Today, Explained - Iran's regime, unchanged

Episode Date: March 16, 2026

Iran's top leaders are dead, but regime change isn't in sight, and the US and Israel's attacks are dividing Iranians at home and abroad. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan and Peter Balonon-Rosen, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Andrea Lopez-Cruzado, engineered by Patrick Boyd and David Tatasciore, and hosted by Jonquilyn Hill. A huge Iranian flag alongside damaged structures in Tehran. Photo by Atta KENARE / AFP via Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A tiny waterway is giving President Trump a huge headache. Iran continues to maintain its stranglehold over a tiny elbow of water called the Strait of Hormuz, connecting oil-rich countries in the Persian Gulf to the rest of the world. Something we're dealing with. We have been dealing with it. Don't need to worry about it. Iran's basically shut the straight down, sending gas prices way up, and the president demanding other countries get involved, too. President Trump's call for other nations to help work.

reopen the Strait of Hormuz is going unanswered. We are ready to ensure safe passage through the Straits of Hormuz diplomatically. However, there will be no military participation. But in the over two weeks since the U.S. and Israel started bombing Iran, there doesn't seem to be a clear end in sight. And all the while, the Iranians inside and out the country feel split on what this means for their future. That's coming up on Today Explain.

Megan Rompino here. This week on a touch more, Juju Watkins joins us to talk about her year off of the court, but definitely not on the sidelines. We're also looking at the upsets coming out of the SEC tournament and how that might impact selection Sunday and the intergenerational span of U.S. players on display at the She Believes Cup. Plus, we have a surprise guest. You won't want to miss it. Check out the latest episode of our podcast,

to touch more wherever you get your podcast and on YouTube. Imagine you find an old alchemy book, and inside it says something like, Take our fiery dragon that hides the magical steel in its belly with our magnet and mix them with torrid Vulcan. These might not seem like real instructions that someone could follow. And yet, some researchers are trying to recreate alchemist's work hundreds of years later. What they've found is that there's actually interesting science hidden away behind some of the bizarre metaphors in these old texts. That's this week on The Unexplanable Podcast. This is Today Explained.

I'm Vali Nasser. I'm professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and also a senior advisor at CSIS. All right. Valley Nasser, political scientists, expert on Iran, friend of the show. The U.S. and Israel have been bombing Iran since the end of February. And the White House says the goal of this operation is to, quote, stop Iran from getting a...

a nuclear weapon. But Trump has also talked about wanting regime change. How much damage has been done to the regime in these past two weeks? I actually think that ironically, the regime has been strengthened since the war started. The Islamic Republic was in a very difficult position after there were massive nationwide uprisings in Iran in January that seemed to unify Iranians against the regime and then the bloody crackdown on the protesters that killed many thousands of protesters galvanized the population against the regime. Witnesses say security forces fired live ammunition

from motorbikes and rooftops. They speak of massacres, a bloodbath. Now that the war has started, it has actually broken that unity and for many Iranians inside the country, the war is the dominant theme in their lives, and politics and opposition to the regime has taken a back seat. And the Islamic Republic is under a lot of pressure militarily,

but it doesn't seem to be under pressure politically at home. In fact, we're seeing daily and nightly anti-war demonstrations across the country, some with very large crowds. Iran's leadership has a lot of. gathered thousands of people here to Tehran after Friday prayers to voice their anger. So what you're looking at here is a pro-government rally in Iran's capital. And you can see how does the Islamic Republic even have the personnel to hold it all together right now? You know, right at the beginning of the war, American and Israeli forces killed Supreme

Leader Ayatollah Ali Hamenei and a bunch of other senior military and political leadership. how has the government been able to survive that? Well, because the Islamic Republic from the outset was far more decentralized than many other dictatorships which are reliant on top-down decision-making and particularly on one man making all the decisions. This has from the outset being a system that has many nodes of power and a distribution of authority and operational decision-making. Now, given that Israel's looks at,

that decapitation as a primary strategy of war. We've seen it in Lebanon, with Iran in the June war. The Islamic Republic has even further decentralized authority in a way that is a web of decision makers across the system extending into the private sector and the economy that are running the country. And they're not dependent on one decision maker or even a layer of decision makers.

the system can continue to function, even if a layer of its leadership is eliminated. And so there is much more resilience to the Islamic Republic than we often anticipate in other authoritarian regimes. That's interesting. So the Ayatollah son, Mujahabahamenei, is now in charge. And it sounds like a lot of other guys of his generation are in leadership positions now, too. how do you think that generational change affects Iran's strategy going forward? I mean, first of all, this generation has risen to power, much about included at the time of war. And that makes this transition different.

