Mojtaba Khamenei Needs War to Consolidate Power and Escape the Regime’s Legitimacy Crisis

Mousa Afshar, a member of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, said the latest military escalation in the Strait of Hormuz and attacks against regional interests and bases cannot be viewed merely as security or military reactions. They form part of an internal strategy designed to consolidate Mojtaba Khamenei’s position and provide a permanent wartime environment for a regime facing an unprecedented succession and legitimacy crisis.

Afshar said the post-Ali Khamenei period has not produced the pragmatic transition some Western policymakers had anticipated. Instead, the new leadership has maintained the same doctrine of repression at home and war, coercion, and blackmail abroad. Mojtaba Khamenei lacks popular, religious, and political legitimacy and therefore depends on a state of emergency to impose discipline on rival factions and justify continued security control.

He explained that genuine peace poses an existential threat to the system of absolute clerical rule because it removes the regime’s pretexts for repression and redirects attention toward accumulated domestic crises, including poverty, inflation, unemployment, public protests, and factional struggles. Without an external enemy, divisions within the IRGC, parliament, religious institutions, and decision-making centers become increasingly visible, weakening the new Supreme Leader’s ability to present himself as the final authority.

Afshar noted that the new leadership’s language of revenge and rejection of lasting compromise demonstrates that war is not a departure from the regime’s strategy but a condition for its survival. The collapse of the understanding with Washington and escalating attacks against figures associated with Masoud Pezeshkian and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf show that the dispute is no longer about diplomatic details but about which faction can preserve the system and prevent a new nationwide uprising.

He said recent regional and international developments have further exposed this reality. Britain’s latest move to place the IRGC within a terrorist and national-security framework recognizes that it is not a conventional national army but the main institution responsible for domestic repression, threats to international shipping, and the export of war. The statement signed by more than 120 Arab public figures condemning the Iranian regime’s attacks against Arab countries also reflects a growing regional consensus against allowing Tehran to hold neighboring states hostage to its internal crises.

Afshar added that the regime uses war rhetoric to justify executions, mass arrests, and forced mobilization because it knows that genuine de-escalation would give Iranian society and the Resistance Units greater space to organize and transform economic and social anger into a nationwide political movement.

He warned that offering economic incentives or diplomatic concessions will not secure peace because the regime views openness not as an opportunity for stability but as a threat to its survival. A society with greater access to information, organization, and economic space would become more capable of challenging the ruling establishment.

Afshar concluded that protecting the Strait of Hormuz, ensuring the security of Arab states, and preventing renewed conflict cannot be achieved through temporary ceasefires or arrangements that give the regime additional time. The realistic path, he said, is to isolate the IRGC, cut off its resources, recognize the Iranian people’s right to resist dictatorship, and support the democratic alternative represented by the National Council of Resistance of Iran in establishing a democratic, non-nuclear republic that respects neighboring countries’ sovereignty and rejects terrorism, proxy militias, and war.