Iran needs regime change, but that can’t be the goal
Limiting Tehran’s ability to harm other nations should be the priority. A post-Islamist government could also be bad, and reviving the monarchy is likely a non-starter.
By Jonathan S. Tobin
JNS
Jun 18, 2025
These are hard times for apologists of the despotic Islamist regime that continues to rule over Iran. The notion that Tehran was the “strong horse” of the Middle East, whose terrorist allies and nuclear program could threaten Israel’s destruction and intimidate moderate Arab states into subservience while maintaining its iron grip on despotic power at home, has been demolished.
The question of whether the government of Iran will fall and what might replace it is still far from resolved. If the ultimate goal of Israeli (and American) policy toward Iran in the coming weeks and months is to get rid of the ayatollahs and their Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) shock troops, then the question of how regime change in Tehran is to be accomplished and what it would constitute cannot be ignored by those who are, with good reason, in favor of such an outcome.
An indefensible government
To pose these questions is not to oppose the idea that the Islamist tyranny that has ruled Iran since the fall of the shah in 1979 must be thrown into the ash heap of history. The indefinite survival of a government that oppresses its own people with the same revolutionary fervor and medieval Islamist ideas that it seeks to foist on the rest of the Middle East—and the world, for that matter—has always been questionable.
Long before Israeli Air Force planes and drones began raining destruction on the regime’s military, nuclear and economic assets, the signs of discontent among the Iranian people about their theocratic masters had been evident. A mass protest movement in 2009 was crushed, as have been subsequent expressions of dissent—something that was made easier by the indifference of former President Barack Obama, who followed up his relative silence about the fate of the Iranian people with a policy of appeasement of their oppressors.
But now that the United States has lined up behind Israel’s military efforts to ensure that Tehran cannot get a weapon of mass destruction and threatened possible involvement in that campaign if the regime doesn’t “surrender” its insistence on retaining its nuclear program, the discussion about what a post-Islamist Iran might look like has become a necessity. Even as decent people everywhere applaud the possibility of the Iranian government’s fall, it’s fair to ask what, if anything, Jerusalem and Washington are thinking about the subject, and what they might do to achieve that end. It’s also possible to argue that, as much as the current campaign to strip Iran of its ability to harm other nations is justified, the question of replacing its government should not be a war goal for Israel or the United States.
Post-Oct. 7 decline and fall
The debate about Iran regime change was made possible not by Israeli or American actions, but by the hubris and recklessness of the Islamist government.
Ever since it fomented a multi-front war on Oct. 7, 2023, when a Hamas-led Palestinian Arab assault on southern Israeli communities, the assumptions that were the foundation of the regime’s hold on power have been exploded. Its allies in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria have been essentially demolished. And its ability to defend its own territory has been exposed as a myth by Israel’s masterful decapitation of its military, terrorist and scientific leadership, in addition to the massive damage done to its nuclear infrastructure.
The Oct. 7 attacks were only made possible by the way that the 2015 Iran nuclear deal had empowered and enriched the Islamists. As appalling as the atrocities committed that day were, the war that Hamas began has led to disaster for the terrorists and their Iranian-backed sponsors. By making it clear that Israel could no longer tolerate a terrorist state on its border, it set in motion a series of events that have become disastrous for Iran.
In 2024, Tehran’s Hezbollah auxiliaries in Lebanon suffered a decisive defeat at the hands of Israel. The decapitation of the terror group’s leadership and the rout of its forces essentially removed Iran’s fail-safe option, in which it was long assumed that it could deter the Jewish state from attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities. That was followed by the fall of the despotic Syrian regime of Bashar Assad, a principal ally of Tehran, which provided it with, along with its Shi’ite friends in Iraq, a land bridge to the Mediterranean.
On top of that, the belief that the United States would always stop Israel from striking at Iran’s nuclear program out of fear of retaliation has also turned out to be mistaken. While past administrations had time after time appeased the Iranians and vetoed Israeli action to remove the existential threat that the regime’s nuclear ambitions posed, President Donald Trump has done the opposite.
He had given the Iranians a last chance to negotiate the end of their nuclear threat; however, believing that the president’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, was working for an appeaser like Obama or former President Joe Biden, Tehran’s leaders prevaricated, assuming that they could out-bargain and bide their time with the Americans while they ensured Israeli inaction.
That was a fatal error.
Trump did not stop Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from making good on his promises that he would not allow Iran to get a bomb. And then, after some initial hesitance, he has not only praised Israel’s efforts but made it clear that he was not going to be suckered into new negotiations that would allow the Iranians to hold onto their nuclear program. He then called for their “unconditional surrender.”
For good measure, the president also denounced former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, the leader of the pro-Iran and anti-Israel faction on the right, as “kooky” for not understanding that his “America First” foreign policy would never tolerate an Iran with nuclear weapons or abandon Israel, as the antisemitic “woke right,” coupled with the progressive left of the Democratic Party, desires.
What happens next?
We don’t know what will happen next in the war against Iran or what Trump will do. He may hope that the mere threat of American B-2 bombers using bunker-buster munitions to pound Iran’s Fordow mountain nuclear redoubt into rubble will be enough to pressure Iran into standing down and accepting the surrender of its nuclear assets.
Yet everything we know about the Islamist regime and its ideology—rooted in their conception of Islam as being in a never-ending war against non-Muslims in the West—will prevent that from happening.
