The reported US-Israeli plan to install Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as an Iranian equivalent of Venezuela’s Delcy Rodríguez is shocking, but not because Ahmadinejad is unknown. He is one of the most recognisable figures in the Islamic Republic’s recent history. It is shocking because anyone with a serious understanding of Iran’s political system would know that he is precisely the wrong figure through whom to imagine a managed transition.
According to a recent New York Times report , the US and Israel considered Ahmadinejad as a possible transitional figure in Iran, modelled on a Venezuela-style scenario in which an insider from within the ruling order could redirect the state after a leadership rupture. Whether the details of the report are fully accurate, exaggerated, or shaped by wartime information politics, the idea itself is revealing. It exposes a deeper failure in how Iran is understood in Washington and Tel Aviv: the belief that the country can be remade by finding the right alienated insider.
Some will explain this episode through the personalised decision-making styles of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. That explanation has some force. Trump’s foreign policy has often relied on loyalists, informal channels, and trusted intermediaries rather than conventional diplomatic structures.
Netanyahu’s wartime decision-making, too, has become increasingly concentrated in narrower political and security circles.
But this explanation is too limited. The Ahmadinejad fantasy cannot be reduced to the personalities of two leaders or the influence of a few advisers. It points to a deeper problem in the policy worlds of Washington and Tel Aviv: a wider regime-change imagination that repeatedly mistakes elite substitution for political transformation.
Iran is too often approached through a leader-centred lens. Policymakers and think tanks search for usable insiders, disgruntled former officials, elite splits, and possible defectors, while paying far less attention to the institutions, class coalitions, and social struggles that actually structure power. The problem is not merely that bad advice reaches powerful leaders. It is that much of the advice is produced within a flawed conceptual framework.
Within this framework, political change in Iran is imagined as a matter of finding the right replacement figure: someone recognisable, someone with a past inside the system, someone angry enough at the current leadership to be useful, but familiar enough to preserve the state.
This is how Ahmadinejad could appear plausible. But such thinking reduces Iran to a succession drama at the top, when the real question is how power is organised through the Office of the Supreme Leader, the IRGC, security institutions, revolutionary foundations, sanctions economies, parastatal capital, and repeated cycles of popular revolt. Ahmadinejad’s own career proves the point.
Ahmadinejad’s rise and fall
Ahmadinejad’s presidency between 2005 and 2013 marked a decisive period in the transformation of the Islamic Republic. His rise was not the product of personal charisma alone. He became president because he aligned with powerful forces inside the state at a particular moment.
In 2005, Ahmadinejad rose to the presidency with the backing of powerful sections of the IRGC, security institutions, conservative networks, and the office of the Supreme Leader against Hashemi Rafsanjani, who represented a rival wing of the ruling elite.
Mehdi Karroubi, another presidential candidate, later alleged in an open letter to the Supreme Leader that his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, had intervened in the election in Ahmadinejad’s favour. Ahmadinejad presented himself as a man of the people, hostile to corruption, suspicious of technocrats, and committed to revolutionary justice. But this populist language was not outside the system. It was enabled by forces inside it.
During his presidency, military and parastatal institutions deepened their influence across Iran’s economy, politics, and security. Privatisation, sanctions, state contracts, and strategic procurement opened new routes of accumulation for actors linked to the IRGC, religious-revolutionary foundations (bonyads), and other institutions tied to the Office of the Supreme Leader. The result was not a simple military takeover of the economy, but the consolidation of what I call the military-bonyad complex: a broader coercive-economic bloc rather than a single military actor.
External observers often personalise Iranian politics, reducing it to familiar oppositions: Khamenei versus Rouhani, Ahmadinejad versus the clerics, reformists versus principlists, conservatives versus pragmatists. These divisions are real, but they do not explain how power is reproduced across the institutions, class coalitions, and coercive structures of the Islamic Republic.
Towards the end of his second term, Ahmadinejad came into conflict with the very power centres that had helped elevate him. His clashes with the Supreme Leader’s office, his challenge to established conservative factions, and the ambitions of his inner circle made him increasingly intolerable to the ruling bloc.
After leaving office, he tried to reinvent himself as an anti-establishment figure. He criticised corruption, challenged elements of the elite, and attempted to present himself as a tribune of ordinary Iranians against a closed ruling class. Yet without the institutional backing that had sustained his presidency, this posture had little effect. He and his close associates were marginalised, disqualified, attacked, and pushed to the edges of formal politics.
This is why the reported US-Israeli plan is so analytically incoherent. Ahmadinejad’s political biography does not show that a former insider could be used to redirect the Islamic Republic. It shows the opposite. His rise depended on the support of Iran’s coercive and economic power centres. His fall showed that personal ambition, rhetorical populism, and elite resentment are insufficient without organised institutional backing.
The Venezuela fantasy
The comparison to Delcy Rodríguez is revealing because it rests on a specific fantasy of regime change: weaken or remove the top leader, identify a pragmatic insider, preserve enough of the state apparatus, and use external pressure to redirect the political order.
But, as I have argued elsewhere , Iran is not Venezuela, and it does not have a Delcy Rodríguez. More importantly, the analogy misunderstands what succession would mean in Iran. The central issue is not who can be placed at the top. The issue is which institutions control coercion, intelligence, money, foreign exchange, logistics, welfare funds, media, border economies, strategic contracts, and ideological legitimacy.
The fantasy of Ahmadinejad as a transitional figure searches for a name rather than analysing a structure. It looks for betrayal at the top rather than understanding power around the top and below.
There is another problem with the Ahmadinejad fantasy: it erases Iranian society.
Ahmadinejad is not the representative of Iran’s democratic demands. He was a central figure in the contested 2009 presidential election, whose official result triggered the Green Movement and one of the largest waves of protest in the history of the Islamic Republic.
Since then, Iran has seen repeated uprisings : in 2017, 2019, 2022, and 2026. These movements were driven by anger over austerity, economic collapse, gender and ethnic repression, and the absence of political freedom. Ahmadinejad had no place in these movements’ imagination of political change. Whatever residual popularity he may retain among some constituencies, he has no organised national force, no backing from social movements, and no support from the ruling-class coalition that once made his presidency possible. To imagine him as a transitional figure is to mistake elite grievance for popular legitimacy and to treat Iranian society as passive terrain for external design. This is not only analytically wrong; it is politically dangerous. External regime-change schemes marginalise democratic forces, feed the regime’s foreign-conspiracy narrative, and strengthen the security institutions that block democratic organising.
The real lesson
The reported Ahmadinejad plan should not be dismissed merely as absurd. Its absurdity is precisely what makes it revealing. It shows how deeply leader-centred the regime-change imagination remains.
Iran’s crisis is real. The Islamic Republic faces deep social anger, economic exhaustion, elite fragmentation, and a legitimacy crisis. But none of this means that the country can be politically redesigned from outside by elevating a former president who was made and unmade by the very system he now claims to oppose.
Ahmadinejad was never Iran’s Delcy Rodríguez. He was a product of the Islamic Republic’s own political economy: useful to powerful forces when he served them, disposable when he challenged them, and irrelevant as a vehicle for democratic transformation.
The future of Iran will not be decided by recycling discarded figures from the Islamic Republic’s past. Nor will it be delivered by US-Israeli plans for a managed transition. It will be shaped by the struggle between a deeply entrenched coercive order and the people who have repeatedly risked their lives to imagine something beyond it. Kayhan Valadbaygi is a Research Fellow at the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam and CEO of Middle East Risk & Reform Advisory. Have questions or comments? Email us at: editorial-english@alaraby.co.uk Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.