Zolghadr’s Appointment Shows Power Shifting from Government to the Hard Core of the Iranian Regime

Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr’s appointment as secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council is not just an administrative reshuffle following Ali Larijani’s death. It is better understood as a political signal that the next phase in Tehran will be defined by even deeper securitization, with real decision-making moving further away from the government and more firmly into the hands of the regime’s hard core: the Revolutionary Guards, the security apparatus, and the leadership circle around the Supreme Leader.

Formally, the Supreme National Security Council is chaired by the president. In practice, however, Iran’s political system has long shown that the president’s role is often procedural, while strategic direction is set elsewhere. By placing a figure like Zolghadr at the center of the council, the regime is reinforcing a pattern that has become impossible to ignore: the council is no longer simply a coordinating state body, but increasingly a crisis-management chamber controlled by the security establishment.

Zolghadr is not a negotiator or a civilian bureaucrat. He is a product of the regime’s most hardened institutions. His career path runs through the core of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Interior Ministry, the judiciary, and other high-level power centers. That trajectory does not produce a reformist or even a pragmatic administrator. It produces a security engineer—someone designed to translate political imperatives into control, surveillance, and repression.

His background also carries regional implications. Zolghadr’s role in “Ramadan Headquarters,” one of the IRGC’s key cross-border operational arms, ties his name to the model of proxy networks, asymmetric warfare, and regional infiltration that has shaped Tehran’s strategy for decades. In other words, the mindset now being elevated inside the highest security body is not one of political compromise, but one of militia management, covert penetration, and hard coercive power.

Domestically, the appointment sends an equally clear message. The regime is facing overlapping crises: social unrest, economic collapse, political fragility, and mounting external pressure. Instead of broadening political space, it is doubling down on its security reflexes. Instead of strengthening state institutions, it is concentrating power in the hands of the Revolutionary Guards and allied structures. In that sense, Zolghadr’s rise is not just about one man; it reflects the regime’s growing conviction that Iran’s future will be managed not by political figures, but by security men.

That is also why this appointment matters beyond internal power dynamics. It shows that the ruling structure in Tehran has little left to offer except the recycling of the same coercive logic that created its current crisis in the first place. When a regime responds to mounting domestic and regional challenges by empowering another hardline security figure, it is effectively admitting that it has no credible political answer left.

This is precisely where the question of an alternative becomes urgent. If the regime is moving from politics to securitized rule, then the international debate should not remain trapped between appeasement and war. The more Tehran militarizes its own internal governance, the more compelling the case becomes for recognizing and supporting a democratic alternative.

In that context, the provisional democratic government announced by the National Council of Resistance of Iran, based on Maryam Rajavi’s Ten-Point Plan, deserves far more serious attention. That plan presents a framework for democratic transition: separation of religion and state, gender equality, abolition of the death penalty, recognition of the rights of ethnic communities and nationalities, and a non-nuclear Iran at peace with the region and the world. At a moment when the Iranian regime is handing more power to security hardliners, support for such an alternative is no longer simply a matter of opposition politics; it is increasingly a strategic necessity.

Zolghadr’s appointment ultimately says one thing very clearly: Tehran has chosen security over politics once again. But that choice also sharpens the opposite conclusion. The only real way out for Iran—and for a region exhausted by the regime’s crisis-making—is to recognize and support a structured democratic transition led by the Iranian people, not by the Guards, not by the clerical establishment, and not by yet another recycled face of authoritarian rule.