While everyone agrees that the Iranian regime needs to go, the tougher question is: what comes next?
Anyone who remembers Iraq or Libya knows that removing a regime and replacing it with something better are two very different things. In Iraq or Libya, the regime was essentially a family enterprise. Remove Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi and there goes the regime.
The Islamic Republic regime is not just a dictator surrounded by loyalists: It is a vast system run by a deeply entrenched ruling elite. At the center of that system sits the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
On paper, the IRGC is a military force of roughly 180,000 men. Add that number to the many layers of regime bureaucrats and their collective families and we’re talking about an entire ruling class. They populate a political, economic, military, and intelligence network that dominates the Iranian state.
This elite has enriched themselves while imprisoning dissidents, crushing protests, exporting terrorism across the Middle East, and running global networks of drugs and illicit finance that stretch as far as Latin America.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has stated the administration’s formal position clearly: the objective of the current war is not regime change but eliminating Iran’s missile capabilities and the threat the regime poses. If the Iranian people overthrow their rulers, Washington would welcome it – but that is not the stated mission.
President Donald Trump, however, recently offered a revealing glimpse into how he thinks about what might follow.
When asked what regime change he’s looking for, Trump pointed first to Venezuela. There, he argued, the United States removed the dictator but kept the governing structure intact. The chain of command remained in place and the state continued to function. In other words, the regime was decapitated, but the machinery of government survived.
Trump then contrasted that with Iraq. After Saddam Hussein fell, the United States dismantled the entire state – firing the military, the police, and the bureaucracy. That vacuum, Trump argued, helped create the instability from which ISIS later emerged.
The implication is clear: if regime change comes to Iran, Trump prefers something closer to the Venezuela model – remove the leadership, but do not destroy the state.
There are obvious advantages to that approach.
First, stability. Iran is a country of nearly 90 million people in one of the most volatile regions on earth. A sudden collapse of the Iranian state could trigger civil war, refugee flows, and regional instability on a massive scale.
Second, preserving parts of the state keeps the country functioning. Someone still has to run the ministries, the courts, and the economy.
Third, it encourages defections. If members of the regime believe they will all be purged after the fall of the leadership, they will fight to the end. But if some believe they may survive politically in a post-Islamic Republic system, they may start laying down their weapons and cooperating.
In other words, leaving room for parts of the elite to survive could actually make regime change quicker and easier.
Risks and rewards of regime transition
But here is the danger. If the same ruling elite simply rebrands itself under new leadership, the Iranian people may gain little real freedom.
The men who run the IRGC are not neutral technocrats waiting to serve whatever government comes next. Besides many being adherents of a Jihadist Shi’ite Islam, they are also deeply implicated in the regime’s crimes – from massacring protesters in Iranian streets to financing Hezbollah, Hamas and other terrorist organizations, while running transnational criminal networks tied to drugs and illicit finance.
Leaving that apparatus intact might stabilize Iran in the short term. But it could also produce something that looks like regime change without actually delivering it.
And there is another complication.
Reports suggest that the US may be coordinating with Kurdish forces in northwestern Iran. That points to a very different possible scenario: fragmentation.
Iran’s Kurdish population has long harbored separatist aspirations, and Kurdish militant groups already have networks capable of exploiting a weakening Iranian state. From the Kurdish perspective, regime collapse in Tehran could be an opportunity to carve out an autonomous region – or even an independent state.
But that scenario carries serious risks. A Kurdish breakaway region inside Iran would immediately alarm Turkey, Iraq and Syria, all of which have large Kurdish populations. What begins as regime change in Iran could quickly spill into a broader regional crisis. There is also the MEK, an Islamic militant opposition group who will want their piece of the pie.
Everyone wants regime change but there are no clean outcomes here.
A collapse of the state could produce the kind of chaos seen in Iraq and Libya. A Venezuela-style transition might preserve order but leave significant power in the hands of the same criminal elite that has ruled Iran for decades. And ethnic fragmentation could widen the crisis beyond Iran’s borders.
For Israel, the strategic priorities remain clear.
Once Iran’s military threat – especially its missile program and nuclear infrastructure – is eliminated, any political transition must dismantle the machinery through which Iran has exported terror across the Middle East: the IRGC’s networks, its proxies, and its financial pipelines.
What kind of government ultimately emerges inside Iran will be up to the Iranian people. It may be a managed transition that preserves parts of the state. It may be something messier. There may even be a period of instability as the system that has ruled Iran for nearly half a century begins to unravel.
But one point should not be forgotten in all the speculation about what comes next.
Whatever follows the Islamic Republic is unlikely to be worse than the criminal Shi’ite-jihadist regime that has ruled Iran for the past 47 years and spent those decades exporting terror, drugs, and instability while threatening the Jewish state.
The writer is the executive director of Israel365 Action and co-host of the Shoulder to Shoulder podcast.