A global reckoning

When news broke that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in the US-Israel airstrikes that hit Iran over the weekend, many responded not with grief but with a sense of relief.

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For millions of Iranians, the death of the aging supreme leader symbolized the end of an era defined by repression, stifling political control and economic decay that crushed the aspirations of his own people.

For nearly four decades at the apex of power in a system that fused clerical rule with military authority, Khamenei presided over a nation battered by sanctions and increasingly cut off from much of the world.

He was no moderate cleric reluctantly steering a revolution he inherited. Khamenei embodied the Islamic Republic's most uncompromising instincts - hostility toward the United States and its allies, implacable opposition to Israel, and deep suspicion of political freedoms at home.

Under his watch, Iran evolved into a peculiar fusion of theocratic authority and military dominance, where clerics, Revolutionary Guard commanders and entrenched bureaucrats shared power in a system widely criticized as corrupt and unaccountable.

Yet the more pressing issue is not his legacy but its implications. The geopolitical landscape surrounding Iran has grown more volatile, particularly after US President Donald Trump ordered the military strikes despite the absence of clear evidence of an imminent threat of Iran to the United States.

The US president insisted that Iran's nuclear capabilities had already been "obliterated" months earlier. If that were so, critics ask, why was urgent unilateral action necessary, and undertaken without US congressional approval?