The Century Foundation takes your data security and privacy seriously. That's why we want you to know that, when you visit our website, we use technologies like cookies to collect anonymized data so that we can better understand and serve our audience. For more information, see our full Privacy Policy.
Israel and the United States Are Planting a Harvest of Chaos in Iran
The first phase of Israel’s war in Iran has been astonishingly effective. Israel is now in total control of Iranian airspace. A who’s-who of Iranian military and political figures have been assassinated. And now, the United States military—the world’s most powerful—has directly entered the fray.
The United States made the decision to attack Iran over the weekend without Congressional approval or any political debate. The risks of a protracted war are high for all involved: widespread death and displacement, spiralling violence, including terrorism and secondary conflicts, and disruption of global energy markets will affect everyone, including Iran, Israel, the wider Middle East, and the United States.
Leaders in the United States and Israel decided to initiate war with Iran and now to escalate with no public debate about the risks, and a lot of public musing about regime change. But do the governments of the United States and Israel really think they can provoke a painless regime change or conquer Iran?
The answer, actually, is no. Despite recent bluster about regime change from President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, there is another troubling outcome with which both governments appear equally comfortable: turning Iran into a failed state. It’s in no way clear that the Trump administration has considered what comes next—having issued no broader strategic statements before or after its bombing of nuclear sites this weekend.
These intentions should raise alarms around the region, around the world, in the United States, and within Israel itself. Crushing Iran would fall short of eliminating the threat it poses. Instead, it would create an entirely new set of strategic disasters for the Middle East, for Israeli security, and for American interests. Iran would become a new, less predictable, potentially worse threat than the existing regime.
After decades of repression and economic isolation, the Iranian people deserve a democratic future—one that upholds their rights and dignity. But that future cannot be bombed into existence. It will require a well-thought out, sustained international strategy to responsibly manage a transition. The war with Iran is leading the situation in the opposite direction: chaos, opportunities for extremism, internal conflict, and more regional violence. The last time the United States embarked on a war of choice in the Middle East—against Iraq—it provoked decades of instability and ultimately savaged America’s security interests and democratic practices, in ways for which the United States is still suffering. A war with Iran, a stronger, wealthier and more cohesively governed country, will be far worse.
Degrade, Destroy, Remove
The American bombardment of Iran this weekend follows more than a week of Israeli assaults. On the morning of June 13, Israel launched a large-scale military operation against Iran—codenamed “Operation Rising Lion”—targeting nuclear facilities, military infrastructure, residential neighborhoods, and the homes of senior military commanders and nuclear scientists. In response, Iran launched waves of ballistic missiles at Israel. The exchange of fire is continuing—and escalating—with no clear end in sight.
Israel’s assault has targeted academics and politicians as well as military leaders, and appears designed to weaken the Iranian state rather than bring some democratic alternative to power. Netanyahu has long been fixated on regime change in Iran but recognizes that there is no credible plan on the table to replace Iran’s theocracy. Netanyau and Trump might believe that any strike on Iran or its allies makes the world safer from Iran. But the destabilizing and unpredictable fallout of this new escalation is likely to create a new slate of security threats for Israel, the United States, and the wider Middle East.
The model here is Libya, Syria, Yemen, or post-American-invasion Iraq—but without an occupying power.
The statements of Israeli leaders, and the military campaign so far, point to a goal of state failure rather than regime change in Iran. The model here is Libya, Syria, Yemen, or post-American-invasion Iraq—but without an occupying power. However, what is unfolding in Iran today more closely mirrors the aftermath of the first Gulf War in 1991, when Saddam Hussein’s regime withstood a massive U.S. air campaign that devastated Iraq but left its core state apparatus largely intact. It took the full-scale U.S.-led invasion and costly occupation of 2003 to truly dismantle Saddam Hussein’s regime—and at that, there were years of bloody civil war that culminated in the rise of the Islamic State.
Israel has hosted Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last shah of Iran—someone who calls for a secular democracy while simultaneously flirting with the idea of a constitutional monarchy. But it is hard to take these overtures seriously—it’s unlikely that outsiders could establish democracy in Iran through the descendant of a deposed autocratic monarch with no political history inside Iran.
Further, Israel has shown no real interest in bearing the costs or investing the political capital needed to support a viable political transition in a country some 2,000 kilometers away. Indeed, it does not have the capacity to do so. With no prospect of Israeli diplomatic or military boots on the ground in Iran, the question is, what can it realistically do?
