He believed the West would never accept Iran’s regime. Two decades later, he died in a war he once predicted.
Slain Iranian Security Chief Long Argued the West Sought Regime Change — A Warning That Now Echoes in War.
When Ali Larijani sat for an interview in Tehran in 2006, he was already convinced that Iran’s standoff with the West was not truly about uranium enrichment. It was about survival.
“If it was not the nuclear matter, they would have come up with something else,” he said at the time, dismissing Western concerns as pretext. The pressure on Iran, he argued, was reason enough to suspect that regime change — not diplomacy — was the real objective.
Nearly two decades later, Larijani is dead, reportedly killed in a targeted Israeli airstrike. His death marks one of the highest-profile assassinations since the conflict between Iran, Israel and the United States erupted into open war.
At the time of his death, Larijani was again serving as secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, the same post he held during fraught nuclear negotiations with Western powers in the mid-2000s.
A former commander in the Revolutionary Guards, he combined ideological loyalty with a calculating pragmatism that sometimes put him at odds with more flamboyant figures inside the Islamic Republic.
He had watched Mahmoud Ahmadinejad win the presidency in 2005 and bristled at what he saw as unnecessary provocations toward Israel and the West. Larijani sought accommodation that would preserve the regime’s security. Ahmadinejad preferred confrontation.
Their rivalry culminated in Larijani’s resignation in 2007 — widely interpreted as evidence that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei sided with the president.
Yet Larijani never drifted far from power. He later became speaker of the Majles and remained a fixture within the ruling establishment. As unrest swept Iran in recent years, he was reportedly tasked with suppressing protests — a role critics say he carried out ruthlessly.
He was not a reformer. But neither was he a caricature. Reports suggested he opposed elevating Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba, to the supreme leadership, favoring instead a candidate who might temper public anger. Whether that was conviction or calculation is unclear.
What is clearer is that Larijani’s worldview — that the West’s hostility was implacable — shaped his politics. He warned in 2006 that war would send oil prices soaring and could lead to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Those predictions now define the global economic landscape.
His life embodied the paradox of Iran’s ruling elite: pragmatic yet unyielding, suspicious yet strategic. His death may silence one voice in Tehran, but it does not end the conviction he articulated years ago — that for Iran’s revolutionary state, compromise was always temporary, and confrontation inevitable.
