2012 to 2020 he served as deputy judiciary chief for strategic affairs, a posting that gave him simultaneous reach into Iran’s security, legal, and intelligence apparatus. He is a hardliner by any measure, with a career that predates and helped build the institutional structures that Qassem Soleimani, the IRGC Quds Force commander killed by a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad in January 2020, used to project Iranian power across the region.

Mohsen Rezaei. Photo: Reuters

Mohsen Rezaei — Military Adviser to Mojtaba Khamenei. Rezaei commanded the IRGC throughout the Iran-Iraq war. Those eight brutal years forged the IRGC into the institution it is today. Crucially in the context of the current war with the U.S. and Israel, Rezaei was the man who wrote to Ayatollah Khomeini in 1988 arguing that Iran could keep fighting against Iraq, that the IRGC had not exhausted its capacity and that accepting UN Resolution 598, which called for an immediate ceasefire between Iran and Iraq and the withdrawal of forces to internationally recognized borders, would be a betrayal. Khomeini overruled him, described the decision as drinking “a cup of poison,” and the war ended.

Rezaei has spent the decades since that war in the political wilderness, running unsuccessfully for the presidency and serving as secretary of the Expediency Council.

In a televised interview in his capacity as military adviser, Rezaei declared “we will in no way back down from our ten conditions in the negotiations.” His references to the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war in the interview show how much that costly stalemate still weighs on him.

In Vahidi, Zolghadr, and Rezaei, the U.S. faces an Iranian leadership whose public positions, stated on the record since the ceasefire began, rule out every concession Washington has publicly demanded. Whoever is negotiating in Islamabad can only offer terms that these three men have not already vetoed.

The Public Three

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. Photo: Reuters

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf: Parliament Speaker. Ghalibaf is the most visible figure in Iran’s wartime diplomacy. He led the delegation to Islamabad. He is the Iranian leadership face the outside world sees the most these days, and posts almost daily on X in excellent idiomatic English (inviting questions about authorship, as he is not known to speak English).

Visibility isn’t power, though. During the Islamabad talks, Vahidi attempted to insert Zolghadr into the Iranian negotiating team over Ghalibaf and Araghchi’s explicit objections. They argued that he had no diplomatic experience. Zolghadr went anyway. In the event, the delegation was called back to Tehran without a deal.

By all accounts, Ghalibaf’s position is weak vis-à-vis Vahidi’s.

Masoud Pezeshkian. Photo: Reuters

Masoud Pezeshkian: President. Pezeshkian holds the title of president. He has said that the current war is even more difficult than the eight-year Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s because the economic pressure is designed to fracture Iranian society from within rather than destroy it from without.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

In the most prominent intervention of his wartime presidency, on April 1, with the war in its fifth week, Pezeshkian posted an open letter directly to the American public on X, appealing to them to question whether the war served their interests. That a head of government’s most visible diplomatic act was a social media post addressed to a foreign public captures his position quite neatly.

Abbas Araghchi. Photo: Reuters

Abbas Araghchi: Foreign Minister. Araghchi is the regime’s most experienced negotiator, having led Iran’s nuclear talks during the JCPOA process. He is a public voice of Iranian diplomacy in this war and the man who announced the Strait of Hormuz open on April 17, triggering a ten percent drop in oil prices. He has served on the team representing Iran in the Islamabad talks. But as I noted earlier this week, the foreign minister was overruled by the IRGC within hours, with hardline website Tasnim headlining its article about his announcement thus: “Araghchi’s bad and incomplete tweet and false ambiguity about the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.”

Three in the Background

Ali Abdollahi: Commander of the Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters. This is the body that coordinates all joint military operations between the IRGC and the regular army. Two of his predecessors were killed in Israeli strikes during the twelve-day war in 2025. Since taking command he has been consistently hawkish on the record. In his words, the will “to take revenge on mortal enemies is stronger than ever.” He is sanctioned by both the U.S. and EU.

Mohammad Mokhber: First Vice President. Constitutionally the successor to Pezeshkian if the presidency falls vacant. He has spent the war posting hawkish warnings on X — warning that “any miscalculation by the adversary will pull the trigger of ‘final chastisement.’” He built his career running IRGC-linked financial foundations worth tens of billions of dollars, and has also been sanctioned by both the U.S. and EU.

Hossein Taeb: Former head of IRGC Intelligence and long-time member of Mojtaba Khamenei’s inner circle. He does not hold a formal wartime position but was the man who ordered the Islamabad negotiating delegation back to Tehran after Zolghadr complained that Araghchi had exceeded his mandate. As a figure with no public role or current official title yet with demonstrable power, he is a clear example of who actually holds sway in Iran these days.

ESSENTIAL READING: POWER IN IRAN TODAY

 

Where’s Mojtaba? Photo: Reuters

Iran’s Supreme Leader No Longer Reigns Supreme. Hamidreza Azizi, Time, April 21, 2026. Argues that since the war began, the Islamic Republic has shifted from a system organized around a single dominant figure to a hardline military-security coalition managing war, diplomacy, and internal competition simultaneously.

In Iran, the Regime Has Indeed Changed: It’s Less Restrained, More Hard-Line. Christian Science Monitor, April 20, 2026. The decapitation campaign that was meant to weaken Iran has instead empowered its most hardline IRGC elements, who are now less restrained and less willing to compromise than their predecessors.

Inside Iran’s IRGC: Power, Influence and Losses in the 2026 War. National Security News, April 15, 2026. A detailed accounting of the IRGC’s structure, the senior figures it has lost since Feb. 28, and why the institution remains the dominant force in Iranian politics despite those losses.

Iran’s new supreme leader is nowhere to be seen. That might be helping the regime to survive. CNN, April 21, 2026. Mojtaba Khamenei’s continued absence from public view since the start of the war is fueling uncertainty about who holds ultimate authority, while paradoxically insulating the regime from having to produce a unified position.