After Months of Succession Planning, Who’s Leading Iran?

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1:29Sarah Holder:Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. Today, the United States military continues to carry out large-scale combat operations in Iran. The U.S. and Israel's attacks on Iran have entered their third day. And President Donald Trump said Monday that the U.S.'s military operation could continue for weeks or more. Whatever it takes, we will always... And we have, right from the beginning, we projected four to five weeks. But we have capability to go far longer than that. The U.S. is now sending additional forces to the region. And Trump told the New York Post that he hadn't ruled out putting U.S.

2:12Sarah Holder:troops on the ground. As of Monday afternoon, six U.S. service members and hundreds of Iranians have been killed. The attacks have set off a chain reaction across the region. The Iranian regime and its proxies launched targeted strikes in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. After Hezbollah fired missiles towards Israel, Israel struck Lebanon. Saudi Arabia was reported that one of their oil refineries was targeted in one of the Iranian strikes. We have several fronts opening up, a number of Gulf Arab countries that also found themselves in the firing line. We've seen Hezbollah joining the fight right now.

2:50Sarah Holder:And on Monday, an advisor to Iran's Revolutionary Guard commander announced on state television that they would not let any oil pass through the Strait of Hormuz and would set fire to any ship attempting to pass. Oil prices had already spiked off the news of the weekend attack. European gas prices surged more than 50 percent on Monday, and Brent crude was up as much as 13 percent at the market open, clearing$82 a barrel. The attack on Iran and killing of its supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, leaves open questions about who will rule the country now, what the war could mean for global oil prices, and how long the U.S.'s involvement might last.

3:29Sarah Holder:Somebody said today, they said, oh, well, if the president wants to do it really quickly, after that he'll get bored. I don't get bored. There's nothing boring about this.

3:42Sarah Holder:I'm Sarah Holder, and this is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, Bloomberg's Golnar Motavalli on the succession plan for the supreme leader in Iran and the efforts to keep oil prices in check amid the widening conflict across the Middle East.

4:01Sarah Holder:Bloomberg's Golnar Motavalli has been following this story since news of the U.S. and Israel's attacks on Iran broke, along with our reporters across the globe. Gulnart, you've been anticipating this conflict could erupt for weeks now.

4:14Golnar Motevalli:Yes, I think generally since Israel last attacked Iran in June and triggered the 12-day war, which obviously the U.S. joined at the very end with the attacks on Iran's nuclear sites, I think there was generally a sense that the Israelis, if not the Americans, would attack Iran again. And I think it was clear that the Iranians themselves were definitely preparing for that. And my sense is that they went into these last round of nuclear talks with the Americans knowing that it was a possibility.

4:48Sarah Holder:Well, Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in a targeted strike over the weekend. Iran was preparing, as you said, they also had a plan for the death of the Supreme Leader. What do we know about it?

4:59Golnar Motevalli:We've seen reports over the past couple of weeks that, again, since June, there has been a real serious effort to just strategize and make plans for various scenarios and eventualities. And part of that is increasing the layers of succession for different leadership roles across these different security institutions and military bodies, whether it's the IRGC, whether it's the Supreme National Security Council, whether it's the new National Defense Council that was established after the war with Israel in June. So these contingencies exist and they are a number of layers thick according to some sort of unconfirmed reports we've seen in terms of personnel.

5:50Golnar Motevalli:So if there's one strike that gets rid of one echelon, then, you know, there'll be someone underneath it to take over. that's going to be increasingly challenging because I'm guessing that there is a point at which you've gone through all the layers of seniority having said that Iran's armed forces are substantial in sight and there is a sizable proportion of Iran's population that is still very loyal to the regime it's questionable whether they are the majority I do not think they are at all but Iran is a country of 90 million people and I still think there is a large number of people who are very loyal to the Islamic Republic and who are part of the governing political military apparatus that runs the country.

6:38Golnar Motevalli:Most of the the ranking individuals who were lost over the weekend they've been replaced. They've announced this interim security council that consists of three very senior individuals and one of whom is from the guardian council a very senior cleric who's also rumored this is completely speculative but rumored as someone who may also be in the running to ultimately replace the supreme leader but that three member council are at the moment caretaking for decisions that would have otherwise been taken by the supreme leader and they're working very closely with the head of the supreme national security council who is Ali Larajani.

7:18Golnar Motevalli:And the elected president, Masoud Pezeshkian, takes on an even more prominent role than before as well.

7:25Sarah Holder:Well, on Saturday in the hours after the attack, President Trump made a statement urging the people of Iran to, quote, take over your government. How likely is it that the Iranian opposition will take power now? And what would that look like? One of the achievements,

7:40Golnar Motevalli:if you want to use that word, of the regime of the Islam Republic in the past 50 years has been to very successfully ensure that an effective opposition just cannot exist in the country. And anyone who does speak up for the rights of women, just basic human rights, civil liberties, they face prosecution and most of them are in jail. And the reformists, they've always been pushing against this kind of like brick wall because hardliners have kind of dominated the country for so long and hardliners are ostensibly in very simple terms who Khamnei has always represented. So in that sense internally there's little organized opposition to speak of but the population by and large are very opposed and have been very opposed to the Islamic Republic for some time.