But there are also key differences between Iran and Iraq that make a smash-into-submission strategy potentially even more catastrophic in Iran than it was in Iraq. Iran is approximately twice as populous as Iraq and has a far more complex geography. But even more importantly, Iran’s state infrastructure—military, bureaucratic, and ideological—is much more robust than Iraq’s was.
And then, even in Iraq’s comparatively simpler setting, outside actors played decisive roles in shaping a transition. In Iran, on the other hand, the United States and Israel are either unwilling or unable to manage post-conflict stabilization. Europe has become irrelevant. Russia is bogged down in Ukraine. China—despite its economic presence—has shown no interest in rebuilding unstable states. The only outside post-transition involvement Iran would probably get is from a patchwork of exiled opposition groups with limited domestic legitimacy, Gulf states with narrow influence inside of Iran, and a host of adversaries more invested in Iran’s destabilization than its recovery.
So, an Iranian regime change does not appear likely, much less a turn toward more democracy. Instead, Israel and the United States may shatter the country with airstrikes, leaving it teetering on the brink of internal collapse, and left to burn.
People look over damage to buildings in Nobonyad Square following Israeli airstrikes on June 13, 2025 in Tehran. Iran’s three top military generals were killed in the attacks that also targeted nuclear and military facilities, according to published reports. Israel described the strikes as preemptive to keep Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, the reports said. Source: Majid Saeedi/Getty Images
A Bleak Vision
If the U.S.–Israeli aerial bombardment continues apace, it is likely to produce a semi-functional Iranian state, with pockets of lost territorial control, deep internal fractures, and constant external pressures.
Yet the Islamic Republic’s systems will endure. For all its repression, regional adventurism, and growing domestic unpopularity, Iran remains a functioning state—with deeply entrenched institutions and a resilient command structure. And Iran’s decision-making apparatus is layered and deliberately insulated.
Power within Iran is diffused across formal bodies—such as the supreme leader’s office, the presidency, and the judiciary—as well as through sprawling networks of economic and paramilitary actors, including holding companies linked to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and overlapping intelligence agencies. This diffuse, horizontal structure is not accidental—it is the product of a governing philosophy that prizes survivability over efficiency. When sanctions bite, leaders are assassinated, or unrest flares, regional governors, provincial IRGC units, and even clerical authorities can act semi-independently to suppress dissent.
Parallel institutions like the IRGC’s intelligence organization, the Basij paramilitary group, and the Law Enforcement Command each maintain their own databases, human networks, and surveillance tools. Thus, no single agency collapse would paralyze the state. What’s more, the IRGC is not merely a military force; it is also a major economic actor. It runs ports, telecommunications firms, infrastructure projects, and banks. These levers of power make it both resilient and incentivized to preserve the state. The IRGC also has built-in succession mechanisms: leadership changes often involve months of grooming and shadowing. When senior political or military figures are assassinated, the system quickly regenerates. Iran has maintained surprising continuity in its mid- and upper-level technocracy through hard-line, centrist, and reformist administrations. Most technocrats—including those who manage the economy, regional trade, or even nuclear diplomacy—have rotated through multiple administrations, so institutional memory runs deep. Herein lies the Islamic Republic’s resilience: it is institutional capacity, not individuals, that sustains the system.
Iran’s nuclear program is resilient for similar reasons. It is made up of a complex web of agencies and bureaucratic entities. The Atomic Energy Organization, the main Iranian government agency responsible for the country’s nuclear industry, is just one player in a broader scientific and logistical ecosystem. Knowledge of centrifuge production, site security, and material movement are deliberately split across multiple chains of command. The American attack on the facility at Fordow might delay enrichment—at the time of writing, it was still unclear how extensive the damage was—but it won’t destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities or destroy its know-how.
Still, even resilient systems can falter. If Israel’s strikes continue eliminating senior IRGC commanders and political figures, and degrading the connective tissue between Tehran and the provinces—particularly intelligence coordination and logistical networks—the regime’s internal cohesion could steadily erode, or gradually unravel. While this may not trigger outright regime change, another scenario is intensified factionalism accompanied by some territorial fragmentation, with a new generation of leaders emerging who are less ideologically driven, but more deeply embedded in the security apparatus.
