Several months into his tenure as supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei is beginning to put his own stamp on Iran’s military and national security establishment. In a sweeping series of appointments, he has effectively recreated Iran’s senior command, reorganizing the institutions responsible for managing both war and diplomacy.
Many of the appointments were necessitated by the extraordinary attrition that Iran’s military leadership has suffered across successive rounds of war since June 2025. But Khamenei’s choices also reveal how Tehran is rebuilding its security establishment around the lessons of these conflicts and preparing for a prolonged confrontation with the United States and Israel.
The emerging command structure points toward a broader shift in how Tehran intends to manage the next phase of the conflict: more centralized military command; a greater emphasis on offensive operations and imposing more severe costs to strengthen deterrence; and tighter integration of military, economic, diplomatic, and domestic-security policy.
Yet this does not necessarily mean abandoning negotiations. Rather, the appointments suggest that Tehran is trying to pair diplomacy with a harder conception of deterrence, centered on preserving and strengthening its ability to damage its adversaries so that negotiations produce a durable settlement rather than another pause before renewed conflict.
The clearest expression of that approach may be Khamenei’s choice of Mohsen Rezaei to lead the Supreme National Security Council, the institution charged with coordinating Iran’s military, diplomatic, economic, and security policies. Rezaei is often described simply as a veteran hard-liner or former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). But that understates his significance.
Rezaei has long stood out as a strategic thinker and institution-builder within Iran’s military establishment. During his 16 years commanding the IRGC, he helped transform it into a sprawling military organization, developing its ground, air and naval forces; the Quds Force, responsible for operations abroad; and Khatam al-Anbiya, the central headquarters for coordinating major military operations. His role thus extended beyond helping to direct the Iran-Iraq War to building institutions and capabilities that would shape how Iran wielded military power for decades to come. But his wartime record also reveals the harder edge of that strategic outlook, particularly when it came to determining when Iran had achieved enough to end a conflict on acceptable terms.
As Iran’s military position deteriorated in 1988, Rezaei was among the senior figures most reluctant to end the war. In a letter sent to the Supreme Defense Council, he maintained that Iran could regain the initiative through a major military buildup and a five-year war plan. Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani—then the speaker of parliament and representative of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini on the Supreme Defense Council—and other senior political leaders instead saw Rezaei’s assessment as underscoring the immense resources required to continue fighting as Iran’s military and economy came under growing strain. Rezaei later maintained that his letter was used to help make the case for Khomeini to accept U.N. Security Council Resolution 598, even though Rezaei had intended it as a plan for continuing the war.
That history makes his elevation particularly noteworthy as Iran again weighs the terms on which to end a costly war. It would be too simplistic to conclude that Rezaei will oppose negotiations today. But his record suggests a higher threshold for compromise and a long-standing conviction that Iran should not end a conflict before it has built sufficient military strength and leverage to shape the settlement that follows.
The rest of Khamenei’s appointments reinforce this picture. Ali Abdollahi, the new chief of the Armed Forces General Staff, has been tasked with completing the integration of the Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters into the General Staff, a reorganization that would further centralize wartime command and coordination. His mandate emphasizes preparedness for “conventional, modern, cognitive, and hybrid threats.”
Ahmad Vahidi, meanwhile, has been formally confirmed as IRGC commander and promoted to major general after assuming the post following Mohammed Pakpour’s assassination. Khamenei instructed him to pursue “maximum deterrence” while maintaining readiness for “powerful offensive operations against the enemy.” Iranian commentators have highlighted the latter phrase as an unusually explicit articulation of offensive operations as part of the IRGC commander’s mandate.
Together, the moves suggest an effort to integrate Iran’s wartime command while embracing a more aggressive form of deterrence, in which attacks are met with greater counterescalation intended to convince adversaries that each new round of conflict will leave them worse off.
The appointments also show how expansive that wartime posture has become. Ali Azmaei, who replaces the slain Alireza Tangsiri as commander of the IRGC navy, takes charge at a moment when control of the Strait of Hormuz has become Iran’s most consequential source of leverage over Washington and the global economy. His mandate emphasizes greater combat readiness, intelligence oversight, and coordination with the regular navy and other state institutions, even as Tehran negotiates with Oman over new shipping arrangements while refusing to restore the prewar order in the strait.
