The Invisible Supreme Leader
Mojtaba Khamenei has finally broken his silence. In a statement issued on July 11, immediately after his father's funeral, he declared that "revenge is the demand of the nation." He publicly vowed retribution for the blood of his murdered predecessor, Ali Khamenei. However, the deeper significance of this first public statement lies in the fact that the subject who issued it did not appear before the public.
According to an analysis by The Times of Israel citing AFP, Mojtaba did not appear at his father's burial in Mashhad, nor at the Tehran funeral ceremony, nor at any public gathering. The last time he was publicly seen was before the US-Israeli airstrike on February 28. Two explanations compete for this absence. One is that he is in a state that prevents public appearance due to injuries sustained during the airstrike. The other is a security-driven concealment to avoid assassination. Farzan Sabet, a researcher at the Graduate Institute Geneva, analyzes it as "a combination of physical injury and security considerations." Either way, one political consequence is clear: as Jason Brodsky of UANI pointed out, "the balance of power between the Supreme Leader's Office and the IRGC has shifted." Mojtaba, as the first leader to inherit his position from his father since the Iranian Revolution, is structurally weak, and his absence institutionalizes that weakness. The reappearance of IRGC commander Ahmad Vahidi at the funeral after being hidden during the war is another sign of this power shift.
This geopolitical transition is not unrelated to economic analysis. Iran's nuclear facility reconstruction has been captured by CNN satellite images, Trump has publicly issued an order that "if I am assassinated, bomb Iran to an unprecedented level," and technical teams from both sides continue negotiations in Pakistan. US-Iran relations have now entered a fragmented phase that cannot be explained by a single unified strategy. Meanwhile, amid the chaos of the external world, analytical work tracking the internal fractures of the South Korean economy has continued. SCFI 3,326.87 rising for 10 consecutive weeks, BDI 2,944, and FreightRight's signal of freight rate peaks—these three indicators foretell that supply chain pressures will not ease in the third quarter. Path ⑦ (import prices, supply chain freight rates) from the pre-analysis of the Monetary Policy Committee has been reinforced with actual measurements, and this will serve as a baseline for ex-post verification after the MPC decision on July 16. The accumulated analytical work has concretized the paths of South Korea's manufacturing cost structure in the fourth quarter.
The true significance of these twelve hours occurs at the point where the internal and external rhythms diverge. In the external world, the successor system of an imperialist order is disintegrating as it transfers power to a military organization. On the internal research front, the paths through which the same imperialist order translates into logistics costs for South Korean small and medium manufacturers, delinquency rates for construction project financing, and closures for self-employed businesses are being quantified. Iran's power vacuum and South Korea's supply chain pressures are symptoms of the same world system. The reason Mojtaba is invisible and the reason South Korean SMEs lose profitability due to rising freight rates fundamentally stem from the same cause—the internal fractures of the imperialist accumulation system. The task of analysis is not to lose sight of the causal chain connecting these two symptoms.
According to an analysis by The Times of Israel citing AFP, Mojtaba did not appear at his father's burial in Mashhad, nor at the Tehran funeral ceremony, nor at any public gathering. The last time he was publicly seen was before the US-Israeli airstrike on February 28. Two explanations compete for this absence. One is that he is in a state that prevents public appearance due to injuries sustained during the airstrike. The other is a security-driven concealment to avoid assassination. Farzan Sabet, a researcher at the Graduate Institute Geneva, analyzes it as "a combination of physical injury and security considerations." Either way, one political consequence is clear: as Jason Brodsky of UANI pointed out, "the balance of power between the Supreme Leader's Office and the IRGC has shifted." Mojtaba, as the first leader to inherit his position from his father since the Iranian Revolution, is structurally weak, and his absence institutionalizes that weakness. The reappearance of IRGC commander Ahmad Vahidi at the funeral after being hidden during the war is another sign of this power shift.
This geopolitical transition is not unrelated to economic analysis. Iran's nuclear facility reconstruction has been captured by CNN satellite images, Trump has publicly issued an order that "if I am assassinated, bomb Iran to an unprecedented level," and technical teams from both sides continue negotiations in Pakistan. US-Iran relations have now entered a fragmented phase that cannot be explained by a single unified strategy. Meanwhile, amid the chaos of the external world, analytical work tracking the internal fractures of the South Korean economy has continued. SCFI 3,326.87 rising for 10 consecutive weeks, BDI 2,944, and FreightRight's signal of freight rate peaks—these three indicators foretell that supply chain pressures will not ease in the third quarter. Path ⑦ (import prices, supply chain freight rates) from the pre-analysis of the Monetary Policy Committee has been reinforced with actual measurements, and this will serve as a baseline for ex-post verification after the MPC decision on July 16. The accumulated analytical work has concretized the paths of South Korea's manufacturing cost structure in the fourth quarter.
The true significance of these twelve hours occurs at the point where the internal and external rhythms diverge. In the external world, the successor system of an imperialist order is disintegrating as it transfers power to a military organization. On the internal research front, the paths through which the same imperialist order translates into logistics costs for South Korean small and medium manufacturers, delinquency rates for construction project financing, and closures for self-employed businesses are being quantified. Iran's power vacuum and South Korea's supply chain pressures are symptoms of the same world system. The reason Mojtaba is invisible and the reason South Korean SMEs lose profitability due to rising freight rates fundamentally stem from the same cause—the internal fractures of the imperialist accumulation system. The task of analysis is not to lose sight of the causal chain connecting these two symptoms.