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U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu started the Iran war off with a bang — not just the bang of bombs and rockets, but the rhetorical bang of declaring their intent to spur the Iranian people to overthrow the Islamic Republic.
As a ceasefire pauses more than a month of combat, and failed talks lead to a planned blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, what has happened to their dreams of regime change? They seem to have fallen prey to the magical thinking of South Park’s underpants gnomes — you know, the episode where Stan, Kyle, and company encounter a group of gnomes with a marvelously vague business plan: in Phase I, they steal people’s underpants, in Phase II … well, Phase III is “Profit!”
Regime change in Iran is as improbable as the gnomes’ ephemeral profit. Iranians are unlikely to overthrow the regime in the foreseeable future because the security apparatus is wedded to the regime, and no amount of rockets and bombs will change the political calculus between the regime, its armed defenders, and its unarmed citizens. The decisive dynamic governing the success or failure of a popular uprising is whether the security apparatus continues to defend the regime or turns on it. As long as forces as large and well-resourced as Iran’s choose to stand with the regime, the regime will survive.
Optimists will argue that no matter what happens in this war, Iran faces escalating cycles of protest that will eventually lead to the fall of the regime — that there is too much popular rage and too little state legitimacy for the regime to survive. The author is rooting for this, too. But he has also watched too many dictatorships teeter on the brink and fail to fall to be an optimist. A popular uprising is akin to a chemical reaction. Imagine a combustion engine: you may have all the fuel in the world, but without an oxidizer, you aren’t going anywhere. Protests are the fuel, but the security defections are the oxidizer. The United States and Israel have exhibited no indication that their planning has taken that dynamic into account or that they have a causal mechanism linking an air campaign to the security forces’ defection.
The reader may be excused for forgetting entirely that regime change was the first objective, given the panoply of additional objectives Trump and his officials have posited since the first week of the war. Also, because he claimed during his national address on April 1 that “Regime change was not our goal.” But it’s worth keeping a bead on his original statements on regime change, when he addressed the Iranian people: “When we are finished, take over your government,” he said. “It will be yours to take.” This was his first explanation for the war and presumably reflects the original intent. Since he clearly called for Iranians to revolt after the fighting was done, a revolt could still play a role in the administration’s expectations. Netanyahu is still talking about the Iranian people seizing power, so regime change is still playing a role in Israel’s strategy.
Trump continued during his address, “We never said regime change, but regime change has occurred because of all of their original leaders’ death. They’re all dead,” a claim he has repeated several times since. New leadership, of course, does not mean a new regime. A regime is a political order, a set of formal and informal rules governing access to and exercise of authority. The same set of rules that governed how to replace Iran’s slain supreme leader and generals will also govern the choices those new leaders make, because the regime endures. Some regimes are so tightly bound around the leader—what political scientists call personalist regimes—that when the leader falls, the regime crumbles as well, as we saw in Libya with Muamar Qadhafi in 2011. Iran, however, is not Libya; it is remarkably institutionalized for a closed autocracy, which is key to its resilience.
He went on to say, “The new group is less radical and much more reasonable.” There is no evidence that the new leadership is less radical. In fact, there is good reason to expect that they will be less reasonable. Given the maximalist nature of Trump and Netanyahu’s demands — which amounts to a complete 180-degree shift in Iran’s national security strategy — it seems reasonable to conclude that regime change would be the simplest path to ensuring those goals. But is it reasonable to expect regime change from an air campaign, however dominant?
Many a U.S. administration, and many a world power, have succumbed to the trap of leaping from a reasonable-sounding Phase I to an intuitive Phase III without working out how Phase II will connect them. It is not exactly a problem of misjudgment. Rather, it is one of unjudgment, relying on intuitive leaps when logical connections are required.
Trump and Netanyahu’s logic presumably went like this: Iranians already despise the Islamic Republic. The regime leadership, after running the country into the ground through corruption and pursuing a foreign policy that invited enormous costs without benefiting normal Iranians, has led to further ruin by inviting Israeli and U.S. air strikes due to their stubborn insistence on a nuclear program, a strategic missile program, and sponsorship of all sorts of unsavory regional actors. The Iranian people, then, will rise up in protest, and through overwhelming numbers and moral righteousness will quickly dispatch the unpopular government, replacing it with one that is more congruent with U.S. and Israeli preferences.