Terrorism and Loose Nukes
But again, neither Trump nor Netanyahu seems to care much whether its rhetoric about regime change is at all realistic. Their main hope is that they can bomb away Iran’s ability to export the Islamic Revolution and perhaps invite an Iranian surrender via negotiations with the United States. And this bet may pay off—at least in the short term. A weakened Iran—regardless of who holds power—would be hard-pressed to continue funding its key allies in the region from the so-called Axis of Resistance, which includes Iraqi groups, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. The Trump administration apparently believes that this damage can be inflicted without taking on the costs of post-conflict transition. And the silence of other Western countries at the moment conveys at least partial acquiescence.
Iran might revert to the tactics of the 1980s and 1990s, when it sponsored terrorist attacks and supported guerrilla and nonstate groups around the region.
But Israel and the United States do not seem to have considered next steps whatsoever. A broken, militarized, and brittle Iran would quickly become a source of deep regional instability. The country would still possess short-range and long-range ballistic missiles, irregular naval forces, and nuclear infrastructure. IRGC commanders across the region might pursue divergent agendas. Provincial power centers could harden into de facto autonomous zones. Clerical networks in cities like Qom—many of them financially independent—might step into the vacuum, deepening ideological rivalries. In a fragmented Iran, hard-line factions would be able to operate unfettered, and would be likely to revive spoiler and terrorist tactics from earlier in the Islamic Republic’s history. A failing Iranian state would be likely to attempt repeats of the string of attempted and sometimes successful attacks it backed on Israeli, Jewish, and American targets in the 1980s and 1990s. Iranian state assets might also revert to the tactics of that era in supporting other guerrilla, nonstate, or terrorist organizations around the Middle East.
The United States would also suffer. American forces are stationed across the Gulf, energy markets remain tightly tethered to the stability of the Strait of Hormuz, and another regional collapse would deal another serious blow to U.S. credibility in counterterrorism, nonproliferation, and state-building efforts.
Meanwhile, the nuclear danger would multiply. Iran’s enrichment infrastructure is deliberately compartmentalized, so in the event of state collapse and the loss of central control, the sale or seizure of nuclear materials is a real possibility. Notably, the International Atomic Energy Agency has no contingency plan for safeguarding centrifuge cascades in a failed state. Nuclear nonproliferation has always been the top U.S. concern about Iran; the current military campaign might actually accelerate proliferation and create a nightmare scenario of loose nukes or fissile material.
Iran’s People Deserve Better
None of this critique of the Israeli and American bombardment should suggest that the current system in Iran is acceptable. But the war will only further immiserate Iranians, and ultimately make for a more dangerous region.
What Iran needs instead is a clear political vision for what comes next—one grounded in relationships with the very individuals inside Iran who are risking everything to push for change. Supporting them requires serious political investment, sustained resources, and a long-term commitment to the kind of transition the Iranian people truly deserve.
At present, there is no viable alternative power structure within Iran capable of filling a post-regime vacuum. Years of repression have hollowed out civil society, with activists wanting reform now working under extremely dire circumstances—constantly surveilled, imprisoned, exiled, or killed. If the current regime were toppled today, power would likely not shift to the reformist or moderate voices—but rather to rival security factions: IRGC hard-liners, intelligence operatives, or clerical networks.
The Islamic Republic has a long history of repressing dissent at home while funneling significant resources to militant groups abroad. Its network of alliances includes actors complicit in grave human rights abuses, and its fingerprints can be found on terrorism plots and smuggling operations stretching from the Middle East to Latin America. But trying to dismantle it by brute force—while also bombing the very grassroots actors who have risked their lives for change, and without a coherent political roadmap or viable transition plan—is dangerously short-sighted.
What’s taking shape in Israel’s current strategy—a strategy in which Washington now seems to be an explicit partner—is a ploy to simply make Iran as weak as possible. The faster Israel and the United States accelerate that trajectory without a plan for what comes next, the more likely the region is to inherit another failed state—only this time, one with more than 92 million people, at least half a dozen known nuclear facilities, and an arsenal of thousands of ballistic missiles.
Header Image: People observe fire and smoke from an Israeli attack on the Shahran oil depot on June 15, 2025 in Tehran. Source: Stringer/Getty Images
Veena Ali-Khan is an analyst, researcher, and fellow at Century international, focusing on the Arabian Peninsula, Gulf energy dynamics, and political economy in the Middle East. She was previously the Yemen researcher at the International Crisis Group.
