As we just passed the six-month milestone of the war against the Islamic Republic of Iran, US President Donald Trump posted a claim on his Truth Social website that the war was “Mission Accomplished.” Paired with an AI-generated image contrasting his alleged success with the widely mocked “Mission Accomplished” banner from the Iraq War era, the post sparked a new wave of derision.
The current conflict against Iran shows no sign of resolution, pointing instead to another Western tombstone in the long historical military cemetery of the Middle East. A photo of former Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed during initial bombing raids on Iran, accompanied the post. This seemed to imply that Trump’s regime change strategy had worked, in contrast to the operation carried out by George W. Bush.
When Trump talks about Iran, he often starts at the top, with the Supreme Leader, the Revolutionary Guards’ commanders, the clerical inner circle and the so-called moderate politicians who provide soundbites to Western journalists. He assumes that if we apply enough pressure to the apex, through sanctions, airstrikes or threats, we will change the behavior of the regime.
“Our objective,” he said in March, in the first phase of our latest 47-year war against Iran, “is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime, a vicious group of very hard, terrible people.” Trump then vacillated between praising the leaders in Iran “very rational people,” “smart people” and “nice to deal with,” and not long thereafter characterized them as “scum” and “sick people.” As Bill Mahter joked, Trump’s book The Art of the Deal is now being sold in the Humor section.
Regime is more than its leaders
Trump’s ignorance of Persian history and culture, and tunnel vision about how to navigate the war in general, carries severe real-world consequences, as soldiers stationed in the Middle East today could attest. Trump’s perspective treats authoritarian governments as if they were run-of-the-mill New York businesses he was familiar with, where the CEO decides, subordinates execute and employees follow orders. But the Iranian case and, indeed, most enduring authoritarian systems, does not work like that, to put it mildly.
The Iranian regime is not merely a set of officials at the top, but rather an extension of a culture and society that has engaged in conflict and statecraft with the Western world since the Persian Empire under Darius the Great and Xerxes I invaded Greece in the fifth century BCE. That ancient state, organized around a Royal Road that tied the country together, relied on coercion (including an early intelligence network along trade routes), patronage, patriotism and a sticky, integrative social system.
The Achaemenid Empire, history’s first superpower, was formidable, repressive and culturally integrative. To misunderstand that deep structural history when attempting to dismantle the Iranian regime is to pull the wrong levers, congratulate oneself on pulling hard and simultaneously misread the adversary. As the contemporary conflict theorist Zachary Shore wrote, successful strategy requires strategic empathy: the ability to step out of our own minds and enter the mind of the enemy, which demands a thorough understanding of the antagonist’s history and culture.
The key lesson in the current conflict is straightforward. Few regimes historically or currently can be reduced to the individuals at the apex. They consist of the society that supports the upper layer and the social machinery that keeps the system functioning. If one wishes to alter a regime’s trajectory, one must focus less on forcing a unified “regime” to surrender and more on pitting elites and enforcers against one another so that the system’s internal logic turns against itself.
But that outcome is far more difficult to achieve than it might appear from the outset. Dissidents who risk their lives to fight oppressive rule are heroic and admirable, but historically, moral resistance alone rarely brings down a regime. Figures with the transformative reach of former South African President Nelson Mandela are exceedingly rare in world history. The adhesive problem of collective action usually prevents a Mandela-like figure from breaking through, since all the privileged stakeholders in a coercive system live in constant fear that they will be betrayed by any potential collaborator in a scheme to overthrow the system they themselves built and maintained.
The missing piece in the divided elite strategy is to include the unprivileged inside an oppressive regime pitted against the privileged. Greed, envy and self-preservation prove far more potent accelerants of political change than abstract opposition.
From an external perspective, supporting the disenfranchised within a durable yet fragile system is a far more effective regime-change strategy. Loyalists in a repressive apparatus often represent its weakest link because they possess detailed knowledge of their leadership’s vulnerabilities. Turning insiders into opponents is entirely achievable if they perceive structural weakness at the top. We see this dynamic vividly illustrated by historical shifts in state power, such as the internal fracturing seen during the recent collapse of the Maduro regime in Venezuela.
