Analysis
The Right Path to Regime Change in Iran
There are many paths to regime change in Iran. In 2020, two of us (Edelman and Takeyh) wrote an essay in Foreign Affairs in which we outlined a way to topple the Islamic Republic. At that time, we assumed that the use of force was off the table and that outside powers could only gradually erode the regime’s sources of strength. Israel’s attack on Iran this month has introduced a new and volatile element into the mix, but the underlying logic remains the same. In all cases of regime change, the indispensable preconditions for success are that the government becomes weaker and the populace becomes bolder.
In the past week, Israel has done a significant amount to establish the first condition. It has not just disabled key Iranian nuclear facilities but also essentially decapitated Iran’s military leadership. As of this writing, Israel has attacked 20 out of 31 provinces and killed scores of generals and scientists. It has largely spared Iran’s economic assets, although it has targeted domestic oil and gas production and distribution facilities. Critics have said that the intent of this Israeli operation is regime change, but it would be more correct to say that regime change might emerge as a collateral benefit of Israel’s offensive.
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has been comprehensively humbled. He once stalked the Middle East as the leader who helped defeat the United States in Iraq and surrounded Israel with lethal proxies. He had defied the international community and expanded Iran’s nuclear program, bringing the theocracy within reach of the bomb. His success abroad reinforced his authority at home. But the collapse of Iran’s “axis of resistance” in the Levant and Gaza and Israel’s current pummeling of the Islamic Republic inevitably raise the question of whether such a reversal can uproot the dictatorship. It could, but Israel will have to do a lot more to shatter the coercive powers of the theocracy’s police state—and do so without military actions that kill large numbers of civilians, especially women and children.
THE REGIME ON ITS KNEES
In its more than four decades in power, the Islamic Republic has faced its share of popular insurrections. Every decade, another social class defected from the revolutionary coalition. Students and liberals were the first to go shortly after the revolution in 1979. This was followed by elements of the middle class during the Green Movement of 2009 and finally, in the late 2010s, the working poor in whose name the movement was waged. The regime always beat back these uprisings. They never gained critical mass, as most people believed that the regime’s Revolutionary Guards, the Basij militia, the street thugs who abet the authorities, and the omnipresent intelligence ministry were too cruel and implacable to defeat. Once the security forces started killing and torturing enough protesters, the demonstrations, which did spiral into insurrections in 2017 and 2019, petered out. For Iranians themselves, it’s been a deeply frustrating recurring cycle, most recently experienced in the protests in 2022 that followed the death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman who had been detained by the religious morality police.