Israel and the United States Are Planting a Harvest of Chaos in Iran
The first phase of Israel’s war in Iran has been astonishingly effective. Israel is now in total control of Iranian airspace. A who’s-who of Iranian military and political figures have been assassinated. And now, the United States military—the world’s most powerful—has directly entered the fray.
The United States made the decision to attack Iran over the weekend without Congressional approval or any political debate. The risks of a protracted war are high for all involved: widespread death and displacement, spiralling violence, including terrorism and secondary conflicts, and disruption of global energy markets will affect everyone, including Iran, Israel, the wider Middle East, and the United States.
Leaders in the United States and Israel decided to initiate war with Iran and now to escalate with no public debate about the risks, and a lot of public musing about regime change. But do the governments of the United States and Israel really think they can provoke a painless regime change or conquer Iran?
The answer, actually, is no. Despite recent bluster about regime change from President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, there is another troubling outcome with which both governments appear equally comfortable: turning Iran into a failed state. It’s in no way clear that the Trump administration has considered what comes next—having issued no broader strategic statements before or after its bombing of nuclear sites this weekend.
These intentions should raise alarms around the region, around the world, in the United States, and within Israel itself. Crushing Iran would fall short of eliminating the threat it poses. Instead, it would create an entirely new set of strategic disasters for the Middle East, for Israeli security, and for American interests. Iran would become a new, less predictable, potentially worse threat than the existing regime.
After decades of repression and economic isolation, the Iranian people deserve a democratic future—one that upholds their rights and dignity. But that future cannot be bombed into existence. It will require a well-thought out, sustained international strategy to responsibly manage a transition. The war with Iran is leading the situation in the opposite direction: chaos, opportunities for extremism, internal conflict, and more regional violence. The last time the United States embarked on a war of choice in the Middle East—against Iraq—it provoked decades of instability and ultimately savaged America’s security interests and democratic practices, in ways for which the United States is still suffering. A war with Iran, a stronger, wealthier and more cohesively governed country, will be far worse.
Degrade, Destroy, Remove
The American bombardment of Iran this weekend follows more than a week of Israeli assaults. On the morning of June 13, Israel launched a large-scale military operation against Iran—codenamed “Operation Rising Lion”—targeting nuclear facilities, military infrastructure, residential neighborhoods, and the homes of senior military commanders and nuclear scientists. In response, Iran launched waves of ballistic missiles at Israel. The exchange of fire is continuing—and escalating—with no clear end in sight.
Four days after the first Israeli strikes, Trump declared on social media that “we now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran” and called for Iran’s “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.” On Saturday, Trump took the next step and ordered “bunker buster” bombs dropped on heavily fortified underground nuclear facilities. Afterward, he said that the strikes “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear facilities—a claim for which he has not yet offered any evidence.
For his part, Netanyahu has said that his goal is to “degrade, destroy, and remove” Iran’s ability to weaponize its nuclear program, and characterizes the war as a precision campaign against the regime—not the Iranian people. He has also suggested that the campaign could cause the collapse of the regime, although this is not an official Israeli war aim.
Israel’s assault has targeted academics and politicians as well as military leaders, and appears designed to weaken the Iranian state rather than bring some democratic alternative to power. Netanyahu has long been fixated on regime change in Iran but recognizes that there is no credible plan on the table to replace Iran’s theocracy. Netanyau and Trump might believe that any strike on Iran or its allies makes the world safer from Iran. But the destabilizing and unpredictable fallout of this new escalation is likely to create a new slate of security threats for Israel, the United States, and the wider Middle East.
No Interest in a Democratic Transition
Israel’s tactics make it painfully clear that its objectives are not to reform Iran, but rather to sow fear among Iranian civilians. It has planted car bombs in Tehran’s densely populated city center; struck state-run media buildings; issued impossible twenty-hour evacuation orders to densely populated civilian areas; and hit residential building blocks. What’s unfolding is a playbook familiar from the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and elsewhere: the calculated, slow-motion unraveling of a state into a fractured, zone of chaos —too broken to threaten the outside world, and too unstable to rebuild.
The statements of Israeli leaders, and the military campaign so far, point to a goal of state failure rather than regime change in Iran. The model here is Libya, Syria, Yemen, or post-American-invasion Iraq—but without an occupying power. However, what is unfolding in Iran today more closely mirrors the aftermath of the first Gulf War in 1991, when Saddam Hussein’s regime withstood a massive U.S. air campaign that devastated Iraq but left its core state apparatus largely intact. It took the full-scale U.S.-led invasion and costly occupation of 2003 to truly dismantle Saddam Hussein’s regime—and at that, there were years of bloody civil war that culminated in the rise of the Islamic State.
