New account! Historian, traveler, flaneur, restless. Itinerant academic. Austrian Academy of Sciences. Plz introduce yourself before following. I block a lot!
Mar 4 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
What remains of the Islamic Republic is a rump-state. It is a pretender to the authority of the IR, trying to fill out a widening power vacuum.
Khamenei spent the last 17 years (at least since 2009) consolidating his absolute power and remaking IRI in his own image. The 2021
elevation of Ebrahim Raisi to presidency, managed through an "election" closely engineered by Khamenei, was the culmination of this effort. The magnificent failure of that, resulting in May 2024 elimintation of Raisi, was the natural endpoint for Khamenei's misguided efforts