At home, Khamenei has returned Hossein Taeb—the controversial former head of the IRGC’s intelligence arm, closely associated with the repression of dissent—to prominence as head of the Basij. Taeb has been instructed to strengthen its “public intelligence network,” exploit new technologies, and deepen neighborhood-level organization.
The common thread is a vision of the conflict that extends well beyond the battlefield. Maritime leverage, domestic surveillance and mobilization, economic resilience, and military power are increasingly being treated as deeply interconnected elements of Iran’s ability to withstand pressure and deter another attempt to defeat it by military force.
This posture reflects a deeper reassessment within Iran’s security establishment of why deterrence failed before the war. After the U.S. withdrawal from the nuclear deal in 2018, Tehran largely pursued what became known as “strategic patience,” calibrating its responses to sanctions, assassinations, sabotage, and Israeli attacks while seeking to avoid a wider conflict and preserve space for diplomacy.
The dominant view in Tehran now holds that this restraint had the opposite effect, reinforcing perceptions in Washington and Israel that Iran was weak and vulnerable, its responses predictable, and the costs of attacking it manageable. The lesson drawn from the wars since June 2025 is therefore not simply that Iran needs greater military capabilities, but also that it must demonstrate the willingness to use them in ways that impose sufficiently severe military and economic costs to discourage its adversaries from escalating again.
Economic security is part of this calculus. Rather than simply accepting perennial isolation in the name of a “resistance economy,” influential figures such as Majid Shakeri, who has served as parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf’s economic advisor, have argued that the war must end on terms that give Iran a viable economic future. Rezaei, who holds a doctorate in economics and served as former President Ebrahim Raisi’s vice president for economic affairs, has similarly described economic stability, public welfare, and livelihoods as components of national security.
But Tehran’s experience with the nuclear deal and the more recent memorandum has deepened doubts that sanctions relief that is dependent on U.S. waivers and vulnerable to congressional or presidential reversal can provide that future. This helps explain the importance that Iran now attaches to retaining control over Hormuz: Tehran is seeking leverage that it controls itself to make renewed economic coercion more costly and, ultimately, to bind Iran’s own security and prosperity more closely to that of the Persian Gulf and the global economy.
That logic extends beyond conventional military deterrence. Iran’s missile and drone capabilities have exposed the vulnerability of U.S. bases and critical infrastructure across the region, while its ability to disrupt Hormuz has demonstrated that the economic costs of war can be transmitted to regional states and the global economy.
Tehran is now trying to convert that wartime leverage into a more durable regional order that better accommodates Iranian power and interests. In other words, its insistence on a new maritime arrangement in Hormuz, and its refusal to reopen the strait simply in return for promises of sanctions relief, reflect a broader ambition to emerge from the conflict with a stronger regional position. Tehran is determined not to return to a status quo in which Washington could progressively isolate Iran while consolidating its preferred regional security order at Tehran’s expense.
This is also why a harder Iranian posture does not necessarily foreclose another agreement with Washington. President Masoud Pezeshkian has called the present moment the “best time” for an agreement and continues to point to the previous memorandum as the basis for a settlement.
Rezaei, however, appears to be staking out a tougher position. In his first meeting as Supreme National Security Council secretary, with China’s ambassador to Iran, he said Hormuz would remain closed until Washington ends the war, releases Iran’s blocked funds, and meets other Iranian conditions conveyed through intermediaries. Notably, he also demanded an end to the wars in not just Lebanon but also Gaza as well, which goes beyond the previous memorandum. And he echoed other senior officials in explicitly separating any agreement with Oman over a new transit route through Hormuz from the question of reopening the strait, making clear that the former would not automatically produce the latter.
Rezaei’s position therefore suggests not a turn away from diplomacy, but a harder approach to the terms on which Iran is prepared to end the conflict. His demands now appear to go beyond full implementation of the previous memorandum, while his insistence on retaining control over Hormuz gives Tehran a powerful means of pressing those demands.
Khamenei’s appointments suggest that he is institutionalizing this broader strategy, building a state prepared to negotiate while strengthening its capacity to withstand a prolonged conflict and impose mounting costs if negotiations fail. The objective is ultimately to convince Iran’s adversaries that reaching a durable settlement with the Islamic Republic will be less costly than continuing the war or again trying to impose their preferred outcome by military force.