In other words, they're stepping into their roles at the time when the country is facing an existential moment in a way, confronting two far superior militaries. Secondly, the generation that they are replacing, You know, as the former Supreme Leader and the Revolutionary Guard commanders that have passed from the scene, were more prudent and more restrained in how far they would go with the United States and how aggressive they would be, on the nuclear issue, on missiles, at willingness to directly attack the United States. This generation that is rising to the hell is not only perhaps more willing to directly confront the U.S., as we are seeing,

right now during the war, but also their conclusion is that the prudence of the previous generation actually invited war, and that they actually are approaching this war far more aggressively than they think the older generation would, with the belief that the older generation's prudence was ill-advised, and actually it's by greater aggression and willingness to stand their ground and take the fight to U.S. and Israel, that actually they will create deterrence against their enemies. like leadership in Iran is really focused on inflicting pain on the U.S. and its allies by focusing on the Strait of Hormuz. The bombs may be exploding in the Middle East tonight, but the fallout is rattling households

and businesses right here in this country. The gas prices rose to over $3.70 today. That's up over 70 cents from before the war began. Is that working? I think it is because you could see that the price of oil is going up, and many other countries are depending on vital commodities and trade that goes and comes out of the Straits of Hormos deep into the Persian Gulf and its ports. And the countries on the southern shore of the Persian Gulf are also greatly dependent on this trade.

So oil is the most immediate and noticeable impact of a partial or total closure of the Straits of Hormos, but it impacts a larger segment of the Straits of Hormos, but it impacts a larger segment of the Straits of Hormos. global economy as well, global supply chains of varieties of things. But the Straits of Hormos is not the end of this, because the Straits of Hormos can be open if the United States is unable to open the straits and is unwilling to negotiate an end to this war and tries to escalate by taking, for instance, Kharg Island or attacking Iran's oil infrastructure, Iran could actually escalate by also attacking oil infrastructure across the southern shore of the Persian Gulf, which then would do far more long-lasting damage to global markets than just the Strait of Hormuz.

So the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is not the end of this. It's the beginning of what the catastrophe could be. It just could be the tip of the iceberg. You know, it seems like the U.S. and Israel and Iran are all digging in. What are the scenarios for how this war ends? I mean, there's one scenario that Israel is looking for and is hoping for, which is a complete regime and state collapse in Iran. In other words, the system will fall apart from the bombing, from intense pressure on it militarily, and also from a popular uprising at the same time. And Israelis are not very concerned about the day after. They don't share a border with Iran. The consequences they don't believe would visit on them. The United States is hoping for not necessarily state collapse, but that the Islamic Republic would surrender. And it would be far weekend, it would be caged in its own shell, and perhaps there would be a leadership that would step forward that would be willing to tow the line that the United States wants to lay out, much like what happened in Venezuela.

In a perfect world, yeah, we would love it if somebody came to power in Iran who would. is willing to work with the United States, who is willing to show some respect to the United States. And the Iranians themselves envisioned that the war will continue until both Israel and the United States abandon these goals and realize that the war is not a solution to Iran problem. They're not going to win, and they would have to arrive at a negotiated settlement in this war. And the negotiated settlement to Iran does not mean that they stay in the same box that they war before the war started, but that there has to be a significant change in the security and economic environment that Iran lives in. And two things that they have stated very clearly

is that there would be no more water on Iran going forward, that every six months there would not be a mowing of the lawn, and that Iran's economic situation would be drastically changed. Okay, so we have these different options. Which do you think is going to happen? It's difficult to tell, but I think if we looked at the three weeks of war, it looks like at least the way Iran saw this war unfolding is the way that this war is unfolding. So if you looked at this scenario and said that Iran has caught the U.S. off guards, has actually been able to escalate with the U.S. toe to toe and escalate in an arena that the United States was not prepared to defend. That means oil markets, international global market, and the Persian government. arena, that you have to say that we may very well see that the Iranian scenario would pan out. If the Iranians don't collapse and are able to stay in the fight, then increasingly the pressure

