Iran’s Power Structure: The Endless Onion.
By Raghu Kondori

Today, Iran’s regime isn’t a pyramid with one man at the top. It’s an onion.War has peeled the outermost layer. Khamenei is gone. His inner circle and the apex of the IRGC have been decimated. In their place sits Mojtaba Khamenei — a cardboard cutout Supreme Leader, more consensus figure than supreme authority, presiding over a hollowed-out core.

Yet the system doesn’t collapse

Beneath that skin lies the second onion: figures like the Larijanis and mid-tier IRGC officers who transitioned into politics, the judiciary, and governance. Pragmatic enough to run the country, hardline enough to kill any meaningful U.S. deal. They were the gatekeepers.Then they got eliminated too.Peel again and you reach the third layer — Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Ahmad Vahidi, and their peers. Same DNA: revolutionary loyalty, patronage networks, institutional control, and deep IRGC roots.Every layer is its own self-contained onion. Each covers and protects the one beneath it. Redundant institutions, parallel chains of command, ideological enforcers, and economic empires all interlock. Remove one ring and the next simply tightens and keeps functioning. The IRGC doesn’t just guard the regime — it is the regime at every level.This is why decapitation strikes, assassinations, and military defeats haven’t delivered the collapse many expected. The structure is deliberate: diffuse enough to absorb shocks, concentrated enough to retain control.No easy negotiations. No quick deals. The security elite views concessions on nukes, missiles, or proxies as existential suicide. Each layer reinforces the same strategic DNA.Onions have a core. Iran’s might too — but only after relentless, cumulative pressure finally erodes the ideology and elite cohesion that binds the rings.Until then, the regime endures, layer after stubborn layer.  Each self-contained ring interlocks via redundant institutions and coercion, absorbing shocks. No quick negotiations; concessions spell suicide.
Iran’s onion has a core, but relentless pressure—military, economic, ideological—must erode elite cohesion to expose it.

The onion survives.

The only real solution is to mash the onion.