Lessons taught by regime change failures
These are not just theoretical abstractions; they describe a practical physics of politics, how authoritarian systems survive, how they crack and why Western strategies routinely fail when they assume a regime is a small, centralized target rather than a broad coalition of social and security networks. On both sides of Iran geographically — in Iraq and Afghanistan — the United States demonstrated in real time its failure to grasp this reality. Overthrowing Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in 2003 was the easy part, transforming Iraqi society required an understanding how Hussein’s “regime” functioned as a social web, a test Washington failed completely. In Afghanistan, the US removed the Taliban in a rapid campaign, only to depart 20 years later with the Taliban’s social structures and governance intact.
It took eight long years in Iraq for the US military to grasp the core reality of the underlying social, cultural, political and military layers. They then departed in December 2011 by crossing the Kuwait border and left behind a fragile, centralized parliamentary democracy with a domestic security apparatus that lacked external defense capabilities, as well as a society that suffered from deep sectarian fractures. Trump made the same initial mistake as in Iraq by conceiving of the state as if it were merely a leadership compound, an officialdom insulated from the broader population. At the start of the bombing campaign on February 28, in a rambling and incoherent pre-taped 3 AM social media post, he concluded by directly encouraging the population to seize control of their government once the US operation finished, calling it “probably your only chance for generations.”
This admonition encapsulated the fundamental error of seeing the regime as separate from the deep system that underlies the state. One key difference between Iraq and Iran is that the latter boasts a far more stable foundation of true believers. Some ideological fanatics and others cynical opportunists who profit from state patronage, they enforce compliance, whether for the right price or out of true devotion to the Islamic revolution. The Iranian regime offers social mobility and status where options are otherwise scarce. Meanwhile, the alienated, mostly urban middle class, which includes citizens who despise the government’s repression, corruption and economic failures, so far lack the organizational mechanisms to translate that discontent into decisive political power.
The critical question of regime change is what is the viable alternative if the system collapses? Simplistic “decapitation” strategies have repeatedly misled American foreign policy leaders throughout the post-World War II era. The historical record, including interventions in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Syria (1956–1967), Indonesia (1957), Cuba (1959–1961) and Chile (1970–1973), demonstrates that severing the top leadership creates temporary chaos but rarely eliminates the underlying social structures that made the regime possible. Even when leaders are removed, coercive institutions and patronage networks fight to preserve their privileges, often by tightening control and reallocating positions.
This leads to a second, more fundamental question: what alternative does political change offer to the lower and middle strata of society beneath the elite? For instance, if a young man joins Iran’s Basij militia for social mobility, what incentive will persuade him to switch sides? A superpower that plans for regime change in a foreign nation must have a clear answer to those kinds of basic questions.
The regime’s coercive ecosystem has deep roots in Iran. The Basij militia, to stay with that core national guard institution, functions as a pervasive auxiliary force enforcing state control through moral policing, protest suppression, and community surveillance. Other military and intelligence formations above the Basij distribute coercive reach across every layer of society.
Authoritarian rule is sustained not by personal charisma, but by human and institutional infrastructure capable of rapidly converting external shocks into internal consolidation. When Western strategists assume that military pressure will automatically yield political transformation, they overlook how authoritarian institutions exploit external threats to enforce internal discipline and rally support.
This dynamic explains the primary strategic error, treating a regime as a single isolated target rather than a complex social coalition. If even 70% to 80% of a population is alienated but the state retains a loyalist minority large enough to staff its coercive apparatus, the regime can persist while becoming increasingly abusive and paranoid. Popular anger becomes a stress signal rather than an automatic engine of collapse. Put simply, a regime can lose all domestic legitimacy while maintaining its coercive capability; it can be widely hated and remain highly durable. This dynamic goes a long way to explain why such a hated regime can nevertheless maintain ruthless control for so long.
Exploit Iran’s internal divisions
What is to be done? First, as noted above, if foreign powers seek regime change, they should not bet on confronting a unified enemy, but on exploiting internal fractures. The second major strategic failure is structural. Western analysts tend to view authoritarian leadership as a monolithic actor with uniform preferences. Regimes dependent on complex security, patronage and ideological networks harbor intense internal rivalries, not only between “hardliners” and “reformers,” but among competing institutions and security factions vying for survival under pressure. Those fissures can be exploited with the correct coherent and long-term strategy.