Israel has hosted Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last shah of Iran—someone who calls for a secular democracy while simultaneously flirting with the idea of a constitutional monarchy. But it is hard to take these overtures seriously—it’s unlikely that outsiders could establish democracy in Iran through the descendant of a deposed autocratic monarch with no political history inside Iran.
Further, Israel has shown no real interest in bearing the costs or investing the political capital needed to support a viable political transition in a country some 2,000 kilometers away. Indeed, it does not have the capacity to do so. With no prospect of Israeli diplomatic or military boots on the ground in Iran, the question is, what can it realistically do?
But there are also key differences between Iran and Iraq that make a smash-into-submission strategy potentially even more catastrophic in Iran than it was in Iraq. Iran is approximately twice as populous as Iraq and has a far more complex geography. But even more importantly, Iran’s state infrastructure—military, bureaucratic, and ideological—is much more robust than Iraq’s was.
And then, even in Iraq’s comparatively simpler setting, outside actors played decisive roles in shaping a transition. In Iran, on the other hand, the United States and Israel are either unwilling or unable to manage post-conflict stabilization. Europe has become irrelevant. Russia is bogged down in Ukraine. China—despite its economic presence—has shown no interest in rebuilding unstable states. The only outside post-transition involvement Iran would probably get is from a patchwork of exiled opposition groups with limited domestic legitimacy, Gulf states with narrow influence inside of Iran, and a host of adversaries more invested in Iran’s destabilization than its recovery.
So, an Iranian regime change does not appear likely, much less a turn toward more democracy. Instead, Israel and the United States may shatter the country with airstrikes, leaving it teetering on the brink of internal collapse, and left to burn.
A Bleak Vision
If the U.S.–Israeli aerial bombardment continues apace, it is likely to produce a semi-functional Iranian state, with pockets of lost territorial control, deep internal fractures, and constant external pressures.
Yet the Islamic Republic’s systems will endure. For all its repression, regional adventurism, and growing domestic unpopularity, Iran remains a functioning state—with deeply entrenched institutions and a resilient command structure. And Iran’s decision-making apparatus is layered and deliberately insulated.
Power within Iran is diffused across formal bodies—such as the supreme leader’s office, the presidency, and the judiciary—as well as through sprawling networks of economic and paramilitary actors, including holding companies linked to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and overlapping intelligence agencies. This diffuse, horizontal structure is not accidental—it is the product of a governing philosophy that prizes survivability over efficiency. When sanctions bite, leaders are assassinated, or unrest flares, regional governors, provincial IRGC units, and even clerical authorities can act semi-independently to suppress dissent.
Parallel institutions like the IRGC’s intelligence organization, the Basij paramilitary group, and the Law Enforcement Command each maintain their own databases, human networks, and surveillance tools. Thus, no single agency collapse would paralyze the state. What’s more, the IRGC is not merely a military force; it is also a major economic actor. It runs ports, telecommunications firms, infrastructure projects, and banks. These levers of power make it both resilient and incentivized to preserve the state. The IRGC also has built-in succession mechanisms: leadership changes often involve months of grooming and shadowing. When senior political or military figures are assassinated, the system quickly regenerates. Iran has maintained surprising continuity in its mid- and upper-level technocracy through hard-line, centrist, and reformist administrations. Most technocrats—including those who manage the economy, regional trade, or even nuclear diplomacy—have rotated through multiple administrations, so institutional memory runs deep. Herein lies the Islamic Republic’s resilience: it is institutional capacity, not individuals, that sustains the system.
Iran’s nuclear program is resilient for similar reasons. It is made up of a complex web of agencies and bureaucratic entities. The Atomic Energy Organization, the main Iranian government agency responsible for the country’s nuclear industry, is just one player in a broader scientific and logistical ecosystem. Knowledge of centrifuge production, site security, and material movement are deliberately split across multiple chains of command. The American attack on the facility at Fordow might delay enrichment—at the time of writing, it was still unclear how extensive the damage was—but it won’t destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities or destroy its know-how.
