What Will Iran’s
Future Hold?

The central assumption underpinning President Trump’s diplomacy with Iran and his subsequent warmaking was that Tehran was on the verge of collapse. Believing the theocratic government was brittle, he demanded that its leaders surrender at the negotiating table — or face war.

The United States and Israel brought that war. One week in, it seems clear that that assumption was wrong. Now the same miscalculation risks turning the U.S.-Israeli military campaign into a quagmire as the Islamic republic remains in control, despite the assassination of numerous senior officials, including the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Perhaps it isn’t surprising that the regime has proved resilient. Though polling shows it is deeply unpopular among most Iranians, the theocracy retains the support of millions of people. And the revolutionary state itself was built to last. The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps was established in 1979 to protect the revolution against the Iranian Army, which the revolutionaries feared would remain loyal to the monarchy they were overthrowing, and the broader political and security structure contains redundancies intended to ensure continuity even if members of the leadership are killed.

Take what’s happened since the attacks in June. Ayatollah Khamenei removed himself from involvement in military operations, and replacements for key military and political positions were reportedly identified several layers deep — in some cases, five levels down the chain of command. Provincial governors have been granted authorities comparable with those of the president in order to keep the government running if the central command structure was disrupted. Local military commanders have similarly been empowered to make decisions without waiting for instructions from Tehran.

Trump’s war of choice could even play into the hands of the theocracy, creating a rally-round-the-flag dynamic. As U.S.-Israeli bombardment continues to cause civilian deaths, my contacts in Iran say nationalist sentiments on the ground are growing stronger. Even more consequential could be any perception that Mr. Trump seeks the partition of Iran by supporting Kurdish separatists. With a long history of secessionist threats, Iranian society is acutely sensitive to the specter of territorial fragmentation, and many believe Western and regional powers have long sought the breakup of the country.

In the 24 hours after the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei, when the government was perhaps most vulnerable to a popular uprising, sporadic celebrations erupted, but crucially, no mass protests. Now the government appears to have regrouped and reasserted control. Mr. Trump seems to be banking on defections within the Iranian theocracy, similar to what occurred in Venezuela.

This hope is probably misplaced. Any potential defector would find Mr. Trump's model in Venezuela unacceptable, because Washington is perceived by some in Iran as having forced Venezuela to sell oil to Israel. It is difficult to imagine that a credible leader in the Iranian system — a person who could mobilize others to his side and keep the security establishment intact — would ever accept such a significant shift in Iran’s orientation simply to retain hold on power.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps is at the moment better positioned than perhaps any other force to seize the levers of power in Iran.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei did not merely rely on it as his Praetorian Guard; he elevated it to be the central pillar of the state. The force is not a monolith, but it is ubiquitous. It presides over sprawling economic conglomerates, penetrates every layer of the state bureaucracy, runs its own intelligence apparatus, cultivates Iranian proxies and shapes the narrative in Iran through an affiliated media empire.

What comes next depends on what — and who — survives the war.

If the Islamic republic’s formal institutions endure, a new clerical leader will eventually be selected, but he will almost certainly begin in a weak position, lacking the authority, networks and coercive leverage that Ayatollah Khamenei accumulated over decades. In that vacuum, the Revolutionary Guards, having carried the burden of wartime cohesion, will rule from behind the curtain. Power would probably gravitate toward Guards veterans with experience in statecraft — figures such as Ali Larijani, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Parliament. The theocracy would retain a leader in title, but he would not be supreme in practice.

If, however, the United States and Israel further dismantle the upper echelons of the regime — removing men like Mr. Larijani and Mr. Ghalibaf — the picture changes. One possibility is what some Iranians call the Bonaparte scenario, in which a Napoleonic strongman emerges from the ranks, consolidating what remains of the Revolutionary Guards’ political and economic interests. Such a figure would most likely tighten political control while cautiously liberalizing the economy and repairing relations with the outside world.

