Iran's Political Leadership: How Middle Eastern Politics Affects South Asian Diplomacy

From Raisi's Helicopter to Pezeshkian's Presidency: A Political Earthquake in Tehran

On May 19, 2024, a helicopter carrying Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi crashed in foggy mountains near the Azerbaijan border, killing him instantly. The death sent shockwaves through a political system that had spent years carefully grooming Raisi — a hardline conservative and close ally of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei — as the likely successor to lead Iran after Khamenei himself. In one sudden moment, decades of succession planning were thrown into chaos.

The snap election that followed produced a surprise that few inside or outside Iran had anticipated. Masoud Pezeshkian, a reformist cardiac surgeon and lawmaker with little national profile, won the runoff on July 5, 2024, defeating hardline conservative Saeed Jalili with 54.8 percent of the vote. He was officially inaugurated as president on July 28, 2024. For analysts watching Iran, Pezeshkian's victory was a double paradox: a reformist winning in a system designed to exclude reformists, approved by the very supreme leader who had spent years purging them from politics.

But the context explains the calculation. Voter turnout had collapsed to historic lows — just 39.9 percent in the first round, the lowest ever recorded for an Iranian presidential election — reflecting deep public disillusionment with the Islamic Republic. Khamenei, who ultimately controls which candidates are allowed to run through the unelected Guardian Council, appears to have calculated that allowing a moderate to compete would drive up participation and stabilize a regime under severe strain.

Who Actually Runs Iran: The Supreme Leader, the IRGC, and the Limits of the Presidency

Understanding Iranian politics requires understanding what the presidency actually controls — and what it does not. Under the Islamic Republic's constitutional structure, the president is the second-highest ranking official but answers directly to the Supreme Leader, who holds final authority over the military, judiciary, nuclear policy, and foreign affairs. Ali Khamenei, now 85 years old, has occupied the supreme leader position since 1989, longer than any Iranian leader since the country's founding.

Below Khamenei sits the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran's 190,000-strong ideological military force that reports directly to the supreme leader rather than to the elected government. The IRGC controls enormous economic interests across Iran's energy, construction, and manufacturing sectors, and runs the Quds Force — the external operations unit that has historically funded and armed proxy groups across the Middle East, from Hezbollah in Lebanon to the Houthis in Yemen. When Pezeshkian says he supports nuclear diplomacy or wants to ease tensions with the West, it is the IRGC and Khamenei who ultimately decide whether that happens.

Senior Khamenei advisor Kamal Kharazi stated this plainly after the 2024 election results: foreign policy, he said, is controlled by the Strategic Council for Foreign Relations, not by the president. Pezeshkian, for his part, has been candid about these limits. During his election campaign, he told students he had "assimilated into the Supreme Leader" and acknowledged he had no power to release political prisoners. His presidency operates within a structure that remains fundamentally unchanged, regardless of who holds the office.

The Twelve-Day War: June 2025 and the Middle East Transformed

Whatever diplomatic hopes Pezeshkian's election had generated were overtaken by a far more violent development in June 2025. On June 13, 2025, Israel launched Operation Rising Lion — a massive surprise attack targeting Iran's nuclear facilities at Natanz, Fordo, and Isfahan, as well as military bases, air defense systems, and key military commanders. Within hours, Israel had effectively seized control of Iranian airspace. Six senior Iranian military commanders were killed in the opening strike, including Chief of Staff Mohammad Bagheri and IRGC commander Hossein Salami.

Iran retaliated with over 550 ballistic missiles and more than 1,000 suicide drones targeting Israeli civilian centers, military installations, and energy infrastructure. The United States, after initially watching, joined the conflict on June 22 by bombing three Iranian nuclear sites. Iran responded by firing missiles at the American Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar. On June 24, under heavy US pressure, both sides agreed to a ceasefire. The Twelve-Day War — as it became known — ended with both sides claiming victory.

In military terms, the damage to Iran was severe. Israeli and American precision strikes destroyed or heavily damaged Iran's major enrichment facilities, setting back its nuclear program by years. More than 30 senior IRGC commanders were killed. Iran fired hundreds of missiles during the conflict but destroyed relatively little strategic infrastructure in Israel — its vast missile arsenal had proven far less accurate and destructive than Iran had projected. Iranian authorities admitted in December 2025 that earlier claims of shooting down Israeli F-35 fighter jets were false.

The political consequences inside Iran were equally serious. Khamenei's authority — already under strain before the war — took a direct hit from the humiliating military defeat. Reports emerged of senior commanders withholding information from him about the war's progress. In November 2025, Pezeshkian himself warned in parliament that factional infighting could cause regime collapse if Khamenei were harmed. Bangladesh's Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned Israel's attack as a violation of international law and backed Iran in the conflict — a position consistent with decades of Dhaka's diplomatic alignment on Middle Eastern issues.

What the Iran-Israel War Means for Bangladesh's Economy

For Bangladesh, the Twelve-Day War was never just a distant geopolitical event. Its economic shockwaves hit Dhaka almost immediately. Within hours of Israel's opening strikes, Brent crude oil prices surged more than 10 percent to $75 per barrel. Insurance premiums for tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz and the Suez Canal surged roughly 60 percent as shippers and insurers priced in the elevated risk. LNG tanker charter rates reached eight-month highs.

For Bangladesh, this matters in several interconnected ways. The country imports most of its crude oil from Gulf states and approximately 75 percent of its LNG under long-term contracts from Qatar and Oman — both of which depend on the Strait of Hormuz for export. Any blockade of that strait, which Iran threatened repeatedly during the conflict, would have cut off a vital energy supply chain for a country already dealing with double-digit inflation and strained foreign reserves that had fallen from $45 billion in 2021 to around $26 billion by mid-2025.