Still, even resilient systems can falter. If Israel’s strikes continue eliminating senior IRGC commanders and political figures, and degrading the connective tissue between Tehran and the provinces—particularly intelligence coordination and logistical networks—the regime’s internal cohesion could steadily erode, or gradually unravel. While this may not trigger outright regime change, another scenario is intensified factionalism accompanied by some territorial fragmentation, with a new generation of leaders emerging who are less ideologically driven, but more deeply embedded in the security apparatus.
Terrorism and Loose Nukes
But again, neither Trump nor Netanyahu seems to care much whether its rhetoric about regime change is at all realistic. Their main hope is that they can bomb away Iran’s ability to export the Islamic Revolution and perhaps invite an Iranian surrender via negotiations with the United States. And this bet may pay off—at least in the short term. A weakened Iran—regardless of who holds power—would be hard-pressed to continue funding its key allies in the region from the so-called Axis of Resistance, which includes Iraqi groups, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. The Trump administration apparently believes that this damage can be inflicted without taking on the costs of post-conflict transition. And the silence of other Western countries at the moment conveys at least partial acquiescence.
But Israel and the United States do not seem to have considered next steps whatsoever. A broken, militarized, and brittle Iran would quickly become a source of deep regional instability. The country would still possess short-range and long-range ballistic missiles, irregular naval forces, and nuclear infrastructure. IRGC commanders across the region might pursue divergent agendas. Provincial power centers could harden into de facto autonomous zones. Clerical networks in cities like Qom—many of them financially independent—might step into the vacuum, deepening ideological rivalries. In a fragmented Iran, hard-line factions would be able to operate unfettered, and would be likely to revive spoiler and terrorist tactics from earlier in the Islamic Republic’s history. A failing Iranian state would be likely to attempt repeats of the string of attempted and sometimes successful attacks it backed on Israeli, Jewish, and American targets in the 1980s and 1990s. Iranian state assets might also revert to the tactics of that era in supporting other guerrilla, nonstate, or terrorist organizations around the Middle East.
The United States would also suffer. American forces are stationed across the Gulf, energy markets remain tightly tethered to the stability of the Strait of Hormuz, and another regional collapse would deal another serious blow to U.S. credibility in counterterrorism, nonproliferation, and state-building efforts.
Meanwhile, the nuclear danger would multiply. Iran’s enrichment infrastructure is deliberately compartmentalized, so in the event of state collapse and the loss of central control, the sale or seizure of nuclear materials is a real possibility. Notably, the International Atomic Energy Agency has no contingency plan for safeguarding centrifuge cascades in a failed state. Nuclear nonproliferation has always been the top U.S. concern about Iran; the current military campaign might actually accelerate proliferation and create a nightmare scenario of loose nukes or fissile material.
Iran’s People Deserve Better
None of this critique of the Israeli and American bombardment should suggest that the current system in Iran is acceptable. But the war will only further immiserate Iranians, and ultimately make for a more dangerous region.
What Iran needs instead is a clear political vision for what comes next—one grounded in relationships with the very individuals inside Iran who are risking everything to push for change. Supporting them requires serious political investment, sustained resources, and a long-term commitment to the kind of transition the Iranian people truly deserve.
At present, there is no viable alternative power structure within Iran capable of filling a post-regime vacuum. Years of repression have hollowed out civil society, with activists wanting reform now working under extremely dire circumstances—constantly surveilled, imprisoned, exiled, or killed. If the current regime were toppled today, power would likely not shift to the reformist or moderate voices—but rather to rival security factions: IRGC hard-liners, intelligence operatives, or clerical networks.
The Islamic Republic has a long history of repressing dissent at home while funneling significant resources to militant groups abroad. Its network of alliances includes actors complicit in grave human rights abuses, and its fingerprints can be found on terrorism plots and smuggling operations stretching from the Middle East to Latin America. But trying to dismantle it by brute force—while also bombing the very grassroots actors who have risked their lives for change, and without a coherent political roadmap or viable transition plan—is dangerously short-sighted.
What’s taking shape in Israel’s current strategy—a strategy in which Washington now seems to be an explicit partner—is a ploy to simply make Iran as weak as possible. The faster Israel and the United States accelerate that trajectory without a plan for what comes next, the more likely the region is to inherit another failed state—only this time, one with more than 92 million people, at least half a dozen known nuclear facilities, and an arsenal of thousands of ballistic missiles.
Header Image: People observe fire and smoke from an Israeli attack on the Shahran oil depot on June 15, 2025 in Tehran. Source: Stringer/Getty Images
Tags: iran, israel, benjamin netanyahu, donald trump