The Iranian people take to the streets. Iranian security forces deploy in response. Then what? How does this lead to regime change? This is the Phase II problem.
In a throwback to traditional military planning, let’s start with Phase III and move backward.
There are two basic pathways for a people to overthrow a dictatorship: Either one or more armed rebel groups seize power by force and implement a new regime, like the Taliban did in 2021, or an unarmed popular uprising ejects a ruler and replaces it with a new system of governance, like the Students Against Discrimination-led movement did in Bangladesh in 2024.
Armed resistance often enjoys external support. The United States has a long and checkered history of proxy warfare. After a brief flirtation with the idea of a Kurdish incursion, both the United States and Israel seem to have ruled out supporting an insurgency. That is wise. Insurgencies take a long time, rarely succeed in overthrowing regimes, and can spin out in unpredictable ways. That leaves unarmed popular uprisings, which are — counterintuitively — more common, but only successful in certain circumstances.
Peaceful uprisings have a very basic dynamic: Protestors resist (largely through street protests, though often there are many more resistance tactics at play as well), the state represses the resistance, and at some point the state’s armed defenders stop repressing. They may take steps to remove the autocrat themselves (as the Egyptian military did in 2011), or they simply step aside (as Georgian forces did in 2003). Either way, the security forces that stand between the resistance and the regime, in the parlance of political science, defect.
When and why a security force defects is the subject of some debate, but ultimately it seems to rest on whether the security forces identify with the opposition and the broader society, and whether they think the regime has a future. If they see themselves in the protestors — whether demographically or ideologically — it is more difficult to impose force, especially deadly force, on them. If they see a near future where they are on the losing side, it is more difficult to stand fast before the protests. Research by Zoltan Barany, Hicham Bou Nassif, Theodore McLauchlin, and the author identify specific indicators of these broad factors, ranging from whether the soldiers or police are conscripts to the age and health of the autocrat.
For instance, security forces are more likely to stand fast when they are filled with volunteers, not conscripts, because volunteers have self-selected into the security apparatus — often for ideological reasons or material reward — and tend to be insulated from the social networks that generate sympathy for protesters. Soldiers and police who were conscripted into service retain ties to civilian life — family members, neighbors, classmates — that make it psychologically and morally costly to turn weapons on their fellow citizens. The core regime defenders — the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its subsidiary militia, the Basij — are largely volunteers.
Forces are more likely to defend the regime when they are well-resourced, well-paid, and receive special benefits and privileges. Officers who are promoted through a highly politicized system have additional reasons to conflate their personal futures with the regime’s survival. The Guards’ base pay is modest, but in line with civil servants, and supplemented with opportunities for political influence and commercial profit as they rise in rank. The Basij receive tangible advantages such as preference in university admissions, some government jobs, and subsidies.
Most importantly (for Iran), forces are more likely to stand with the regime when they have a responsibility for domestic security and a history of doing so. Armies traditionally focused on external threats will often balk when ordered to turn on their fellow citizens, as we saw in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011. Iran, however, has a long track record of repression indicating it has the resources, experience, and stomach to brutally repress its own people. In 1999, the Basij emerged as the primary responder to street protests, beating and torturing students protesting the closure of a newspaper. In 2009, the Guards joined the Basij and riot police in suppressing demonstrations — known as the Green Revolution — against a fraudulent election. In December 2017 to January 2018, the same mix of forces killed at least several dozen people and arrested thousands, and during the November 2019 fuel price protests, they killed as many as 1,500. The nationwide “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests starting in September 2022 saw up to 500 deaths, and the protests starting in December 2025 earned a crackdown that killed at least 6,000 and resulted in upwards of 40,000 arrests.
There is no question that the Iranian people have the will and the courage to challenge the regime. But there is also no question that the security forces have the stomach to repress.
It is notable what is not relevant: the popularity of a regime. The size of street protests can certainly matter — the larger the better, though protests don’t have to be large to be effective against a weak regime. But general public sentiment, though by no means irrelevant, is not predictive of regime change. Sentiment matters less than action, so how many Iranians oppose the regime in a survey matters less than how many Iranians will risk their lives to oppose the regime. But even that is a less significant number than the number of Guards and Basij who are willing to lay down their arms.
