The sudden deaths of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian in a helicopter crash have plunged Tehran into instability. Raisi was not only the head of Iran’s government but was also seen as a leading candidate to replace aging Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Amid a struggling domestic economy, popular protests, and a shadow war with Israel, how will Iran respond to the loss of its hard-line leader? What will Tehran’s next steps mean for the broader Middle East?
FP’s Ravi Agrawal put these questions to Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Robin Wright, a contributing writer for the New Yorker and distinguished scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Journalist Robin Wright looks back at the legacy of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, as “belligerent,” “unpopular,” and an “absolutist ideologue.”
The death of President Ebrahim Raisi leaves a vacuum in Iranian leadership. Iran scholar Karim Sadjadpour tells Ravi the likeliest political outcomes.
Karim Sadjadpour says he can’t think of a single country with a larger “gap between the aspirations of its people and the aspirations of its regime.” But he cautions that few Iranians see reform as a likely outcome of the upcoming June elections.
Robin Wright says that even with a new government in Iran, its foreign policy will continue to operate according to anti-American and anti-West attitudes.
Iran’s Axis of Resistance was built because it feels strategically lonely in the region, says Robin Wright. But she explains that most Iranians would prefer those resources be spent at home.
Robin Wright
Contributing Writer, the New Yorker
Robin Wright is a contributing writer and columnist for the New Yorker. She is also a distinguished scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace. Wright has covered Iran since 1973 and is the author of many books on the Middle East, including Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World.
Karim Sadjadpour
Senior fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Karim Sadjadpour is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. A top expert on Iran and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, he serves as an advisor to the Aspen Institute’s Congressional Program on the Middle East. He previously was an analyst with the International Crisis Group. Sadjadpour is also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, and he is writing a book on radicalism.
Ravi Agrawal
Editor in chief, Foreign Policy
Ravi Agrawal is the editor in chief of Foreign Policy, the host of FP Live, and a regular world affairs analyst on TV and radio. Before joining FP in 2018, Agrawal worked at CNN for more than a decade in full-time roles spanning three continents, including as the network’s New Delhi bureau chief and correspondent. He is the author of India Connected: How the Smartphone Is Transforming the World’s Largest Democracy.
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