will rise on the United States to find a way out of this war, which is short of a continuous escalation, which could end up as many fear that in a much larger regional war or ultimately U.S. boots on the ground, none of which was in U.S.'s original thinking. Your family fled Iran during the 1979 revolution. You're an expert in understanding this conflict, but you also have a personal stake in this. How are you feeling about all this right now? Well, it is very difficult to separate analysis from personal feeling. I mean, wars that have come to the Middle East, whether it was Iraq War in 2003, the Gaza War, the Lebanon wars, are all extremely painful because you identify with the plight of the region

and you have also many friends in those countries. This war with Iran even comes closer. I mean, ultimately, my roots are there. I know people who are there. I know the country. I know all of its historical legacy, its monuments, its people, its cities. And to watch it being destroyed and also facing an unknown future. It was much more clear to think about a future when Iranians were struggling and fighting to politically liberate themselves from the Islamic Republic. But the war brings far more uncertainty and prospect of a much darker, awful future for the country, and that is personally painful. Valley Nasser is a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

His latest book is Iran's Grand Strategy, a political history. Coming up, how this war is dividing Iranians inside and outside the country. Support for today explained comes from Found. Found says managing your finances can be difficult no matter who you are, perhaps much more so. If you're running a business, that makes things all the more complicated, they say, especially when it comes to figuring out things like taxes and expenses. Found says they bring everything into one place. They help you cut through the clutter, banking, bookkeeping, invoicing, taxes, all in one.

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I want to talk with you about how this war has been received throughout the Iranian diaspora. You know, I want to start with the story of the WhatsApp nightlife group you wrote about in your recent piece in New York Magazine. what is that group and what happened? Sure. So when Chaminé was assassinated, there was a chat that came through that said, let's get together and celebrate his assassination. Dictator elimination party invite. Come celebrate the elimination of the reason

for all our pain, loss, and suffering. And then pretty much immediately thereafter, another person on the chat said, how can we celebrate with an over 100 school children? have been killed. As a reminder, a hundred Iranian children were murdered by the U.S. and Israel today. I'm not sure our party is where it's at right now. This sort of went over a day and a half to two days.

People were responding. They were sending emojis to the different texts. It's super polarized, which is the way that the diaspora is right now. People began to put in definitions from Wikipedia of what Nightlife even means. Nightlife is a collective term for entertainment that is available in generally more popular from the late evening. Should we be even having these kinds of conversations in a nightlife group? The reason I wrote about it was because it was really emblematic of the ways in which everything was crashing against one another in the Iranian diaspora.

And how the personal really became political immediately. What it sort of showed was that there is no way to reconcile this incredible chasm that began to exist within the diaspora. A lot of people in the world. the diaspora especially, do not see eye to eye with the establishment in Iran, which is why they are in exile or in diaspora and are desperately wishing for something to be different. And a lot of other people who continue to have family there and who have sort of seen the past two and a half decades of U.S. wars in the Middle East understand that this is not going to be quick or easy. And so all of these emotions were coming against each other.

How have tensions over the quote unquote right way to view this war impacted you? and your family. I think of your cousin Ali, who you wrote about. The tensions with my cousin, who I'm calling Ali, really comes from, you know, him and his friends have become really pro-intervention. Many of them are recent members of the diaspora. They immigrated about 10 years ago. For them, this, you know, watching this is the first go-around. For me and a lot of my friends, our coming of age story was the 9-11 wars. I remember Ahmad Shalabi. I remember Ahmad Shalabi, and the Iraqi diaspora pushing for intervention in Iraq and then getting sidelined in the aftermath of that.

So for many of us, as much as we may not want the Islamic Republic, we also recognize the ways in which this plays out and has played out in the Middle East. I don't think there's any quick fix in these kinds of regime change wars. My cousin who lives in Australia and his group of friends began to write big screeds against me online because I was not supporting that a judge

for intervention into Iran. Ali, he was my best friend growing up, and now he doesn't even, we don't talk to each other. Families are breaking apart in real time. You're either for this or you're against this and everything kind of organizes itself along that. And so the community and families are really cleaving in real time. I imagine that's got to be really hard. It's very hard to have that where people that you know and have known for a very long time, from family to friends who are no longer willing to speak to you and not just that but who are hurling insults at you all the time is kind of you know I don't want to say the human toll of this

because the human toll of this war is really being borne out by those on the ground in Iran where bombs are falling on them but the sort of collateral damage if you will of part of this is also what's refracting into the diaspora as people are having differing reactions what's been the most surprising fault line for you? So the Iranian diaspora has traditionally been a diaspora like many others that is really diverse and how it thinks about the politics of its home country.