Iran, as we can see, is not a great candidate for a successful popular uprising. So, returning to the Phase II problem: How can an air campaign instigate and support an unarmed popular uprising? Is there something bombs and missiles can do to disrupt the security forces’ relationship with the regime?
It seems like not much. The idea that regimes roughed up in international wars are vulnerable to internal overthrow probably originates in World War I, when the Bolsheviks rose up while the Russian Empire was fighting Germany. The template is powerful because not only did the revolutionaries eject the tsar, but they withdrew from the Great War, redrawing the contours of that momentous conflict and shaping the aftermath.
In the world of analysis, this is called anchoring bias, where a single momentous event drags down your thinking and prevents you from an accurate assessment. In this case, the fall of the Russian Empire had such an impact that it distracts us from remembering that such an event never happened again.
The closest recent example is in Serbia, where protestors deposed President Slobodan Milosevic in October 2000, more than a year after a NATO air campaign helped end the Kosovo civil war. But the inciting incident for the Bulldozer Revolution was not NATO’s air campaign so much as the 2000 election, when Milosevic’s election engineering and outright fraud outraged young Serbs. Serbia’s political environment, while far short of democratic, was also far less repressive than Iran’s Islamic Republic today. Serbia’s opposition movement was masterminded by Otpor, a historically effective and ingenious underground resistance movement that Iran lacks.
Of course, Serbia’s opposition also benefited from intensive support from U.S. pro-democracy groups like the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute — groups the Trump administration effectively defunded last year. Even in this most favorable historical comparison, the air campaign wasn’t the operative factor, and the Trump administration has since hamstrung the tools that probably were.
In fact, waging war is probably counterproductive for popular resistance. First, attacks from abroad tend to trigger a rally-around-the-flag effect, whereby citizens are more likely to defend and less likely to challenge the regime when that regime is beset by outsiders. Second, in this case, the leadership targeting campaign has killed Ali Larijani, the most moderate (a relative term, admittedly) of Iran’s leaders while replacing an aging supreme leader with a youthful version even more tightly wedded to the Guards than his father. And Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way posit very persuasively that “sustained, violent, and ideologically-driven conflict” can reinforce identities and norms that reinforce cohesion and durability in autocracies. After all, it was Iran’s brutal war with Iraq in the early days of the Islamic Republic that led to the elevation of hardliners over moderates and shaped the Guards into Iran’s premier fighting force from a modest state militia.
With these historical patterns in mind, the road to meaningful regime change in Iran appears long and narrow, and the U.S.-Israeli air campaign more likely to elongate it than to shorten it. The security apparatus, especially the Guards and Basij, is large and well-resourced, intrinsically allied to the regime, and has no apparent qualms over repression.
The implicit lesson here is that Phase II grows more difficult the more ambitious Phase III becomes. Regime change in a dictatorship is about as ambitious as it gets, and even when it succeeds, it ends badly as often as it ends well (see also: Afghanistan, Egypt, Haiti, Libya, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen). The potential for unintended consequences is vast. But sudden regime change, as tantalizing as it sounds, is not the only solution to the rogue nation. The most common pathway out of dictatorship, historically, is structured liberalization — gradual, internally-driven reform that shifts the balance of power within a regime rather than annihilating it. That path requires patience, the cultivation of moderate internal actors, and economic and diplomatic pressure calibrated to reward reform rather than simply punish defiance. The current campaign has foreclosed most of those tools and may have eliminated some of those actors.
Just a few weeks before the war started, Dokhi Fassihian warned in these pages:
Direct military action would likely consolidate command-and-control within the security apparatus, narrow elite debate, and foreclose the very accommodations that succession uncertainty might otherwise force.
That prediction has almost certainly been borne out. However militarily weakened Iran might be, it is farther from democracy — and thus accountability — than ever. Phase III was a mirage. Phase II was a black hole. Phase I was a disastrous detour.
Denis Prieur served 26 years between the U.S. Army, Foreign Service, and intelligence community, including overseas tours in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. He directed the Political Instability Task Force from 2018 to 2021 and currently teaches at Georgetown University.
All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the U.S. government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. government authentication of information or endorsement of the author’s views.
Image: The White House via Wikimedia Commons