There is another, more combustible path. President Trump’s elimination of the Revolutionary Guards’s expeditionary force commander, Qassim Suleimani, in 2020, followed by Israel’s sustained campaign against senior Guards commanders in the past few years, has already thinned its upper ranks. It is conceivable that no single figure commands enough legitimacy in the corps to control it. In that case, rival factions could compete for shrinking spoils, pulling the country into a cycle of internal conflict reminiscent of Libya or Sudan, in which the collapse of central authority paired with instability from below yields disintegration.

The Revolutionary Guards Corps faces heavy international sanctions; the United States and the European Union have designated the group as a terrorist organization. It hase led domestic repression, projected force across the region and driven Iran’s nuclear and missile programs. Yet in the rubble of war, the very institution most isolated from the international order may prove the most capable of inheriting the state.

The U.S.-Israeli war against Iran has created a moment that many Iranian people and opposition figures have long dreamed of. With the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the regime in Tehran under unprecedented military pressure, many view this as a historic opening for political change. This has seemingly included President Trump, who at the war’s outset called on the Iranian people to “take over your government.”

While this indeed is a moment of profound rupture, the Trump administration’s timing, convoluted aims and reliance on military coercion have set the Iranian people up to fail.

Iran’s opposition, such as there is one, enters this moment deeply fragmented. Monarchists who support Reza Pahlavi, the militant exile opposition group Mujahedeen Khalq and Kurdish and other ethnic parties have all attempted to build bridges with one another in recent years. These efforts remain incomplete, hampered by ideological rivalries, historical grievances and competing claims to legitimacy. Today there is no unified opposition structure that stands ready to transform regime instability into a coherent political transition. There is no day-after plan, no vision, no organization ready to step up.

Nor does the long history of foreign involvement in Iran, which throughout the 20th century often stifled pluralistic and popular movements in favor of authoritarian bargains, bode well for the emergence of a democratic system. Washington still doesn’t seem to have a grasp of its own objectives; while early statements hinted at regime change, administration officials now emphasize dismantling Iran’s nuclear and missile capabilities rather than clearing the way for a democratic order to emerge in Tehran.

Over the past two decades, Iran has seen millions of people periodically take to the streets to protest disputed elections, economic conditions, political and social repression and regime brutality. Each wave has eroded the Islamic republic’s legitimacy and expanded the social base of dissent.

But that has not succeeded in producing a durable opposition infrastructure capable of coordinating leadership, articulating a shared transitional vision or overcoming divisions between domestic activists and diaspora figures. Public anger, however powerful or courageous, is not the same thing as a credible political alternative.

This new war is reshaping the political landscape faster than opposition forces can organize. Those who oppose the regime have not had the time or the support to do the slow political work of compromise and reconciliation that makes democratic openings viable and have found themselves scrambling.

This does not mean that democracy in Iran is a pipe dream. With the Islamic republic in crisis, a democratic transition in Iran remains conceivable. But the aperture is narrowing. To take advantage of this moment, the opposition would have to put aside its differences and forge a pluralistic coalition, engage with factions of the existing security establishment and secure the backing of the United States, regional powers and, above all, the Iranian people. The tragedy of the present moment is that the historic opportunity many Iranians hoped for arrived before the political architecture necessary to seize it was built.

The modern history of Iran, and even much of its ancient history, has been shaped by repeated foreign interventions. This has deeply scarred the national psyche. Even in extreme circumstances, many Iranians instinctively react against the pretensions of outsiders to shape their country. At this moment, any regime or leader who reaches power with the endorsement of the United States and Israel would find it exceedingly difficult to govern.

Despite this history, some fantasize that Reza Pahlavi, the son of the shah who was deposed in 1979, could return to power and forge a pro-American regime in Tehran. Hope lies with him, in part, because there is no other galvanizing figure among Iranian expatriates and the brave civil society leaders in Iran have been brutally repressed for years. Yet many both inside and outside Iran see Mr. Pahlavi as an unserious candidate who has little understanding of today’s Iran and has shown too much fealty to Israel and the United States.

