Why Iran’s regime did not collapse - opinion

It was an understandable hope. After the mass killings of protesters in January, the regime appeared not only brutal but politically exhausted, despised by much of its own population and increasingly incapable of offering anything beyond coercion.

But hope was never an adequate theory of regime collapse. The Islamic Republic did not fall during the war because the conditions that make authoritarian systems collapse were largely absent, and because war itself made them less likely, not more.

This is not an argument that the Iranian regime is strong, legitimate, or secure in the long run. It is an argument that military assault was never likely, by itself and in real time, to convert public hatred into revolutionary action.

The war has damaged the regime profoundly. But expecting Iranians to bring it down while their country was under bombardment misunderstood both the nature of the state and the political psychology of a society at war.

The regime suffered blows of a kind it had never before endured, yet its coercive institutions held. Its survival does not disprove its decay; it shows why decay and collapse should never have been confused.

That outcome should not have been surprising. The Iranian people may loathe the Islamic Republic; they do not, therefore, welcome foreign attacks on their cities, infrastructure, or country.

An external assault blurs the crucial distinction between Iran and the regime that rules it. It gives the authorities the patriotic language they have long struggled to regain: not the defense of an unpopular Islamic order but the defense of the homeland.

The Islamic Republic was never merely a personal dictatorship whose foundations would disappear with the death of its leader. The killing of Ali Khamenei was a historic humiliation for the regime. It exposed the vulnerability of the state, shattered the aura of protection around its highest office, and violently ended the rule of the man who had overseen Iran since 1989.

But Khamenei was not the regime. Behind him stood the Revolutionary Guards, intelligence bodies, clerical institutions, patronage networks, and vast economic interests whose survival depended on preventing the system from falling.

The rapid succession of Mojtaba Khamenei illustrated this point. His appointment should not be read, as some commentary has suggested, as evidence that the war suddenly handed Iran to a more radical leadership. Mojtaba had long been discussed as a plausible successor and had cultivated close relations with the Revolutionary Guards, which reportedly pressed hesitant clerics to approve his elevation.

The war accelerated a process already underway; it did not invent it. More broadly, it did not radicalize an otherwise malleable Islamic Republic. It exposed how decisively the security establishment already dominated it.

Institutional density explains why hopes for an internal “night of the long knives” proved misplaced. Iran’s governing elite is divided, suspicious, and far from harmonious. There are rivalries among clerics, commanders, technocrats, and families with access to money and power. But division does not automatically lead to rupture.

Most importantly, the Iranian public had already been savagely disciplined before the war began. In January, nationwide protests were met with mass killings that human rights organizations described as unprecedented.

The point of such repression is not only to clear the streets at that moment. It is to implant fear, disorganization, and uncertainty long afterward: Who can be trusted? Who is still alive? Who is under surveillance? Who will risk joining a protest that may again be met with live ammunition?

A population can be enraged, bereaved, and deeply opposed to its rulers, yet still be in no position to launch an immediate uprising – especially when missiles are falling and the security state is mobilized for war.

The regime has also exploited the war to do what authoritarian regimes do in moments of external danger: equate dissent with treason. Arrests, executions, street mobilization, and accusations of espionage were not signs of popular reconciliation with the state. They were instruments for suppressing the possibility that wartime confusion might turn into organized opposition.

In March, the authorities feared economic collapse after the war and intensified their crackdown on dissent. This is not the behavior of a confident regime; it is the behavior of a frightened one that understands how fragile its control may become once the emergency ends.

Distinction matters here. The regime’s failure to collapse during the war does not mean that the war strengthened it.

In important respects, the opposite is true.

For decades, the Islamic Republic built its regional strategy on the promise that its enemies would be fought abroad, through Hezbollah, Iraqi militias, the Houthis, and other armed partners, before war ever reached Iran itself.

The regime has therefore survived, but it has survived stripped of a central claim to competence: that its costly regional architecture kept Iran safe. For a state that has demanded enormous sacrifice from its citizens in the name of strategic depth, this vulnerability will not easily be forgotten.

The most dangerous moment for the Islamic Republic may thus come not during the war, but after it. A ceasefire, if it holds, will deprive the regime of the patriotic cover that a foreign attack temporarily supplied.

It will also return attention to January’s dead – to the families who lost children, to the unanswered demands for accountability, and to a government that proved capable of killing its own citizens but incapable of protecting the country from devastating attacks from without.

Economic relief could sharpen this reckoning. If an agreement brings oil exports, unfrozen assets, or sanctions relief, the new leadership will need to use these gains to prevent economic desperation from turning into mass protest again.

But it faces a trap.

Too little improvement, and the public will conclude that even relief cannot rescue a bankrupt system. Too much official celebration, too many promises of recovery, and Iranians will reasonably ask why a wealthy country remains mired in inflation, corruption, and inequality once the external excuse of sanctions has weakened.

At that point, the question may cease to be what America or Israel did to Iran. It may become what Iran’s rulers did to their own country – those still alive, and those who inherited the machinery they built.

The Islamic Republic did not collapse because wartime collapse was always the least likely form of its undoing. Regimes such as Iran’s rarely fall merely because they are struck hard from outside.

They become vulnerable when fear begins to fade, when economic expectations collide with political corruption, when mourning becomes memory and then accusation, and when a society concludes that a government able to survive at any cost can no longer justify the costs it imposes on everyone else.

The war did not bring that moment. It may, however, have brought it closer.