After the 1989 death of Khamenei, the first Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, Khamenei was not considered his natural successor. A potential rival, Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, was named as a candidate and won the support of other clerics.
Over the next decade, Khamenei positioned the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its top commanders not only as the country’s top military power, but also as the top economic power. The Revolutionary Guard oversaw a vast foundation that controlled large parts of the economy.
In turn, those Revolutionary Guard commanders became Khamenei’s loyal inner circle, helping to quell domestic unrest and export the Islamic Republic’s revolutionary ideology across the region in Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq and Yemen.
The first real challenge to his political power came in 1997 when a reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, was elected president. Khatami pushed for greater social freedoms, and Khamenei tolerated the changes brought about by the reform movement for several years.
But each time increased freedom and pressure for change spilled into the streets in the form of protests — in 1999, 2009, 2019 and 2022, and in the last two months — Khamenei responded with assassinations and mass arrests. Human rights groups have documented the torture of detainees after each crackdown.
When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, Khamenei saw an opportunity to follow through on his years of anti-American rhetoric and deployed the foreign services branch of the Revolutionary Guard, the Quds Force, to work with like-minded Shia militias to target American troops.
Improvised explosive devices used by Iraqi forces, aided by the Revolutionary Guards, have maimed and killed dozens of Americans in Iraq, a point Trump has discussed in recent weeks as his distaste for the administration.
Still, Khamenei showed a practical side when he agreed to a nuclear deal with the US and European powers, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, an agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for lifting sanctions.
When Trump pulled out of the deal in 2018, Khamenei seemed to solidify his anti-American worldview, arguing that the US could not be trusted.
