Commentary: The false promise of regime change in Iran

LONDON: Could the end be approaching for the Islamic Republic of Iran? Unpopular at home, under attack by Israel and led by an 85-year-old supreme leader, the Iranian regime looks potentially vulnerable.
Anti-government demonstrations that began in 2022 were savagely repressed, with hundreds shot in the streets and thousands imprisoned. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, is trying to reach out to the Iranian opposition. Even as he threatens to take military action against the country, he has predicted that freedom will come to Iran, “sooner than most people think”.
Netanyahu argues that regime change in Iran would benefit the whole world. The Iranian regime is clearly a malign force in global affairs. It has supported violent militia groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. It also provided crucial military support to Bashar Al Assad, Syria’s dictator, and has supplied missiles to Russia, for use in its war with Ukraine.
Given Netanyahu’s influence in the United States, his arguments are inevitably being picked up on the Republican right. But not just there. Le Monde quotes a French diplomat as saying: “Perhaps the Israelis are leading us towards a historic moment … the beginning of the end for the Iranian regime.”
In the abstract, the fall of the Islamic republic sounds like a welcome development for the democratic West, which is increasingly concerned by the co-operation of an “axis of adversaries” made up of Iran, Russia, China and North Korea. The return of political freedom to Iran would also mean the country’s reintegration into the world economy.
In the real world, however, there is every reason to be very wary of those calling for “regime change” in Iran.
First, there is the question of how it would happen. Iranian protesters have risen up against the regime several times in the past and been killed and imprisoned in large numbers.
Bombing Iran and its critical infrastructure, in the vague hope that this will cause the regime to collapse, is also a deeply unconvincing strategy. Rather than helping the internal opposition, Israeli or American strikes could actually aid the regime by causing a rally-round-the-flag effect as patriotic Iranians bury their differences to unite against a foreign aggressor.
American intervention could be particularly counter-productive, given that every educated Iranian remembers the role of the US and the United Kingdom in backing a coup in Iran in 1953.
Even if the Iranian regime did somehow fall, there is absolutely no guarantee that something better would replace it. Many dictatorial regimes have been forced from power across the Middle East in recent decades. Often the successor regimes have proved even more oppressive than those they displaced, as happened when the Iranian revolution forced out the Shah of Iran in 1979.
A recent book, surveying the sorry record of US intervention in the Middle East, is entitled Losing The Long Game: The False Promise Of Regime Change In The Middle East. Its author, Philip Gordon, is national security adviser to Kamala Harris and deeply involved in the White House deliberations over how to handle the current crisis. It might be helpful if Gordon handed out copies of his book to anyone foolish enough to speculate that now might be the time to topple the ayatollahs.
Gordon illustrates the US repeatedly falling into the same trap, decade after decade, as it got behind the idea of regime change in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Egypt and Libya. In every case, the US embraced the optimistic assumptions of exiled leaders (and of Netanyahu over Iraq in 2002), but “failed to anticipate the chaos that would inevitably ensue after the collapse”.
As Gordon notes, “whenever an existing regime is destroyed … a political and security vacuum emerges and a power struggle begins”. The winners of that power struggle are usually the most ruthless and well-armed groups, not the most liberal and tolerant.
Conditions of insecurity also persuade people to fall back on kinship groups or sects, making it more likely that a civil war will break out. Iran, like Iraq, is a patchwork of different ethnic and religious groups.
The power vacuum when an autocratic regime is toppled often sucks in neighbouring countries and groups, spreading violence across the region. All these warnings apply just as forcibly to hopes for a new political order in Lebanon, following the destruction of the Hezbollah leadership.
Cautioning against making regime change a goal of Western policy could lead to an unacceptably bleak conclusion – that Iranians must live under an oppressive theocracy forever.
That is too pessimistic. The question is not whether change should come to Iran, but how.
The best hope for Iranians and the Middle East is that the Islamic republic is eventually consigned to history not by an invasion or a revolution, but by peaceful negotiation. In recent decades, the democratic transitions that have worked best have taken place in countries such as Poland, South Africa and Chile, when autocratic governments – driven by generational change or by shifts in world politics – have sat down with their opponents and negotiated.
Iran has always had reformist politicians operating within the theocratic system. But war with Israel is guaranteed to empower the hardliners. Change must come to Iran. Bombing raids are not the way to bring it about.