Regime Change in Iran Will Fail

There’s an old joke, courtesy of The Onion, that I always think of when the issue of regime change re-enters the American political consciousness: “This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism vs. No It Won’t.” The Onion’s representation of the neoconservative pundit’s “No It Won’t” position might be a satirical exaggeration, but it does a good job of illustrating how much of the discourse around American foreign intervention unfolds. As Americans, we tend to resort to a simplistic view of foreign conflicts, primarily as a result of our own cultural chauvinism and biases, which are heavily influenced by the media. The Middle East particularly is profiled in exoticized terms as a chaotic, tribalist region filled with failed states and constantly warring ethnicities that are incapable of developing democratic systems and effective forms of self-governance. These characteristics are typically portrayed as inherent to the cultures they describe.

For example, take the statement of political commentator and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, a vehement advocate for the Iraq War. In making a comparison to the polarization in modern American politics in his column Sinbad vs the Mermaids, Friedman claimed that the MAGA faction of the Republican Party “embraced the core philosophy that dominates tribal politics in Afghanistan and the Arab world: The ‘other’ is the enemy, not a fellow citizen, and the only two choices are ‘rule or die.’ Friedman likes to position himself as a centrist Never Trumper, and a lot of his writing on the Middle East displays how this bias has infected center and center-left circles. Friedman’s perception is inaccurate and oversimplified; the Middle East is filled with diverse, complex societies, with a sociological history greatly overshadowed and shaped by colonial interventions and obstacles to socioeconomic development. However, years of priming by hawkish presidents have set the table for this reductive view to be our foundational assumption when discussing the region and regime change efforts inside of it.

The Trump administration’s bombastic rhetoric threatening the leaders of other sovereign nations has forced the concept of regime change back into the mainstream discourse, despite the fact that every post-war president has been involved in regime-change efforts, whether clandestinely or openly. Trump’s populist rhetoric surrounding him being a “pro-peace” president has been shown to be a cynical lie by his actual behavior in attempting to start wars with Venezuela and Iran and refusing to enforce the ceasefire in Gaza. More specifically, his aggressive rhetoric around Iran elicits a particularly impotent retort from the Democrats; while they criticize the rhetorical bluster, they ultimately support the end goal of collapsing the Iranian regime.

These discussions were reinvigorated by the nationwide protests that broke out in Iran in late December of last year, and the Islamic Republic’s violent crackdown has provided fertile ground for a “humanitarian” cover to topple the Iranian regime. It is important to acknowledge the Islamic Republic’s crackdown and brutality towards protestors; since Khomeini’s ascension to power in 1979, the IR has executed thousands upon thousands of left-wing political dissidents who have opposed the theocratic oppression of the regime without due process, and the regime is by no means an ally to left-wingers or a conduit for left-wing political goals. However, we’ve seen what happens to countries in this position that are aligned against the United States, which will become abundantly clear when examining the numerous examples of regime change throughout the Middle East since the 1990s. I am not here to defend the Islamic Republic; I am here to argue that a US-led regime-change effort would create a substantially worse political situation for the Iranian people and the Iranian left than today.

There is a consistent playbook for regime-change efforts by the United States that dates back to colonial tactics employed by European powers in the 19th and 20th centuries. The carving-up of the Middle East by the British and French through the Sykes-Picot Agreement was the initial move towards rendering the region completely subjugated. Artificial mandates like Syria and Iraq were created with the deliberate goal of producing divided, ethnically mixed states that would struggle to establish themselves as powerful sovereign nations. These nations would be heavily reliant on the political and economic assistance of Europe to sustain themselves once they became independent, and through this, the colonial powers could maintain a foothold on the resources and affairs of the fragmented nations.

