The Pandora’s box of regime change

Opinion

One view of Israel and Iran’s brief war last month is that Tehran was humiliated. In just 12 days, Israel decimated Iran’s air defence systems and many of its missile launchers. A slew of senior Iranian military commanders were assassinated as well. Such sweeping operational success also indicates Israeli intelligence agents have thoroughly penetrated Iran’s government.

The U.S. then bombed Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities. Tehran’s response was feeble; rockets fired at an American military base in Qatar were signalled beforehand and easily shot down.

But that isn’t the whole story. Indeed, if you take the long view, understanding the Iranian regime’s enduring goal is self-preservation, they emerged quasi-victorious.

“The Islamic Republic may be weaker in some ways, but its leaders are proud of having withstood the Israeli and American assaults,” writes U.S.-based Middle East expert Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar in Foreign Affairs. “They see the substantial damage they inflicted on Israel’s cities as a major achievement. And they continue to believe that demonstrating resolve in the face of aggression is the only way to deter opponents.”

This has sparked a burst of nationalism among the country’s otherwise downbeat population. Many Iranians, says Tabaar, have concluded “they must confront these external threats with the government they have, not the one they want.” Even if that means accelerating efforts to acquire nuclear weapons as a deterrent.

Analysts have pointed out adversaries would never brazenly attack North Korea — with its estimated 50 nuclear warheads — the way Iran just was.

Such dynamics are not lost on Tel Aviv and Washington. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister have both said Israel would strike Iran again if it resumes its nuclear enrichment activities. Donald Trump similarly told an Oval Office press briefing that he wouldn’t rule out further attacks if it meant denying Tehran a nuclear weapon.

But Iran’s technical knowledge and industrial capacity mean aerial bombardment alone can’t ever totally eliminate the threat. The head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog has already suggested Iran could be enriching uranium again in a matter of months. Following the attacks, Tehran has stopped co-operating with the agency.

The inescapable conclusion is that so long as the current Iranian regime remains intact, their pursuit of nuclear weapons will be a risk. And as long as that’s the case, there will be hawkish voices — mostly in Israel and the U.S. — asserting that regime change is the sole solution.

Israeli officials, American pundits and U.S. President Donald Trump himself have openly mused about assassinating Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

“He is an easy target,” the president posted in June on his Truth Social platform, after reportedly vetoing an Israeli plan to kill Khamenei.

The dark irony is that Trump owes much of his political fortune to tapping into popular anger in America over forever wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Both debacles offered searing evidence that ousting a dictatorship doesn’t guarantee it will lead to something better. The Arab Spring proved this too.

Instead, what’s more likely is an abrupt descent into anarchy and warlordism — as seen in Libya and Yemen. Or more organized and ruthless government, such as in Egypt. A third path is full-blown civil war, like the conflict that devastated Syria and the one currently tearing apart Sudan.

Predicting the outcome of regime change is impossible. This especially true in societies, such as Iran, with opaque leadership structures and significant ethnic and religious minorities. As longtime Middle East observer Thomas L. Friedman has warned, “One just doesn’t know when you start to pull the thread on a country like this.”

Others concur.

Calling for regime change “sounds so simple on social media,” says Dennis Horak, a former Canadian diplomat. But that’s fantasy. “Calls for regime change beg the question: Change to whom or to what?”

In Iran’s case, Horak predicts, the outcome would be chaos.

Hoping for the Iranian regime to be toppled from within also appears to be wishful thinking. Decades of sanctions, corruption and the brutal quelling of prior protests have left citizens dispirited and anti-government movements fragmented.

“The regime seems to be weak, but its people are even weaker,” The Economist reported last month. “People are just really struggling to get by. It’s become quite an individualistic society — and that’s hard to organize.”

Claims that Iran’s nuclear weapons program has been “obliterated” and that the Middle East has been forever changed are overblown. An abusive theocracy lives on in Tehran; the region remains a tinderbox ready to ignite all over again.

Instigating regime change would just make things worse.

Kyle Hiebert is a Montreal-based political risk analyst and former deputy editor of the Africa Conflict Monitor.