US President Donald Trump said he must personally approve Iran's next supreme leader, just as he was involved in installing Delcy Rodriguez as Venezuela's interim president following the US-backed ouster of Nicolas Maduro.
In an interview with Axios, Trump said that Mojtaba Khamenei, the 56-year-old son of late Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei, succeeding his father as the new head of the Islamic republic is "unacceptable" and that he wants someone who would "bring harmony and peace to Iran".
Trump said that making someone a leader who would continue Khamenei's policies would force the US to be back to war "in five years".
"They are wasting their time. Khamenei's son is a lightweight. I have to be involved in the appointment, like with Delcy [Rodriguez] in Venezuela," Trump said.
When asked who could replace Khamenei, Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday that, "Most of the people we had in mind are dead."
Mojtaba Khamenei has emerged as the most prominent candidate to succeed the late supreme leader although no official confirmation has been given by Iran. He would represent a hereditary transition that his father rejected as an idea in 2024.
According to an investigation by the Bloomberg news organisation, which cited anonymous sources and Western intelligence agency reports, Mojtaba Khamenei has amassed wealth estimated at more than $100 million.
The US Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Mojtaba Khamenei in 2019 during President Donald Trump's first term, stating that the Iranian represented the supreme leader "despite never being elected or appointed to a government position aside from work in the office of his father".
US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said repeatedly denied that the goal of US strikes is a regime change in Iran and instead said that the operation had a "clear, devastating, decisive mission" to "destroy the missile threat" from Iran, destroy its navy and to make sure there are "no nukes".
The late shah's son, Reza Pahlavi, has proposed that he return as a transitional figure before Iran drafts a new constitution as a secular democracy. Pahlavi earlier Thursday said that any new supreme leader within the Islamic republic would be illegitimate.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei died aged 86 on Saturday in Tehran in one of the opening US-Israeli missile strikes of the war.
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