8:36Golnar Motevalli:And much of the opposition comes from a very simple idea, which is that the regime treats its own people often appallingly. And we saw that during the protests, the latest protests that started on the 28th of December and kind of reached a sort of a peak of violence and brutality over the weekend of January the 8th and 9th, where we know that thousands of people were killed. And Iranians have known at least since 2009 that Khamenei has been prepared to give orders to the security forces to kill people if it's necessary. And the more the Iranians have gone out to protest, as they've become increasingly dissatisfied with the system, the harder and the the more ruthless the security forces have been in dealing with them.

9:35Golnar Motevalli:And we have seen, especially since 2019, the numbers of not just people killed actively in protests go up, along with the numbers of protests that actually take place, but also the number of judicial executions as well that happen in the country.

9:57Sarah Holder:After the break, Golnar and I discuss what we know about the U.S.'s endgame and how the war is already impacting the flow and the price of oil.

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11:23Golnar Motevalli:I've never seen that much evidence in my entire career, and I don't think we'll ever see that much evidence again.

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12:05Sarah Holder:We're ensuring that the world's number one sponsor of terror can never obtain a nuclear weapon. On the U.S. side, I want to talk about what Trump and Trump administration officials have said is the U.S. endgame here. How have officials explained why the U.S. attacked and what the plan is now?

12:24Golnar Motevalli:The rationale behind the US decision to attack Iran has changed. Donald Trump's motivations for threatening Iran or threatening regime change have sort of flipped between wanting to protect the protesters, many of whom who were under arrest were also at risk of execution. but also then using the nuclear program, Iran's nuclear program as a pretext to threaten and to attack Iran. And one thing that's been interesting is that both Donald Trump and Keir Starmer have referred to this idea of, you know, Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. American officials have been saying this repeatedly for years and Iran has been saying repeatedly for years that we do not intend to have a nuclear weapon our program is for peaceful purposes only now you know obviously it's not good enough to just say that the negotiations the round that they were meant to have this week before the attack started on saturday was to provide americans with a sense of confidence an ironclad guarantee that iran would not weaponize its nuclear program and there's also been this argument that the more that you push iran and threaten it and do various things like pile on sanctions designate the rgc as a terrorist organization kill someone like general gassem soleimani abandon the nuclear deal that barack Obama agreed with the Iranians on the basis that it was Barack Obama's deal and you felt that it wasn't a good deal.

14:16Golnar Motevalli:There's a school of thought that says doing this actually pushes Iran further toward the calculation that having a nuclear weapon is actually probably what it needs. And that is something that Lara Jani, who is now very prominent at the moment in Iran's decision-making apparatus has said in the past right now Iran is a member of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and that means that it is prohibited from trying to acquire or developing nuclear weapons but it is also allowed to pursue a peaceful civilian nuclear program and Iranian officials have been insisting this is what they want the problem is is that there is no trust between them and between countries like Israel, who have been threatened by Iran for years and years and years and years, and are deeply uncomfortable with the idea of a country like Iran having indigenous nuclear enrichment capability.

15:16Sarah Holder:So Gulnar, I want to talk about the economic impacts of this war. Oil prices have spiked, but not to the extent that some have feared. Why is that?

15:25Golnar Motevalli:I think a lot of people are, or the market at least, maybe taking into consideration the fact that this can't go on forever, that there's a limit to what both sides are able to maybe tolerate. There's certainly a limit to what the Gulf Arab states and the Persian Gulf can stomach. They did not want to get dragged into this war. They didn't want this. From what we know from our sources is that they tried to dissuade Donald Trump from going into this war. They were very active in trying to facilitate the negotiations and mediate between Steve Wyckoff and the Iranian foreign minister Abbas al-Araqchi because they didn't want a war.

16:08Golnar Motevalli:They don't want missiles flying around their countries and populations. And these are oil producing countries whose budgets depend on their ability to sell oil at a certain price.

16:23Sarah Holder:And OPEC Plus has responded by saying, you know, they're going to resume oil production increases. Could that continue to moderate oil prices if this conflict continues?

16:33Golnar Motevalli:Yeah, if they're not deciding to cut and they're actually deciding to even ramp up production, that will definitely have an impact on prices. It's just unclear at this stage to what extent how much of the gains that a decision like that will help to erase at this point.

16:50Sarah Holder:And Golnar, this is a very fast-moving situation. There's questions about Iranian succession plans, about further attacks in the region, about the ripple effects on the global economy. But where do you expect this conflict to go from here? What are you watching for in the hours and days ahead?

17:07Golnar Motevalli:I think the one thing that concerns me a great deal is the civilian toll, the number of civilians that are being killed right now, particularly in Iran. It's very difficult to rely on the state media in Iran to give a death toll and to kind of break down that death toll in terms of civilians. And the same with infrastructure, with the loss of infrastructure in Iran and just the basic, basic idea that there doesn't seem to be any long term planning or thinking on the American side or amongst the Israelis about what happens in Iran next. I think Pete Hegseth said today that this wasn't a regime change war, but it did change the regime.

18:02Golnar Motevalli:And then he said something along the lines of we'll leave it to Iranians to decide what to do. and I think there's a recklessness in that in inherent in that statement because it's a way of saying we're just gonna you know do the attack this phrase that often people use cut off the head of the snake and then just let people to get on with it and I don't know what that means getting on with it. I'm not sure that anyone's really thought that through. And that's what worries me. I think the concept of regime change as we know it is freighted with the weight of that question and always has been. And partly the reason why it has been is because I don't think there are that many examples in history where this type of intervention has ever been successful or led to anything good fast.

19:10Sarah Holder:This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg.com, subscribe today at Bloomberg.com slash podcast offer. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.

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