Iran's Regime Is Changing-And the Man Taking Over Is a Problem for Trump

As President Donald Trump claims signs of disarray in Iran’s wartime leadership, one key player appears to be accumulating sizable influence that could shape the Islamic Republic’s position on the battlefield and negotiating table.

And he’s likely not the kind of figure the White House wants to see at the helm.

While Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei assumed the highest office of supreme leader after the killing of his father and Parliament Speaker Mohammed Bagher Ghalibaf has taken the spotlight in negotiations, the rise of Brigadier General Ahmad Vahidi may prove most consequential of all the many shifts taking place within Iran’s complex internal power dynamics.

Vahidi was named head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) upon the killing of his predecessor, Mohammad Pakpour, in the opening stages of the U.S.-Israeli war launched against Iran two months ago. It’s a position that poises him as a top target, with Pakpour having only taken the role after the slaying of former IRGC chief Hossein Salami by Israel during the 12-Day War in June of last year.

But Vahidi’s credentials are unique. In addition to having previously served as deputy IRGC commander, interior minister under former President Ebrahim Raisi and defense minister under former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Vahidi served as a founding chief of the elite Quds Force, later led by Major General Soleimani until his death in a 2020 U.S. strike ordered by Trump.

Today, with the Islamic Republic facing its most serious test since the 1980s Iran-Iraq War during which the IRGC and its Quds Force were forged, “Ahmad Vahidi is the one calling the shots,” Kamran Bokhari, a strategic forecaster and senior resident fellow at the Middle East Policy Council who has written extensively on the internal evolution of Iran’s leadership, told Newsweek.

Shadow Behind the Shadow

Soleimani, during his 21-year tenure as Quds Force chief, was often referred to as the “shadow commander.” He earned the monicker from an expansive career mounting covert operations abroad, from aiding militias to target U.S. troops in Iraq, backing Hezbollah against Israel and taking on rebels and jihadis, including the Islamic State militant group (ISIS), in Iraq and Syria.

Yet Soleimani became something of a celebrity in his time. And his open notoriety proved fatal when Trump opted to make the unprecedented move of killing him during a visit to Iraq in January 2020.

Vahidi is also well-known to the West, having been hit with an Interpol Red Notice in 2007 and U.S. sanctions in 2010 over an alleged role in the deadly bombing of a Jewish center in Argentina in 1994. Vahidi has since been subject to further restrictions by the U.S. and European Union, though this has done little to stymie his career in Iran.

Speaking in Buenos Aires last week, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Thomas DiNanno referenced Vahidi’s alleged role in the 1994 bombing of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina and in a 1992 blast targeting the Israeli embassy, also in the Argentine capital.

DiNanno called Vahidi’s promotion to IRGC chief “clear proof of the IRGC's culpability as a foreign terrorist organization and role in Iran's long-lasting state sponsorship of terrorism.”

Despite his public positions, however, Vahidi remains something of an enigma. His capacity to maneuver upward within the formal power structures of the state, forge ties based on technocratic rather than personalized leadership and maintain a lower international profile proves particularly formidable.

Bokhari, who also serves as senior director of the New Lines Institute in Washington, D.C., briefly met Vahidi on the sidelines of a conference in Tehran 15 years ago, describing him as surprisingly engaging and fluent in English.

He also drew a seemingly unlikely parallel between Vahidi and Iran’s penultimate monarch, Reza Shah Pahlavi. Pahlavi, whose son was later deposed during the 1979 Islamic Revolution and whose grandson still seeks to reclaim the throne today, took power himself as head of the powerful Persian Cossack Brigade in a series of military actions from 1921 to 1925, resulting in the fall of the war-weary Qajar dynasty.

Like Pahlavi, Bokhari noted, Vahidi “is a man within the system,” and may ultimately serve to mold it, if he manages to survive the conflict.

“For all we know, tomorrow he gets hit by an airstrike, and he’s gone,” Bokhari said. “But he comes across as the kind of guy who would want to be that Bonapartist figure that everybody’s been talking about.”

“He can’t do it alone. There will be power centers,” Bokhari added. “I think right now he is consolidating power, and I’ve been hearing from contacts in-country that he has ambitions, if you will, and he has personal ambitions, if you will.”

Vahidi’s ascendence also marks the acceleration of a long-running evolution taking place within the Islamic Republic. Even during late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s latter years, power was quietly being increasingly delegated to other areas, including the IRGC and Iran’s conventional armed forces, known as the Artesh.

Bokhari took note of this two years ago, when “there were institutions that had emerged, both the IRGC, with all its complexity, and then [Ali Khamenei] brought in the Artesh at one point to counterbalance the IRGC so that he could retain power.”

“In other words, the Guards were calling the shots long before this war. What has now happened is that that has become the de facto position, because there isn’t a supreme leader,” Bokhari said. “And I keep saying that because I think [Mojtaba Khamenei] is at best the nominal supreme leader. And even if he hadn’t been wounded, he would not have the kind of influence that his father enjoyed, because at the end of the day, he was just running his father’s office.”