Ultimately, the continuity between the colonial strategies of yesteryear and the strategies of the United States lies in the creation of chaos and fostering of political fragmentation. In a country like Afghanistan (which is foundationally a fragmented tribal state created by arbitrary borders), it was easy to exploit the contentious politics of the Pashtun, Tajiks, and Turkic tribes, who had mostly organized themselves independently for most of their history. Competing political interests and a fragile state apparatus made it susceptible to complete foreign takeover, which ensued in 2001. Despite its swift collapse, the Taliban government was able to reorganize as an insurgent force and eventually reclaimed power in 2021. The American occupation of Afghanistan was an objective failure; the occupation was sold as a democratic experiment that would modernize Afghanistan and emancipate its women but was instead merely a developmental lull that saw any of its minimal progress reversed after the Taliban took over. In fact, the American occupation preserved the system of tribal warlords that acted as a bulwark against the Taliban and abetted many cases of child sexual abuse that were committed by warlords and their allies in the Afghan National Army. Afghan women experienced a temporary period of expanded rights, but the Taliban swiftly reinstated education bans upon their ascension to power, and women’s rights groups in the country were abandoned without assistance by the American contingent in Kabul.

The case of Libya reads similarly. Protests during the Arab Spring and the rise of jihadist militias had threatened Muammar Gaddafi’s hold on power and sent the country into civil war. A NATO bombing campaign backed the rebel offensive in the spring of 2011, and Gaddafi was eventually captured and killed. In his wake, a second civil war began after numerous rebel militias failed to agree to integrate into the new national army after Western forces had disengaged. After the outbreak of the second civil war, Libya was rendered a failed state, fragmented among warring militias and economically stagnant. Even with the ouster of the brutal and paranoid Gaddafi, Libya remained dysfunctional. There was no concrete plan on how the country would be governed after the power vacuum opened up, and the people of Libya have suffered as a result. In 2023, a report from Walk Free, a human rights group focused on modern slavery, indicated that Libya had one of the highest rates of slavery vulnerability in Africa.

Additionally, Libya’s crippled infrastructure made it especially vulnerable to the effects of Storm Daniel, a Mediterranean Sea tropical-like cyclone whose floods killed nearly 6,000 people and spawned a refugee crisis. We can try to cling to the idea that these interventions were humanitarian missions with noble intentions, but history has shown that they weren’t. Instead, they were destabilizing initiatives intended to force adversarial countries to submit to American hegemony. Iran in 2026 represents an even greater threat to American hegemony than Afghanistan or Libya ever did.

The Islamic Republic, unlike Afghanistan or Libya, is a nuclear-capable country with its own sphere of influence. Hezbollah, Hamas, and other Iranian-backed militia groups in Yemen and Iraq that make up the “Axis of Resistance” can’t match the military prowess of the West, but they are certainly a significant (yet diminishing) force in the geopolitics of the Middle East. With Israel’s recent decimation of the leadership of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Netanyahu government appears less restrained when it comes to aggressive military action on foreign soil.

Now, much of the West’s attention has turned to the focal point of the Axis of Resistance in Tehran. The fortified uranium enrichment plants at Fordow and Natanz were bombed in a joint Israel-American effort in June 2025, and the bombings set the tone for how the Trump administration would approach nuclear negotiations with Iran. Trump’s Iran doctrine appears to mimic Nixon’s “peace-through-strength” strategy in Vietnam, meaning that bringing Iran to heel through aggressive military action is the only way to end the US-Iran proxy conflict.

In combination with a military offensive, domestic turmoil and protests could lead to the overthrow of the Ayatollah with the backing of the United States, in his mind. Unlike previous administrations, however, Trump needs little pretext to start a war and pays only minor lip service to the idea of spreading democracy across the globe. While the recent protests in Iran allow for his rhetoric to be slightly more effective, the true benefit of the recent unrest is that it leaves the Islamic Republic in a vulnerable state. The protests have mostly been brought on by dissatisfaction with the economic state of the country, which has been severely strained by American sanctions. Sanctions have been employed as a political weapon by the United States since the beginning of the Cold War, and one of the most comprehensive sanction regimes has been placed on the Islamic Republic. This regime has been incredibly effective at instigating domestic strife and has mostly affected working- and middle-class Iranians. Their purpose is not to punish foreign elites for misbehavior, but rather to instigate economic chaos and social turmoil by extension.

