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Six months into the war, the central question about Iran’s regime is no longer its missile arsenal, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) ability to menace the Strait of Hormuz, or how long the confrontation can endure. The deeper question is political and historical: Who governs Iran? Is it Mojtaba Khamenei, whose position at the apex of the system remains opaque; Masoud Pezeshkian, whose office of president was never designed to hold sovereign power; or the IRGC, which after decades of accumulating military, intelligence and economic authority may have become the state’s true center of gravity?
Iran increasingly resembles not a Shiite theocracy protected by soldiers, but a militarized dictatorship in which the notorious clerical establishment provides ideological cover for the men with guns.
The Shiite Republic or Islamic Caliphate of mullahs emerged from the bleak winter of 1979 promising salvation and delivering coercion. Khomeinism turned political Islam into state power and terrorism, proxy warfare and revolutionary expansion into instruments of foreign policy. For nearly half a century, Tehran built armed transnational terrorist networks abroad while suffocating political life at home.
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Now, this outlaw regime that once dreamed of exporting its revolution is consumed by a more primitive instinct: survival. War serves that purpose. Under its shadow, dissent becomes treason, criticism becomes collaboration and repression becomes patriotism. Washington must reject the regime’s oldest deception: Iran is not the Islamic Republic, and the Islamic Republic has never been Iran.
Iranian opposition leader and son of the last shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Reza Pahlavi, holds a press conference in Paris on June 23, 2025. (Joel Saget / AFP via Getty Images)
That distinction matters as economic pressure intensifies. Operation Economic Outcast seeks to sever the financial lifelines sustaining the regime and the IRGC, but Iran’s economic deterioration predates this war and cannot be blamed on sanctions alone. Corruption, ideological adventurism, institutional decay and the diversion of national wealth toward repression and regional militancy have exacted their price.
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Economic pressure may accelerate the regime’s exhaustion, but the deeper crisis is political and psychological: the widening gulf between a society seeking a place in the modern world and a ruling establishment imprisoned by the fears and obsessions of 1979.
Another uprising therefore cannot be excluded. No one can predict when humiliation overcomes fear and private anger becomes public defiance; history rarely announces revolutions in advance. Iran is under immense pressure: grievances have accumulated, the regime’s legitimacy has eroded, and successive uprisings have not been erased because repression has quieted the streets. The regime has contained anger, but not the conditions that produced it. Silence should never be mistaken for consent.
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Yet the collapse of dictatorship and the birth of democracy are different historical events. Between them lies the dangerous terrain of transition. Iran’s next political order must be chosen by Iranians at the ballot box, not manufactured in Washington, Jerusalem, Moscow or Beijing.
Nor does every opposition faction carry equal political weight or vision. In my assessment, Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi occupies a distinctive position through his national visibility and advocacy of secular government, territorial integrity and democratic transition. His role and Iran’s constitutional future — republic or constitutional monarchy — must be decided by Iranians. Regime change should restore a nation’s right to choose, not merely destroy an old order.
Nor would the Islamic Republic’s collapse automatically bury the ideologies that have poisoned Iranian politics for decades. Islamism, authoritarian Marxism, sectarianism and separatism would compete for the vacuum. Democracy requires citizenship above ideology, national belonging above faction and the state above revolutionary militias. Iran’s transition will be difficult because the Islamic Republic has spent decades destroying the institutions a peaceful transition would need.
Washington’s record deserves scrutiny. Successive administrations have oscillated between confrontation and the hope that another negotiation might alter the regime’s character. Diplomacy can prevent wars, but the illusion begins when a tactical bargain is mistaken for strategic transformation. Tehran has learned to negotiate in one room while applying pressure in another, speaking diplomacy while preserving asymmetric warfare. A regime’s method of survival should not be confused with a change in its nature.
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Tehran may calculate that America’s political calendar will restrain Washington before the November midterms. But Nov. 3 cannot define American national security. Iran is neither a Republican nor a Democratic question: its covert networks, terrorist capabilities and asymmetric retaliation concern the country itself. A regime fighting for survival may become more dangerous as its options narrow. Negotiation may alter Tehran’s tactics, but asymmetric pressure and deniable violence have been tools of its statecraft for decades.
Iran’s next political order must be chosen by Iranians at the ballot box, not manufactured in Washington, Jerusalem, Moscow or Beijing.
The deeper lesson reaches back to 1979. Washington misunderstood not only the revolutionaries seizing power but the institutional rupture they were about to impose on one of the Middle East’s oldest nations. It was more than an intelligence failure; it was a failure of political imagination.
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Nearly half a century later, America should not again imagine only two futures — accommodation with the Islamic Republic or chaos after it. Serious statecraft should prepare for a third: political transition that preserves Iran’s territorial integrity, national identity and continuity as a unified state.
The growing security cooperation among the United States, Israel and Arab states belongs within that horizon. Saudi Arabia faces Iran-backed armed groups, including the Houthis, while Israel and Arab governments confront overlapping security threats. Deeper cooperation — and potentially broader normalization through the Abraham Accords — could build a regional order less vulnerable to proxy warfare and transnational militias.
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Any regional strategy begins with understanding Iran itself. American and Israeli policymakers — and the intelligence communities that inform them — should distinguish democratic Iranian nationalism from Islamist, Marxist, sectarian and separatist movements offering different futures for the country.
Iran’s territorial integrity and credible democratic actors should be understood before transition begins, not after institutions collapse. History is unforgiving toward governments that prepare for yesterday’s crisis; the worst morning to search for reliable Iranian interlocutors is the morning after a dictatorship loses control.
China embodies the final contradiction. Foreign Minister Wang Yi calls for reopening the Strait of Hormuz and preventing the war from spreading into Yemen and the Red Sea. Beijing’s anxiety is understandable: Middle Eastern energy arteries are also arteries of the Chinese economy. Yet China cannot demand stability while maintaining close ties with Tehran and avoiding confrontation over conduct that undermines it. Beijing wants open shipping lanes without confronting the forces threatening them — a policy that manages symptoms while leaving the disease untouched.
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Hormuz, the Houthis, Tehran’s terrorist proxy networks, sanctions and war are not separate crises. They are consequences of the revolutionary order born in 1979, when ideology became an instrument of domestic rule and foreign policy. For decades, the West has confronted those consequences without resolving the underlying strategic problem.
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The question after six months of war, therefore, is not merely how it ends, but what begins afterward. Iran’s future belongs to Iranians, but serious statecraft requires contemplating a future beyond the Islamic Republic. For nearly half a century, the world has built its Iran policy around the regime’s presumed survival. Beneath it stands a far older nation seeking to reclaim its political future. America need not write that future. It should ensure that when history next knocks on Iran’s door, Washington is not once again the last to understand what has arrived.
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