Khamenei gone: six big questions from the US-Israel bombing of Iran

In the end, maybe the surprise came not in the attack, but the details, whether…

• the CIA tracking Iran’s supreme leader for months
• pinpointing the exact time and location of his big all-hands, or
• handing that intel off to Israel to pull the trigger around 9.40am Saturday.

The result? Israel’s opening strike alone wiped out a veritable LinkedIn of names: not just the supreme leader (Khamenei), but also his revolutionary guard boss (Pakpour), defence minister (Nasirzadeh), military chief of staff (Mousavi), and later Ahmadinejad (of “Israel is a cancerous tumour” fame).

All while the US focused on capability, hitting missile sites, comms centres, and naval assets (it’s investigating who is behind the deadly strike on a girls’ school in southern Iran).

So with the months of will-he-won’t-he now giving way to oh-he-just-did, here are the six big questions now worth your time, starting with…

• First, why now?

Kudos to whoever suggested maybe the Pentagon had to act before its Claude subscription expired, but this was realistically linked to the…

• a) talks: the Iranians offered big nuclear cuts, but still quibbled on some details (enrichment at home vs abroad) and held firm on others (ballistics, proxies)
• b) balance: the mass US footprint vs the ebb of Iran’s grip and proxies, and
• c) deadline: the bombs fell just as Trump’s latest 10-day deadline expired.

So throw in the window of the ayatollah’s big Saturday meeting, plus maybe a few US pressures at home (tariffs, midterms), and it’s on.

• Second, was it legal?

No, but the mere debate now highlights its own irrelevance in major decisions, so we include it here as an excuse to cite Germany’s Merz, who just argued, “international law too often benefits dictators, enabling their brutality while handcuffing democracies“.

If you’ll excuse the comparison, it’s almost a modern version of the 1st-century’s “law was made for man, not man for the law” in how it inverts the point. Several democracies (from Canada to Australia) were quick to endorse the hits, and might adopt that justification.

• Third, what’s Trump’s endgame?

Trump wants regime change. The murkier bit is how. And while there’ve been critics warning of some kind of Iraq 2.0 ahead, the first Iraq war (or even Venezuela) seems a better analogy: there’s zero talk of occupation here, but rather a degradation of Iranian forces until someone better emerges, whether via succession, coup, or uprising.

So this is almost an assassination masquerading as war. Regime change was impossible with the ayatollah in power, and maybe it’s possible with him gone. To be clear, nobody knows, and some of the “Delcys” Trump had in mind are now dead — but he seems to have calculated that the opportunity still outweighs the uncertainty.

• Fourth, what’s Iran’s endgame?

By retaliating with hits on US allies and partners across the region — not just US bases but also luxury hotels and airports — it’s a classic asymmetric response aimed at…

• ratcheting up the costs on US enablers in hopes they’ll force a US backdown
• demonstrating the regime’s reach, and
• distracting the US and Israel while Iran’s rulers regroup.

But while the strategy seems calibrated (it didn’t hit NATO member Turkey, for example) and is overwhelming some air defence systems, it might also be ill-conceived (Trump isn’t exactly known for prioritising allied wellbeing), if not actively now backfiring: achieving the impossible, virtually the entire Arab world is now united… against Iran.

• Fifth, the winners and losers?

A dictator who spent decades pledging death to Israel/America just got death by Israel/America, and the cold reality is this means another win for US and Israeli deterrence.

Meanwhile, it’s a loss for Moscow and Beijing: they’re not Iran’s formal ‘allies’, so there’s nothing surprising about them not lifting a finger, nor lacking a finger in the region to lift.

Rather, this is a broader hit to both a) their brand, which is now less “join us as a US counterweight”, and more “we might buy your oil or drones but you’re still on your own”; and b) their strategy: partnering with pariahs to distract and dilute Western power makes sense until you start running out of pariahs. And…

• Finally, what does this all mean for the markets?

The aviation ripples alone will be massive here: Gulf carriers (Emirates, Etihad, Qatar) funnel almost half of all Europe-Asia passenger traffic through hubs that are now closed.

The other big hit is to oil, though DC isn’t tapping US strategic petroleum reserves for now, signalling confidence in US inventories and the low US reliance on the Gulf.

But Brent prices peaked up ~13% soon after the strikes, reaching 14-month highs (~$82/barrel). And that’s a reflection of the fact Iran’s revolutionary guards are warning tankers not to enter the critical Strait of Hormuz.

So you’ve now got ~150 tankers waiting outside, plus several major exporters stuck back inside (Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, plus partially the Saudis and Emiratis) — together with Iran, that’s now ~20% of global oil supply on pause.

Intrigue’s Take

There’s no question Iran’s regime is odious. The debate is more around whether this is the best way to deal with it. And maybe one reason this debate is now so rancorous is we’ve just seen an arguably progressive step (ousting a misogynistic bigot like Khamenei) delivered by modern DC’s least progressive POTUS.

Anyway, the gambler in chief has rolled his dice, and history will judge him by what comes next:

• Worse-case scenario, this power vacuum metastasises into regional chaos, and more misery for the jubilant folks whose name Trump invoked in pulling the trigger. Iran has already widened its target list, and Hezbollah has joined the fray. With missile interceptor stocks already running low in the region, maybe Trump declares victory and heads home while the region burns.
• A better-case scenario is perhaps a more pliant administration emerges or evolves, but that’s a black box right now. One of the main clerical names doing the rounds (Arafi) is just as hardline as his dead boss; ditto one of the main generals (Qaani).

Meanwhile, the old Voltaire/Mirabeau line comes to mind about Prussia being an army with a state, because it suits Iran right now. The regime’s own foreign minister just said as much, suggesting the revolutionary guards are hitting targets absent any direct orders!

And while the mullahs and generals are busy figuring out succession or hitting hotels, Iran’s ethnic minorities will be wondering whether to wait for a new oppressor to emerge, or carve out their own space now: the Kurds (10%), Balochs (3%), Azeris (20%), and even Ahwazi Arabs (2%) already have their own varying separatist presence.

Anyway, while Trump is now running the risks, it’s the region that might bear the costs, and they’re all still downstream of one of the most catastrophic gambles in modern history: it was Yahya Sinwar (the Hamas chief in Gaza) who decided to attack Israelis on October 7th, hoping it’d trigger a war that’d vanquish the world’s only Jewish state.

Instead, that move has now degraded his entire axis, with Iran’s ayatollah joining the heads of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Assadist Syria in defeat.

Sound even smarter:

• After months of tit-for-tat, Hezbollah has now launched missiles and drones at Israel in retaliation for the ayatollah’s death. Israel has responded with hits on Hezbollah-controlled areas in Beirut.
• A suspected drone strike has hit the British RAF base in Cyprus, shortly after PM Starmer announced the US can use UK bases for airstrikes on Iranian missile sites.
• And Saudi Arabia has halted operations at its vast Ras Tanura facility (~5% of global crude exports) as a result of a drone strike.