That might mean the sort of crack-up that could lead to the fall of the government. And that’s something many in the West, including Iranian exiles who left the country after it became a theocratic nightmare, have longed for. But a dose of skepticism about that much-desired scenario is necessary.
It is an iron rule of history that tyrannies fall when they lose wars or become too weak to sustain themselves. Another requirement is that such regimes must have lost not only the belief in their ruling ideology but also their willingness to shed blood to sustain it.
That was true of the ancien regime in pre-revolutionary France in 1789 and the Communist rulers of the Soviet Union after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The same could be said of the Iranian government of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in 1979, when he was ousted and replaced by the Islamists who were followers of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who at the age of 86 still rules in Tehran.
It may be that the Islamist fervor of 1979 is gone, along with faith in the regime. But the forces that back it, primarily the IRGC, remain vast, with no sign that they are going to let their domestic opponents win without a fight. The finances and the survival of a vast number of government operatives and allies depend on the regime remaining in power.
The Iranian government might be a disaster, though its fall could be a matter of wishful thinking. It’s just as likely that it could exploit the fact that most of its citizens resent the attack on their country and are too compromised by Islamist ideas, antisemitic and anti-Western beliefs, to give up on it.
Since an actual invasion of Iran by Israel or the United States—as opposed to targeted attacks on nuclear, military or economic targets—is probably out of the question and a dubious idea at that, the only way regime change is likely to happen is from within.
Nor should we count on the Iranian people rising up in rebellion.
The one accomplishment of theocrats is that no evidence that a coherent or effective political opposition inside Iran exists. It’s also true that, contrary to the hopes of many in the West and Iranian exiles, after 46 years of Islamist indoctrination, the assumption that most Iranians are longing for a secular, democratic government may be a pipe dream.
Revive the monarchy?
Many well-intentioned people are counting on Iranians welcoming a return of the Pahlavi dynasty in the form of the last shah’s son, Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi. He has become a favorite of some Americans, and especially the Jewish community, because of his advocacy for an end to Islamist tyranny and good relations with Israel and the Jews. One of his daughters even recently married an American Jew.
The prince says a lot of things that are easy to support. And he is certainly to be preferred over the current band of theocrats and IRGC terrorists and kleptocrats. But as much as some might wish it to be so, the belief that the Iranian people are longing for a return of the monarchy or the son of a man who was a repressive tyrant—albeit not as bad as his Islamist successors—seems unfounded. The prince has spent most of his life in exile, living on the charity of his supporters, and may not be the model leader his fans assume him to be. His seeming support for the Israeli attack could also be a problem since his compatriots may not welcome someone who cheered on the destruction of a nuclear program that many Iranians may see as an expression of Iranian patriotism, however foolish that belief may be.
Would Western support for anti-regime forces, assuming that any could actually mount an effective rebellion or replace the ayatollahs if they just collapsed, help or hurt them? There are arguments to be made on both sides of that question.
Still, what even those who are most enthusiastic about replacing the government in Tehran should realize is that it is just as likely that what follows the current regime could also be very bad for Israel, the West and the Iranian people.
As the world learned after the toppling of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq—something that was a good thing in and of itself—the unintended consequences of such a development can be even worse. The collapse of Iraq into civil war and the empowerment of Iran were arguably worse or as bad as Saddam’s survival might have been. That’s a lesson that Trump has correctly absorbed. Those cheering on the idea of repeating that mistake in Tehran should do the same.
It’s possible to argue that nothing could be worse than a regime of millenarian religious fanatics bent on the mass murder of Jews, acquiring a nuclear weapon. But perhaps Washington and Jerusalem should set their sights on that limited goal, rather than aiming at installing a pro-Western or less awful government in Tehran.
No to nation-building
But rather than counting on finally finishing the conflict in the near future, those who understand the necessity for stopping the Iranian nuclear threat should be prepared to settle for something short of regime change.
It’s true that in the long run, the existence of an Islamist government in Iran means that it will be locked in a long-running conflict with the Jewish state it wishes to destroy and the West, which it despises.
Yet an Iran that is an economic basket case and still the subject of international sanctions is unlikely to be able to afford to repair or replace the damage that Israel has already done to its nuclear facilities. Some well-placed American bunker-buster bombs dropped on Fordow might also postpone an Iranian bomb for the foreseeable future. As long as the United States makes it clear to other nuclear regimes, like China, Russia and North Korea, that it will not tolerate their helping Iran to get a weapon, a satisfactory end to the current campaign might be possible without it involving America or Israel in the dubious pursuit of a friendly government in Tehran.
Carlson and other Israel-haters are hopelessly out of touch with the reality of the Middle East and continue to make unhinged arguments calling for more appeasement of fanatical theocrats who hate America and the West. They should no longer be treated as having any influence on Trump or anyone else who counts. Even as Israel and the United States are rightly pursuing a justified campaign to ensure Tehran’s ability to inflict suffering on other countries is limited. But a willingness to ponder the possible unintended consequences of a war for regime change is something that decision-makers in Jerusalem and Washington need to keep in mind.
The focus seems clear: obliterating Iran’s nuclear facilities and military power. But nation-building should be off the table. It’s up to the Iranian people to free themselves, not Israel or the United States. Fantasies about a secular, democratic Iran presided over by a friendly monarch are pleasant to contemplate, yet cannot be confused with serious policy options.
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