‘The Worst Case’

Annika Ganzeveld, Middle East portfolio manager for the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project, argued that the absence of Iran’s new supreme leader, whose public role since being appointed last month has been limited to written statements released by his office, has only helped paved the way for Vahidi’s consolidation of power.

“The absence of a supreme leader who arbitrates among regime factions and acts as the ultimate decision-making authority has likely contributed to Vahidi's rise in the regime,” Ganzeveld told Newsweek.

Even if Trump has often touted that “regime change” has been achieved in Iran, he acknowledged early on in the conflict the risk of begetting new leadership that would continue to run contrary to U.S. interests.

"I guess the worst case would be we do this and then somebody takes over who's as bad as the previous person, right?” Trump said in response to a reporter’s question last month, just days into the war. “That could happen. We don't want that to happen. It would probably be the worst.”

That reality may be coming into play, particularly as Vahidi appears to have begun cultivating his own “inner circle,” which includes Supreme National Security Council Secretary Mohammed Bagher Zolghadr, according to Ganzeveld.

Zolghadr took the influential position last month after the Israeli killing of his predecessor, Ali Larijani, who was believed to be the second-in-command and effectively in charge on behalf of the primarily absent supreme leader. His death left a major vacancy in terms of institutional cohesion.

Now, Vahidi’s clique appears “to be dominating regime decision-making at the moment,” Ganzeveld said, complicating the quest for an agreement between Washington and Tehran that would end the conflict, address Iran’s nuclear program and, perhaps most urgently, deal with the dueling U.S.-Iran blockades of the critical Strait of Hormuz energy trade chokepoint.

“Vahidi and IRGC leaders close to him appear to have sidelined more ‘pragmatist’ officials, such as the leaders of Iran's negotiating delegation, Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Foreign Affairs Minister Abbas Araghchi, who have exhibited more openness to reaching a compromise with the United States,” Ganzeveld said.

“Vahidi, in contrast, has not indicated any willingness to concede to core U.S. demands related to Iran's nuclear program and the Strait of Hormuz,” she added.

Gang of Five

Yet Vahidi is not alone in vying for power.

Ali Alfoneh, senior fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute who specializes in tracking Iran’s insider dynamics, described a “five-man collective leadership” in which “the principal fault line runs between elected officials-President Masoud Pezeshkian and Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf-and unelected actors: Judiciary Chief Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei; a representative of the IRGC, either former commander Mohsen Rezaei or current commander Brigadier General Ahmad Vahidi; and an unidentified representative of the regular military.”

The fault line matters, Alfoneh told Newsweek, because “elected officials tend to think of re-election and are more sensitive to the plight of the population, while unelected officials tend more willing to accept hardship for the public.”

Of these figures, he ranked both Ghalibaf and Vahidi as the among the system’s “most strategically minded figures,” calling them both “pragmatic operators.”

Vahidi, moreover, is reported to have a history of dealing with both the CIA and Israel’s Mossad spy agency back in the 1980s. The covert arrangement that came to be known as the Iran-Contra Affair saw U.S. officials sell arms to Iran during its war with Iraq in order to siphon funds to Contra rebels battling the socialist government in Nicaragua despite a congressional ban on financing the Central American insurgency.

Trump, on the other hand, has expressed a clear preference for Ghalibaf.

A former IRGC Air Force chief and mayor of Tehran who ran unsuccessfully four times for the presidency, Ghalibaf has established himself as a known bridge between various Iranian camps and interest groups. At the same time, his internal record is challenged by links to several high-profile corruption allegations.

Even if Vahidi’s track sheet gives him an edge, few expect an overt takeover by the IRGC, which traditionally prefers to maintain a layer of plausible deniability in Iranian affairs.

“Neither he nor the IRGC as an institution appears inclined to stage a coup d'état and assume full responsibility for governing a state under severe internal and external strain,” Alfoneh said. “From the IRGC's perspective, a power-sharing arrangement with civilian and semi-civilian figures such as Ghalibaf is preferable: it allows the Guard to dominate strategic decision-making and allocate the country’s diminishing resources, while civilians absorb public blame for the regime's failures.”

Some signs of dissent have emerged. Iranian analysts and media outlets of various political orientations and official links are offering rival outlines for how to proceed in negotiations and conflict.

Still, even a number of prominent conservative sources in the nation have warned against efforts to fuel the kind of “infighting” Trump has alleged, with most rallying behind the diplomatic track.

And while rivalries undoubtedly exist among key voices in the Islamic Republic, Alfoneh argued that Trump’s frequent talk of fractures in Iran’s decision-making apparatus revealed more about the White House’s own woes as it oscillates between rhetoric of war and peace two months into the conflict.

“The existential threat posed by Israel and the United States has fostered cohesion rather than division among Iran's leaders,” Alfoneh said. “President Trump's assertions of a leadership vacuum and indecisiveness in Tehran reveal more about disarray in Washington than realities in Iran.”

“His claims that Iranian leaders have admitted collapse, or that the regime has already changed, reflect an inability to see the world as it is, rather than as he wishes it to be,” he added.

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This story was originally published April 30, 2026 at 1:00 AM.