By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The Right Path to Regime Change in Iran

There are many paths to regime change in Iran.  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 raises 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 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 abetted the authorities, and the omnipresent intelligence ministry were too cruel and implacable to defeat. Once the security forces started killing and torturing enough protestors, 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.

Now, after days of Israeli bombings, both the regime and the Iranian public appear traumatized. When things calm down, scores surely will be settled, perhaps even within the ruling elite as power brokers in the security, clerical, and political establishments get their knives out. Members of the Revolutionary Guards, for instance, may blame the civilian leadership for the country's failure to develop the atomic weapon that would have deterred an Israeli attack. The 86-year-old supreme leader may have a very rough go of it with younger members of the Guards, who appeared to want a more aggressive nuclear policy. They will be distressed that the vaunted atomic program that cost billions of dollars is now in ruins. (Its actual financial cost probably runs into hundreds of billions, given the commercial opportunities Iran has lost as a result of sanctions placed on it by the West.)

Although Israel has killed a lot of very important people in the country, all the pathologies of the Islamic Republic are still intact. It remains a theocracy drowning in corruption. Core institutions, such as government ministries, are in an advanced state of decay, and social inequality, especially in the wake of soaring inflation, has deepened. Some observers imagine that Israel’s attack will stimulate a nationalist fervor that would help insulate the regime. But the bonds between state and society are too severed for such an outcome. In past demonstrations, the Iranian people have blamed their regime and not outsiders for their predicament. Another major protest movement will undoubtedly arise. The question is what Israel and the United States will do to tilt the scales in the movement’s favor.

At an anti-Israeli rally in Tehran, June 2025

 

A Visit to the Goon Squad

It will be tempting to offer the regime a lifeline should it agree to abandon its nuclear quest. “Realists” on the American left and right are acutely uncomfortable with the promotion of human rights and democracy overseas. They don’t see it as an effective American weapon.

The regime has always preferred to have the West focus on its nuclear ambitions, not on its internal troubles. Many Americans and Israelis have also not been hugely interested in supporting human rights for Muslims. But the Israelis now appear far more attuned to how this advocacy, even if applied only to Iranians, reinforces the chances that the Islamic Republic might crack. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has described the regime as “weak” and urged Iranians to rise against it, and Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, both appear willing to think more seriously about supporting Iranians from the ground up.

Trump has now called for the Islamic Republic’s “total surrender,” by which he means the regime abandoning its enrichment activities and nuclear weapons program. It is hard to see Iranian leaders acquiescing so easily; they might instead agree to a diplomatic process and make enough concessions, such as Iran accepting that it cannot enrich uranium beyond a certain level, to secure a much-needed respite. A better policy, however, would need to dispense with arms control as its sole aspiration.

Although there is not a great track record of success when it comes to implementing regime change from the air, Israel can do a lot more to get the sparks flying. The military campaign that has focused on disarming Iran needs to focus on the regime’s enforcers. The Revolutionary Guards’ leadership has been decimated, but its many military bases remain intact and should be targeted. The regime’s first line of defense in times of internal crisis is its goon squad, the Basij, which is under the control of the Guards. The Basij has committed enormous crimes against the Iranian people. Its installations, including police facilities and military bases, should be on target lists. So, too, the intelligence ministry, with its many offices throughout the country. Such bombings won’t permanently destroy these forces; it will, however, inject a measure of doubt in the regime’s upper echelons about the availability and reliability of its foot soldiers and inquisitors.

Israel would also need to expand its campaign to cripple Iran’s economy. The Israeli Air Force would need to disable additional oil and gas infrastructure. The regime sustains its power partly through its patronage networks. Unable to meet its financial obligations to its core supporters, defections from its ranks would likely increase, perhaps markedly. It is important, however, that such strikes be surgical and limit civilian casualties as much as possible.

The most significant challenge of any regime change policy is to remain focused on the task after the fireworks are over. Once Iran is disarmed, Israel and the United States might be tempted to walk away and look elsewhere. It is precisely at that moment that they should instead increase pressure on the regime. The United States must maintain sanctions and check Iran’s pathways into global commerce. Mossad, which has demonstrated tremendous capacity to work inside Iran, should ramp up its covert operations, since the CIA historically has shown almost no appetite for this, at least since the 1970s.

 

End of the Road

Given how weak the Iranian government may be after the current Israeli assault concludes, it might not take much to keep the Islamic Republic politically unstable. And an intense American propaganda campaign through social media and other channels should continuously highlight the calamitous and corrupt rule of the mullahs. The Iranian elite stashes a lot of money abroad. At a minimum, the U.S. Treasury should track and expose those funds. And whatever and wherever opposition forces emerge inside Iran, the United States should aid them with financial backing and technological assistance to the extent possible, so long as these forces aren’t politically extreme.

Iran belongs to the Iranians. They are the only ones who can, in the end, determine the direction of their country. They have taken to the streets in 1906, 1922, and 1979, and they can be counted on to do so again. All the United States and Israel can do is weaken the regime and accentuate its vulnerabilities. The Islamic Republic has never faced a crisis like the one unleashed by this month’s attacks. It’s a great irony that Israel - disparaged relentlessly by the Iranian leadership as a savage, illegitimate colonial settler state aiming to humble Muslims everywhere - may, just possibly, have opened the door for a new future for the long-suffering Iranian people.

 

 

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