How Iran's new regime is very different to what came before

How Iran's new regime is very different to what came beforePublished7 minutes agoByPaul AdamsDiplomatic correspondentWhen US President Donald Trump signed a ceasefire agreement with Iran during dinner at the Palace of Versailles last month, many saw an irony.His host, French President Emanuel Macron, may have wanted to make sure the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed before Trump changed his mind, and possibly calculated that the gilded Hall of Mirrors would appeal to his guest.But the choice of venue inevitably invited comparisons between the one-and-a-half page agreement and the extremely lengthy Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919 at the end of World War One. The 1919 treaty reshaped Europe, but its demands for huge reparations left an angry and embittered Germany and helped to set the stage for another global conflagration just 20 years later.Might the Iran deal, different in so many ways, nevertheless come to be seen as similarly fateful?Almost three weeks later, a fragile ceasefire more or less holds. But after several skirmishes in and around the Strait of Hormuz, and with none of the issues that led to war anywhere close to being resolved, the situation in the Middle East looks every bit as precarious as it did before.Image source, Getty ImagesImage caption, Khamenei will finally be laid to rest after a week-long funeral processionMeanwhile, Iran is in the midst of profound change.The country is saying farewell to its former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed more than four months ago in the devastating joint US-Israeli airstrikes which began the war and decapitated much of the regime in Tehran.It's a big moment: a grand reminder that the old guard has given way to the new. And with the new faces comes a new approach with its own implications.The US and Israel may have sent many of the country's former leaders to early graves, but have they been replaced by even more formidable foes?Reordering the chess board&quo...