What Happens If Iran’s Regime Collapses? Eli Lake
https://www.thefp.com/p/what-happens-if-irans-regime-collapses
Trump says it’s time to Make Iran Great Again. But what’s more likely if the mullahs fall: democracy or anarchy?
A lot has changed in the past 48 hours of this war.
Before American B-2 bombers struck Iranian nuclear facilities in Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz, the message from the White House was that regime change was off the table. Indeed, the chatter out of Washington and Jerusalem was that the White House was spooked by some of Israel’s messaging.
Defense minister Israel Katz instructed the military to destabilize Iran’s regime and threatened that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “can no longer be permitted to exist” after an Iranian missile hit the Soroka Medical Center in the southern part of the country. Indeed, the operation’s name, “Rising Lion,” is a not-so-subtle nod to the Iranian flag under the Peacock dynasty, which ruled Iran until the Shah was ousted in the Islamic revolution in 1979. The son of the late Shah, Reza Pahlavi, is now calling for a national rebellion. “The Islamic Republic has come to its end and is collapsing. What has begun is irreversible,” he said in a video message from the United States, where he has lived since 1979.
Now, 10 days into the war Israel began against Iran’s nuclear program—the prospect of a regime collapse is very real. President Donald Trump on Sunday evening floated the idea in a post on Truth Social: “It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!”
This kind of talk has gone out of favor in Washington in recent years. The fall of dictatorships in Libya and Iraq led to confessional sectarian war. The fall of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt led briefly to a Muslim Brotherhood government in Cairo before a military coup. But in Iran, a country that has experienced democratic uprisings five times since 2017, it now seems like a real possibility.
Since the war began I spoke to 10 opposition figures, analysts, and U.S. officials who have varying levels of optimism and pessimism about what could come next if this regime is stripped of what really gives it its true power: its nuclear weapons program and the leadership of its ruthless security services. There is no doubt that the war has humiliated Khamenei. Iran no longer controls its own airspace, has been all but abandoned by its allies, and has lost nearly all of its top military leaders. Nonetheless, the answer to the question of whether the regime will actually fall and what would come next is far from clear.
At the heart of the present uncertainty is a paradox. On the one hand, the Iranian regime is wobbling. On the other, the organic Iranian opposition has been targeted with ruthless lethality by security services that have proven efficient in targeting dissidents. Since 2009 and the Green Movement against the stolen presidential election that year, internal opposition leaders have been killed, exiled, or jailed.
The last uprising began in 2022 and was sparked by the killing of Mahsa Amini, who was detained for improperly wearing the Islamic headscarf known as the hijab. Her killing sparked nationwide grassroots protests, known as the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. Women were blinded with acid and beaten by the Basij militia. Other demonstrators were shot. In November 2022, poison gas attacks began to be reported in a number of girls’ schools where the students had supported the protest movement. As hundreds of girls returned from their schools sickened by these gas attacks, the protests began to dwindle. State violence again suppressed popular outrage.
Will Iran’s thugs suppress the Iranian people again? They are already trying. There is already a near total internet blackout, and reliable reports from the country suggest the regime is conducting mass arrests of suspected dissidents.
Mehdi Yahyanejad, a well-known Iranian American democracy activist who works on defeating the regime’s internet censorship, said Trump’s recent warnings to Khamenei have changed the dynamics on the ground in Iran. Iranians “realize this is much bigger than the nuclear issue and the end of the regime is in sight,” he said. “The top IRGC commanders are gone. In some places, their replacements are gone. People are frightened. People are trying to save their lives and get out of the way. But this is not an uprising. This is a collapse of the regime.”
Khalid Majidyar, a senior manager at the National Endowment for Democracy who works with opposition groups in Iran, told The Free Press that the regime was facing a legitimacy crisis before Israel’s campaign. But he added, “Our partners are worried even if the regime collapses what would replace it. They don’t want the theocracy to be replaced with an IRGC-led military dictatorship.”
There is no doubt that the regime is on the ropes. Since the war began, at least 17 senior military commanders were killed in pinpoint Israeli attacks. Iran had no defense against Israel’s air force, which obtained air supremacy over the skies of Tehran in less than 48 hours. And none of Iran’s putative allies, including Russia, which has relied on Iranian drones for its own war in Ukraine, has come to Iran’s aid. An Israeli strike on Iran’s state broadcasting building was captured live as a woman in Islamic headdress was ranting on air. On Wednesday, clips of Iranian state television broadcasting footage from past demonstrations made the rounds on social media, suggesting the state’s propaganda organ had been hacked. The most humiliating development for Khamenei’s regime is that its once mighty Lebanese proxy Hezbollah has offered only words of encouragement, but stayed on the sidelines.