In this context, traditional “negotiation” can represent a category error. Bargaining assumes that the adversary has a stable incentive to compromise and that its internal coalition can absorb concessions without collapsing. In most authoritarian systems, leadership legitimacy rests on coercive identity and ideological purity rather than public welfare. If compromise threatens that core identity or signals vulnerability, bargaining becomes performative rather than substantive.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) came into existence to protect the Islamic Revolution of 1979, but remained a second pillar to the Artesh, the conventional national military with four standard branches: ground, air, navy and air defense. But the US–Israel attack six months ago led the Artesh to shift power significantly to the ideological extremists in the IRGC. Under severe external strain, authoritarian elites face three choices: double down, bargain or defect. After the Iranian regime survived the original onslaught, doubling down made sense since the war shifted from the air to the geopolitics of oil and the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has now demonstrated in real time that a previously hypothetical tactic to control the straits is a potent weapon, perhaps more useful than a nuclear capability, which has self-limiting utility. Both US allies and rivals have certainly taken note.
The true meaning of regime change
Which brings us to the second misunderstood word in “regime change.” Change can mean at least three things in a decapitation strategy: an organic long-term evolution to a new order, a short-term transition to a mixed order of the old and new elites, or a decisive replacement of the old order. In all three scenarios, the internal costs of loyalty to the status quo need to be weighed against the perceived benefits of a future new constellation.
History teaches us that societies first implode, not individual leaders. Internal, not external, factors matter much more. Authoritarian systems usually do not collapse because of external force, but because internal incentive structures collapse or the social base sustaining coercion no longer believes the regime is worth defending. In studies of communist system collapses, scholars highlight the contrast between a regime’s formidable facade and its fragile underlying social structure, an “uncivil coalition” that fractured rapidly once internal dynamics shifted. Wars that bring about the collapse of a robust authoritarian regime like Nazi Germany look impressive in World War II films, but such dynamics are quite rare in history.
The case of Nazi Germany validates the argument presented here, since the allied demand for unconditional surrender and the sustained bombing campaign during the last two years of the war solidified, rather than weakened, the German population’s resolve to fight to the bitter end. Only when overwhelming force, in the war’s final months, demonstrated that the allies would prevail, did capitulation to the inevitable defeat sink in. Even then, the Nazis put up tenacious resistance until the ultimate days of the war.
While Iran’s theocratic model differs both from 20th-century communism and fascism significantly, the structural mechanism is similar. Regime survival relies on a social base that executes administration and enforcement. When that base ceases to function, whether through fear, opportunism, ideological exhaustion or fractional rivalry, the pace of collapse can accelerate rapidly.
Recognizing this historical pattern requires a shift in Western policy posture. Viewing a regime as merely a leader and a propaganda machine led to strategies focused on changing the mind of the top strongman — Hussein is Exhibit A in recent regime change history. Viewing a regime as an interconnected web of social networks and institutions, by contrast, leads to strategies focused on altering incentives for those who enforce the rules — the Sunni Awakening in Iraq circa 2006 is Exhibit B.
The principal obstacle to achieving a coherent strategy toward Iran is not primarily military or diplomatic, but cognitive and strategic. Overestimating decapitation and external coercion lead to the mistaken assumption that striking the top will automatically cause society to crumble. Overestimating traditional diplomacy leads to the false assumption that leaders will respond rationally to rising costs through concessions. When a regime functions as a socio-institutional network driven by factional competition, neither decapitation nor traditional negotiation yields predictable outcomes.
A plausible path to structural change combines calibrated external pressure, which increases internal strain without triggering a “rally ‘round the flag” effect, with deliberate encouragement of intra-regime competition. This strategy targets the specific incentives of those who staff the apparatus of repression and mediate between the top leadership and its security networks. Achieving such a subtle posture requires a foreign policy apparatus backed by deep expertise and historical understanding. Navigating complex conflicts demands strategic empathy, historical depth and a rigorous understanding of how authoritarian societies operate.
To point out that the current regime in Washington lacks such expertise and foreign policy experience is, unfortunately, stating an obvious and painful truth. Trump has shown no coherent strategy, exit or otherwise, to end the current conflict with Iran. But at least understanding what the terms “regime” and “change” mean might help some future president or Congress, should it decide to wake up from its pathetic slumber and restore its constitutional prerogatives, to navigate the next Middle East misadventure.
[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.
