Iran Conflict Brief: Ali Ansari on What's Going on Inside Iran

**Daniel Sternoff** (0:03)
Events in the Middle East are changing quickly, and the complexities of understanding the global energy landscape grow deeper by the hour. Join me as we talk to leading experts on the latest developments in the region and what it means for the rest of the world. Welcome to our rapid response series, the Iran Conflict Brief, a special edition of the Columbia Energy Exchange podcast. I'm Daniel Sternoff, a senior fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy.
We are recording this podcast on Monday, April 6th at 1130 AM in Washington DC, 8 PM in Tehran and 730 and 830 PM respectively in Abu Dhabi and Riyadh. Today, day 37 of the war is a moment of culminating risk to world energy markets. Tomorrow at 8 PM Eastern time on April 7th, President Trump's ultimatum expires for Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz or face escalating attacks on its core energy and civilian infrastructure. Underscoring the credibility of that threat, Israel cut off power supplies to Iran's biggest petrochemical complex on Monday. The Israeli logic is that if IRG hardliners remain in power, then denying them a functioning economy or energy export revenues may create conditions to topple the regime in the months that follow the war. Iran has warned that it will respond to attacks on its national infrastructure by targeting economic assets in the Arab Gulf states, a threat underlined by weekend strikes in Bahrain, the UAE, Iraq and Kuwait, including a highly symbolic attack on Kuwait's oil ministry and national oil company, KPC. Reportedly, Iran has threatened Saudi oil and power assets will be next. Dated Brent, the physical benchmark for North Sea crude is over $140 a barrel, almost $30 higher than Brent futures. That has one way to go up if key Saudi assets like the East West pipeline bypassing Hormuz or Aramco's Abqaiq oil processing facility is targeted. In short, unless regional mediators pushing for a 45-day truce can pull a diplomatic rabbit out of their hats, the region stands on the edge of Ukraine style tit-for-tat infrastructure strikes that would subject the world energy system to prolonged outages, significantly higher prices and deeper economic disruption, even if there is eventually a ceasefire that restores transit through the Strait of Hormuz. I'm joined today by Ali Ansari, one of the world's leading authorities on Iran. He is a professor of Iranian history and the founding director of the Institute for Iranian Studies at the University of St. Andrews. He's also a senior associate fellow with the Royal United Services Institute and is the author of multiple books on the politics of modern Iran. I can think of no one better to help us understand how wartime decisions are being made in Tehran and how to assess how fragile or durable the Islamic Republic will be when the most intensive kinetic phase of this conflict winds down. Good afternoon, Ali.

**Ali Ansari** (2:51)
Hello.

**Daniel Sternoff** (2:52)
Let's get into it. Love to hear your perspective about what is going on right now inside of Iran as well as to understand what might be as we move through this. Many outside analysts tend to treat Iran as a unitary actor. The Supreme Leader sits on top, but decision-making authority in the Islamic Republic has always involved bargaining between many key institutions. IRGC, the Supreme Leader's Office, Guardian Council, Presidency. That's in, quote-unquote, normal times. Now we're in war and Khamenei is dead. Many senior officials have been decapitated. Israel is hunting those that remain. The new Supreme Leader's son, Mushtabah, is not seen in public. So under these conditions, where does real operational authority sit? Is the IRGC effectively the state or are there still countervailing centers of power that matter?

**Ali Ansari** (3:52)
I mean, it's a good question because at the moment, you're seeing a state under a political system under quite intense stress. It's giving the impression of functionality.
It's always at the best of times have been pretty dysfunctional, to be honest. It operated on the basis basically that the Supreme Leader was the final arbiter and could make the final decision depending on competing claims to his attention and ultimately he would make a decision. Now with the Supreme Leader out of the way and a new Supreme Leader, his son no less, who nobody's seen or heard of really, apart from a few sort of messages that seem to have been written for him, one can assume really that because it's wartime conditions that you're seeing the IRGC, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, taking the front seat really in the organizing and the sort of administration of the country. But it is difficult because we don't really have eyes and ears inside the country. I'm sure the US and the Israelis have pretty good intelligence assets. I mean, one of the striking things was that when Khamenei Senior was killed, a picture of him as proof of death was basically sent to Israel, I think, within minutes. So how that happened, we can only sort of conjecture that they have some fairly sort of high-level assets within the country and that this may be continuing, which only can increase the level of paranoia really that goes on. I think at the moment now it's a much, much more complex affair with many different sort of elements competing in a sense for attention, although because of the war situation, clearly some elements in the hierarchy of the IRGC are dominant in driving that. And of course, key to that in many ways is Khalil Barf, who's the mayor of Tehran, but obviously an ex, very closely tied to the IRGC and someone who can basically direct attention. What's interesting is the president probably doesn't have a huge amount of say in what's going on. I mean, Pezeshkian doesn't, I mean, he had a fairly backseat role, I think even when he was actively president in a sense. I think now his chief function is to really warn the IRGC from what we can gather about what happens after the war's over. And I mean, I think that's a very important question that few people are really addressing. They're not really seeing what the underlying problems Iran will have going forward.