Those developments are deadly for a dictatorship that survives on its reputation for omnipotence and ferocity. And at the same time, there is almost no chance that these blows to the regime will inspire an instant uprising. Iranians right now are terrified. There have been only sparse demonstrations since the war began.
Mohsen Sazegara is a former deputy prime minister of Iran and one of the founders of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC. “I tried at first to reform the Islamic Republic in the 1980s. I was arrested four times for my political activities and I finally came over to America in 2005,” he told me. Sazegara said that Iranians in the current moment are not going to flood the streets and demand their freedom. “Some stupid opposition in this situation are telling people to come out to the streets and overthrow the regime,” he said. “Right now people are thinking about their security, and second, they are thinking about food, medicine, and fuel. The government has failed to support the people. I think if we are lucky and take over the power from Khamenei it would be very good, but I doubt we can at this moment.”
Mariam Memarsadeghi, a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and the founder and director of the Cyrus Forum for Iran’s Future, also sees very little hope in a democratic transition as Israel wages war in Iran. “The opposition, unfortunately, is not ready,” she said. “I don’t like saying that but it’s the truth. Pahlavi talks about having a plan to maintain security and stability, but I just don’t see how that can be possible. At the very least, he is going to need foreign help.”
That foreign help will not be coming from America. Despite the president’s MIGA post, there is no serious conversation inside the Trump administration about another nation-building war in the Middle East. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Sunday told reporters that America’s war aims did not include “regime change.” As one Trump administration official told me, “There is no chance we go in for nation-building when this thing is done.”
For different reasons, Israel will also not be stabilizing a post-Khamenei Iran. Israel would welcome a democratic Iran but will settle for a weakened one. The Jewish state is far too small—with a population of just over 10 million—to put significant boots on the ground in a country of more than 90 million people if Khamenei was deposed. Nonetheless, its intelligence service, Mossad, has cultivated networks now being used for targeting nuclear and military sites and other kinds of sabotage. Two former U.S. national security officials who worked closely with Israel while in government said those networks can be repurposed to support an Iranian uprising should the need arise.
Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told The Free Press, “What is going to get Iranians back to the streets in great numbers will be support from the West; that means Israel. The security apparatus is weakened. There is an internet blackout. It’s early days. I think the opportunity is there.”
Dave Wurmser, a former national security council staffer in Trump’s first term who also worked at the Pentagon and State Department under George W. Bush, said Israeli war planners were aware that a byproduct of the campaign could “destabilize the regime to the point where it could fall.”
Some former U.S. intelligence analysts, however, see the prospects of a democratic uprising in the near term to be slim. Jonathan Panikoff, the former deputy national intelligence officer for the Middle East, told me that even if Iran’s supreme leader was taken out, the regime may not collapse. “I would love nothing more than democracy in Iran, but it’s much more likely that you get IRGC-istan,” he said, a reference to the Revolutionary Guard Corps that has amassed extraordinary domestic power over the last 25 years. “At the end of the day, guns trump words. We’ve seen that play out in 2009, in 2017 in the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. It’s more likely it’s a different kind of authoritarian state, a military junta with a fig leaf government, a Pakistan on steroids.”
Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former Iranian targets officer for the CIA, also said he was not expecting a democratic transition in Iran in the near term. “I would expect some form of anarchy; that is always the case in Iran when the central government goes down,” he said. One of the problems for the internal opposition is that “the regime has done an excellent job of locating individuals who have charisma and neutralizing them. The opposition is there, but it’s not cohesive,” Gerecht added. That said, he stressed that there were too many factors that were unknown to really predict what would come next if Khamenei was toppled.
The most salient factor that will determine if a democratic transition in Iran is possible is how many mid-level officers in the internal security agencies of the state, like the Basij militia and the intelligence ministry, are willing to break ranks with their superiors and refuse to fire on protesters.
Gerecht said that the apparatus that arrested and killed demonstrators in the Woman, Life, Freedom demonstrations in 2022 and 2023 will likely carry out such orders. Sazegara, the former deputy prime minister, is optimistic that at least some of them can be turned. “Our strategy is, as much as possible, to support dissidents inside the IRGC and the army and the intelligence services to join the people,” he said. But any chance for such an uprising will have to wait until the war is over.
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