For years, you had lots of infighting in the diaspora, but it was not as polarized as it is today. You had secularists, you had monarchists, you had leftists, you had reformists, and they would all disagree with one another. But today you have a situation in which it is extremely polarized. It is either you want this kind of war for regime change or you don't. And if you don't, that side that wants the regime change is calling you and thinking of you as being pro-regime. So all of the diversity of the diaspora politically has really been washed out and it's come down into two hard camps. That is something that I think many, many people, and there's a very large silent majority of the diaspora that just does.

feel that that is an organic way of even thinking about politics for it to be so polarized in these two ways. So that's Iranians outside the country. But what about people inside the country? What are you hearing from people there? Yeah. I mean, in the in the first few days of the bombings, there were also people in some sectors of society who thought that, okay, maybe this is going to be a very quick operation and the Islamic Republic will go. and maybe it'll be similar to what Trump did in Venezuela and to sort of open the way for a different kind of politics. So the regime, what we're witnessing right now is that it's quite disorientated. That slowly, that realization, the more that the bombs began falling. If we left right now, it would take them 10 years and more to rebuild.

The more that residential buildings were being hit, and especially once in Tehran, the black smoke and the acid rain started. Tonight, Israeli forces drop bombs on Iran's oil refineries outside the capital. This attack released large quantities of hazardous and toxic pollutant into the atmosphere. The rain that's coming down seems to be saturated or filled with oil. You can see it's completely black. Everything that I began to hear, and I'm in touch with people every day and across different sectors of society and different political sort of leanings,

that really began to take a hard turn. In recent days, the U.S. and Israel are using larger bombs. So every time that they're bombing, people's homes are shaking many, many miles away from where the bombs are being dropped. And the noises are extremely loud and terrifying. So now it's really turning into a, again, there's a big sort of nationalist feeling that is beginning to arise, which is that this is not a war against the Islamic Republic. This is a war against Iran. And so you're beginning to have a shift.

in that kind of polarization that we were also seeing inside of the country. You write, quote, the question I keep returning to is whether you can hold the desire for a political systems in and grief for its victims at the same time. Can you tell me a little bit more about that tension? Yeah, I mean, the fact that a lot of Iranians want a different kind of politics is no secret. And it's something that Iranians inside of the country have been struggling for for decades now and have developed really robust movements to sort of push that forward. But the reality is that when bombs drop, they are indiscriminate. And let's say even tomorrow or next week, the Islamic Republic is not there, which I don't actually think is going to happen.

But what you get in the aftermath of these kinds of massive bombing campaigns is a traumatized and fractured society. We see that in Iraq. We see that in Afghanistan. And so part of what I've been sitting with a lot is how do we reconcile the desire for a different political system, but having that come through these massive bombing campaigns. And I think the folks who are turning their, you know, giving a blind eye to the civilian casualties and what is happening on the ground are having to shut off parts of themselves in order to not see that to get. get to their political ends. And I think that that ultimately ends up creating a much more fractured future. How hopeful are you about the idea of the Iranian people at one point, having self-determination, being able to create the society in the country that they want to live in and being able to connect with their loved ones across the diaspora again? Does that still feel like a possibility to you? I've always had a lot of optimism in Iranian civil society and Iranian society because it's led some of the most incredible social movements of the past few decades in Iran. But the reality is that when war happens, and this is the same thing that happened in the 1980s in Iran too during the Iran-Iraq War, is that the system becomes more solidified, the governing system, and especially those within the military establishment of the system.

I think moving forward, the governing system knows that it is contending with a population that wants fundamental shifts. But at the same time, it has hardened now and become much more of a system that is being wielded by the Revolutionary Guard, the IRGC. Into the future, what I know as a scholar of Iran is that Iranian society is a society that for 150 years has been organizing, not just for the independence and sovereignty of the nation, but also for dignity from its internal governing establishment. And that will continue no matter how this war pans out. That's Nargis Bojogli, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. You can read her writing over at New York Magazine. Today's show was produced by Miles Bryan and Peter Ballin-on-Rosen.

It was edited by Amina al-Assadi, fact-checked by Andrea Lopez Crusado, and engineered by Patrick Boyd and David Tattashore. I'm Jacqueline Hill, filling in on Today Explained.