With Khamenei’s Death, Israel and America Close the Door on October 7 and Recalibrate the World

Iranian dictator Ali Khamenei is dead. He was killed over the weekend in a joint American-Israeli strike as Iranian leaders sat down to plan their hold-out strategy against the massive build-up of American military force in the Middle East. With his death, the Middle East is recalibrated and the door on October 7 closed.

Ali Khamenei was an Iranian cleric and politician who was the Supreme Leader of Iran from 1989 until his death. The Supreme Leader is the highest political and religious authority in Iran, with decisive power over the military, judiciary, foreign policy, and key state institutions.

Before becoming Supreme Leader, Khamenei served as President of Iran from 1981 to 1989. After the death of Iran’s first Supreme Leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, who had ruined the country, Khamenei was chosen to succeed him even though he was not originally considered a top religious authority; the constitution even had to be amended to allow his elevation.

As Supreme Leader, he consolidated power, expanded the influence of the Islamic Republic’s religious and military institutions, and shaped Iran’s domestic and foreign policy for more than three decades. His rule was marked by ruthless internal control, zero tolerance for political dissent, and the cruel suppression of occasional large-scale civil rights protests.

Under Khamenei’s leadership, Iran pursued an ambitious foreign policy, supporting regional terror groups and a series of global proxies in an effort to build the networks necessary first to annihilate Israel and then to turn its attention to the liberal West. The advance of its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs was central to both those objectives.

The end came for Khamenei in what he and many allied parties saw as a historic victory in the October 7 attacks on Israel that were planned, led, and executed by Iran’s Hamas proxy. The slaughter of hundreds of Jews was celebrated and, with the very weak Biden Administration in the White House and advanced anti-Israeli information operations deeply embedded in the Western media and on university campuses, the calculation was that Washington would hold back, or even directly countermand, an expansive Israeli response.

That was the lesson the Iranians thought they had learned from the broader arc of Western diplomacy in an age of wokeness. Western leaders, increasingly ashamed of their countries and cultures, were averse to the projection of hard power lest that echo what many regarded as their shameful colonial pasts. The Iranian nuclear deal, under which Iran was in practice free to develop a bomb and the delivery mechanism, was a case in point.

The Iranian calculation was not wrong, and had a Harris administration come to power in America, the Israeli military response to Gaza would probably have been cut off at the knees by arms supply restrictions and much of Iran’s regional and global proxy network (Hamas, Hezbollah, Assad, the Houthis, Venezuela, Cuba, and South Africa) would still be intact. A new nuclear deal would have been negotiated, strikes on those facilities would never have taken place, and Khamenei would still be comfortably in power.

The Trump administration changed all that. On foreign policy, it rejected the “end of history” delusion that the fall of the Berlin Wall had marked the collapse of the final threat to the Western liberal order and therefore the need for hard power to underpin Western diplomacy. The much-vaunted rules-based order, that administration understood, was nothing more than a set of rules the West was expected to play by whilst its global rivals did not.

Only as a consequence of that is the Iranian proxy network now all but extinguished, with only Pretoria, long its diplomatic proxy, still bleating from the Union Buildings about talks and negotiations even as the Iranian leadership lies dead in the rubble of their lair.

Now a new Iranian leadership must emerge. From the US perspective, that leadership must meet two conditions. The first is to abandon the missile and nuclear weapons programs. The second is to abandon the ambition to destroy Israel and the Western order beyond it. If those conditions are met, then any new administration will likely be welcomed and supported as long as it can maintain internal order. The case of Venezuela points to the risk for Iran’s people, where the Rodriguez administration was permitted to succeed that of Maduro even though it was just about as cruel and undemocratic, as it had agreed to meet distinct US objectives and could be relied upon to maintain internal order. This stuff is about bringing peace to the West and security to the United States, which is fair enough, and not about democracy to the world, at least not as the primary objective.

The implications for Israel are significant. With the Iranian nuclear menace gone and the ballistic missile program too, that recalibrates the strategic math in the Middle East entirely. What occurs a generation from now if the Saudis, Emiratis, Qataris, Jordanians, and Egyptians no longer fear Iran? Do they turn on Israel, and has the death of Khamenei therefore destroyed even more than now meets the eye, including the basis of the Abraham Accords? That might easily be true.

For Pretoria, the strategic math has also changed. South Africa got into a horrible pickle in Iran after MTN entered that country’s cell phone market under murky circumstances and found itself in business with some of the world’s most ruthless actors. Now, many of those lie dead, and the prospect therefore is that whatever leverage Iran held on the Union Buildings has been at least partially relieved. Batting for Iran has never been a historical African National Congress position and has been falsely conflated with its long commitment to the Palestinian cause. The recalibration of the Middle East and the take-downs of both Venezuela and, in practice, Cuba are the writing on the wall, and if Pretoria can read that, the opportunity exists to recalibrate its foreign policy too, which would in turn open a new avenue to more than just a trade deal with Washington but also the kind of expansive investment pact that South Africa needs to get out of its low growth rut.