Libya had been sanctioned by the United States since 1986 (albeit with a brief pause in the early 2000s), and a new round of harsh sanctions was imposed shortly before the 2011 revolution. These sanctions primarily targeted Libya’s economic institutions and assets of the Gaddafi government, and the resulting economic strife increased the Libyan people’s desire to depose Gaddafi, even without a replacement plan in place. We can see a consistent pattern with military interventions preceded by either short-term or long-term sanction regimes that are designed to create a foundation for instability. Like for our European colonial forefathers, chaos is the ultimate weapon and key to subjugating a foreign country.

Just as the British had identified the Kurds as a proxy group to manipulate and use as a bulwark against oppositional forces in post-WWII Iraq, the Americans would find a marginalized ethnic or political group to rally around and exploit. The most likely American-backed group would be the Iranian monarchist contingent, who seek to restore the Pahlavi dynasty and who thoroughly embody the right-wing nationalist and Zionist politics of the Trump administration. The Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, who would presumably become the new Shah of Iran after the fall of the Islamic Republic, is incredibly naive, bumbling, and myopic, and he would be a ready-made puppet for an American-backed client state. Monarchists worship Reza Pahlavi like he’s a deity of some kind and spend most of their time spewing violent rhetoric about Arabs and Muslims. As the Islamic Republic has taken a firmly pro-Palestinian stance since the 1979 revolution, monarchists have adopted the contrarian position, often going to lengths to explain how culturally different “Persians” are from Arabs and that Islam is not their true religion.

However, Pahlavi’s power base within Iran is very weak, and he would require significant backing by the U.S. By boosting an outsized sociopolitical entity, the Americans would be using a similar tactic to one they employed in Afghanistan. Sectarian violence that mirrors political allegiances (as it often does) would erupt, with different sides being armed to the teeth and serving as proxies for opposing geopolitical interests, like in Syria. Gulf monarchies may back Sunni separatists, Turkey may back Azeri separatists, and Kurdish forces would back local Kurdish militias in order to carve out a favorable political settlement once the conflict ended. The Iranian left would likely be subsumed into one of these coalitions, receiving funding and arms from perfidious actors that would sell them out the moment their arrangement became unfavorable.

On top of that, a combination of opposing political interests from countries like Turkey and the United States and militia violence would spell their political exclusion and possible eradication. The purpose of this would be to keep Iran weak and ineffective on the geopolitical stage, mired in internal conflict and unable to function as a strong, centralized entity. Internal chaos allows for foreign powers to exert greater control with a lack of centralized opposition. Iran would face the same catastrophic displacement, violence, and infrastructure collapse that befell Afghanistan and Libya.

National self-determination is a key principle that I would urge us as leftists to accept. The destiny of Iran is one that should be decided by the people of Iran, not by outside actors. Intervention in periods of political transition by outsiders with ulterior motives has proven to be a failure across the globe, especially in the Middle East with the cases of Libya and Afghanistan. Ruthless actors driven by the same chauvinist zeal as the European colonialists seek to employ the same tactics on Iran, promoting sectarian conflict and reducing it to a failed state de facto controlled by outsiders. Chaos is a strategy, not a side effect of interventions of this nature. The self-determinative model, by contrast, has been shown to produce real progress towards an egalitarian society. Internal movements like the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and democratic movements in Latin America in the late 20th century managed to liberate their countries from oppression and violence and produce more stable societies than the ones that have been created and administered by colonialists. South Africa managed to avoid a long, drawn-out civil war precisely because it solved the issue of apartheid internally.

We are presented with a false binary of outcomes: either the theocracy remains or the Americans bring democracy to Iran. In reality, we must choose between respecting the political rights of Iranians or trampling on them. It is not our responsibility to “save” Iran but to support its people in their pursuit of the right of self-determination. Solidarity means respecting this hallowed right. When the issue of regime change re-enters the public discourse, reject the “No it won’t” kind of argument we see in the Onion article. Understand that history tells us that it damages the countries involved, primarily seeks to serve the narrow interests of oppressive elites, undermines our shared sense of humanity and dignity, and systematically destroys the domestic left by excluding it from any post-intervention political settlement.