Bangladesh's ready-made garment sector, which generates over 80 percent of the country's export earnings, was also exposed. Higher fuel costs raise production and transport costs across the entire manufacturing chain. Rerouted shipping to avoid conflict zones adds time and freight costs, threatening the country's reputation for timely delivery to European and American buyers. BGMEA President Mahmud Hasan Khan Babu warned explicitly that the conflict could undercut the sector's global competitiveness at an already difficult moment — the industry was simultaneously managing domestic inflation, rising labor costs, elevated interest rates, and newly imposed US tariffs.

Remittances represent the deepest vulnerability. Over seven million Bangladeshis work in Middle Eastern countries, and remittances from the region make up more than half of Bangladesh's total remittance inflows. If instability spreads to Gulf host countries — Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait — it could threaten employment, reduce wages, and cut the inflows that have served as Bangladesh's primary buffer for its foreign exchange reserves. Economists at SANEM and the Centre for Policy Dialogue warned that a sustained escalation creating labor disruptions in the Gulf would trigger a cascading series of economic shocks with no easy domestic policy response.

Iran-Bangladesh Relations: History, Trade, and the Eastern Refinery

Bangladesh and Iran share a relationship that dates back to the Iranian Revolution of 1979, when bilateral ties dramatically improved after years of cooler relations during the Shah's era — imperial Iran had supported Pakistan during the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. Since the revolution, both countries have maintained regular diplomatic contact, cooperated in multilateral forums including the OIC and the Non-Aligned Movement, and made state visits at the leadership level.

The most tangible marker of the relationship is Eastern Refinery, Bangladesh's primary oil refinery, which was originally built with Iranian technical assistance in 1963, when Bangladesh was still East Pakistan. Iran has repeatedly offered to upgrade Eastern Refinery's capacity and assist in construction of new oil processing infrastructure — an offer Bangladesh has explored across multiple governments. A preferential trade agreement signed in 2006 aimed at establishing a framework for growing bilateral commerce, though it has remained largely non-functional, with annual non-oil trade sitting at around $120 million.

In September 2024, Iranian Ambassador Mansour Chavushi met Bangladesh's Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus at his Tejgaon office just weeks after the Hasina government's collapse, expressing Iran's strong desire to deepen economic ties in trade, energy, education, and health. Yunus welcomed the engagement and expressed appreciation for Iran's support on the Rohingya issue in international forums. The meeting signaled continuity in the relationship under Bangladesh's new interim leadership.

In 2024, satellite tracking data revealed that Iran had also begun shipping small crude oil cargoes to Bangladesh through ship-to-ship transfers near Chittagong — part of Iran's broader push to expand exports beyond China as US sanctions continued. Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation stated it had not purchased the cargo, and the ultimate buyer remained unclear. The episode illustrated the complex informal energy dynamics operating beneath official diplomatic statements.

Iran After the War: Internal Fractures and an Uncertain Succession

The Twelve-Day War did not end Iran's political turbulence — it accelerated it. Khamenei, who turned 85 in 2024, has faced growing questions about succession for years. Raisi's unexpected death in 2024 had already removed his most prominent loyalist from the equation. The military humiliation of June 2025 further eroded the cult of infallibility that the Islamic Republic had spent decades constructing around the supreme leader position.

Possible successors include Khamenei's son Mojtaba — reports in late 2024 suggested he had stepped down from his seminary position in preparation for the role, though the pro-government Tehran Times denied this. Other names circulated include Sadiq Larijani and Hassan Khomeini, the grandson of the republic's founder. As of early 2026, no official succession has been announced, and the Assembly of Experts — the body constitutionally tasked with selecting a new supreme leader — is conducting its deliberations in secrecy.

In November 2025, protests erupted across multiple Iranian cities, with the IRGC reportedly considering additional Israeli strikes as a further destabilizing factor. The post-war period has also seen Iran engaging in an unusual diplomatic maneuver: Pezeshkian gave an interview to Tucker Carlson shortly after the ceasefire, signaling a desire to reach influential voices in the American political landscape who might push for reduced pressure on Tehran. Hardline factions within the political establishment criticized the move as capitulation. The internal fissures are real and growing.

Bangladesh's Diplomatic Balancing Act in a Fractured Middle East

For Bangladesh's foreign policy establishment, the transformation of the Middle East since June 2025 presents a genuinely difficult navigation challenge. Bangladesh has traditionally maintained a non-aligned posture rooted in its principle of "friendship to all, malice towards none" — supporting Palestinian rights and Muslim-majority solidarity positions while maintaining productive economic relationships with Western nations and multilateral financial institutions.

The Twelve-Day War has tested this balance. Bangladesh condemned Israel's strikes on Iran. But Bangladesh also depends on the United States for preferential market access for its garment exports, on IMF support for its balance of payments, and on Gulf states that are broadly aligned with American positions on Iran. Remaining neutral while these blocs move further apart demands diplomatic agility that smaller economies with this degree of trade exposure rarely possess.

Analysts at Bangladesh Enterprise Institute have recommended that the country expand its diplomatic toolkit — investing in economic diplomacy, diaspora diplomacy, and climate diplomacy to build influence beyond the traditional bilateral framework. Bangladesh's contribution to UN peacekeeping operations, its hosting of Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, and its recent LDC graduation trajectory all offer international standing that can be leveraged. The question is whether the institutional capacity exists to deploy those assets coherently in a Middle East that has been reshaped in less than two weeks of war.

Iran's political future remains uncertain. Whether Khamenei's successor will be a hardliner who doubles down on confrontation or a pragmatist who seeks economic normalization will shape the regional environment for years. For Bangladesh — a country whose energy security, export economy, and labor market all pass through the Middle East — that question is not an abstraction. It is among the most consequential foreign policy calculations the country faces heading into the second half of this decade.

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