For much of the 19th century and afterward, a weak Iran was forced to accept impositions from foreign powers. In 1908, after a one-sided deal with a pliant monarch, Britain took control of an ocean of oil that lay beneath Iranian soil. Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh nationalized the oil after World War II, but British and American leaders found this intolerable. In 1953 they staged a coup, deposing him and putting an end to Iranian democracy.

After that coup, the United States returned Mr. Pahlavi’s father, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, to the Peacock Throne, which he abandoned several days before. He ruled with increasing repression for 25 years. Finally, in 1979, a mass uprising forced him to flee. Various factors contributed to his downfall, but the central one was his lack of legitimacy. Iranians never forgot that he had been installed and propped up by foreigners and effectively ruled on their behalf.

Anyone who comes to power in Iran now on the backs of American and Israeli military power will carry the same stigma, even somebody with deep roots in the country like the shah’s son. Many Iranians would see any imposed leader as a tool of predatory foreigners. Touching the most sensitive nerve in Iran’s body politic is not a promising way out of this crisis.

Last week at the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, said repeatedly that the United States would not get bogged down in this conflict. But if the Trump administration knows what it doesn’t want from the war with Iran, it has been less clear about what it does want — and the plan to achieve it.

If we assume that President Trump’s preferred scenario is a Venezuela-style decapitation — a short military campaign that leaves the current Iranian regime in place but under more cooperative management — that objective seems to be quickly receding. The conflict is expanding, and some candidates Mr. Trump initially considered were killed in the strikes.

Confusion, inconsistency and incompatible goals are creating the conditions for state collapse. Israel may prefer its neighbors weak and fragmented, but other states in the region know that chaos in Iran could engulf them all and will have no quick remedy.

When Syria, Libya and Iraq shattered, they exported refugees, violence, drugs and ISIS to the surrounding region. In Iran the risks are far worse.

Its collapse could scatter nuclear, drone, missile, cyber and proxy capabilities among the remnants of a disgruntled fallen regime, as well as aspiring militants, positioned on one of the world’s most strategic waterways and next to major global energy, financial, logistics and emerging A.I. hubs on the Arabian Peninsula. Those remnants could find fertile ground in the mounting anti‑American and anti‑Israeli sentiment fueled by more than two years of horror in Gaza and Israeli strikes that have left the extended neighborhood feeling much less safe.

If Iran were to collapse, it is not difficult to imagine a corridor of violence and illicit trafficking in drugs, arms and humans forming along Iran’s already volatile borders with Pakistan and Afghanistan. And in a country of some 90 million people, state failure could trigger a migration crisis that could quickly overwhelm its neighbors and Europe and dwarf the Syrian refugee crisis that began more than a decade ago.

In one week this war has already escalated, affecting Persian Gulf economies, energy infrastructure and global markets. It has drawn Europe and NATO in, albeit so far in a limited way, and stretched to the waters off Sri Lanka. One cannot expect further fallout, if the state collapses, to be localized.

A fragmented, armed and embittered Iran is the last thing the region or the world’s economy and order needs, and it is certainly the last thing the Iranian people deserve. But it risks becoming this poorly planned war’s most tragic outcome.

The Islamic republic is a dictatorship. For decades, it has brutally repressed cycles of civil society protest by students, labor unions, teachers, lawyers, pensioners, ethnic minorities and women.

This past year, however, the regime appears to have reached an inflection point. Its aging leadership has lost support among most of the country, while people attempting to reform the system have been purged and imprisoned. It faces runaway inflation, currency devaluation, shortages of water and electricity and a restive population angrier than ever. In January, Iran’s leaders ordered the massacre of thousands of protesters, a cowardly act that betrayed their fear and insecurity.

Even before the outbreak of the war, it was clear that the Islamic republic could not continue as before. Given the magnitude of the regime’s accumulated political, social and economic challenges — and its proven inability to address any of them — Iran was poised for some kind of political transition; even if it had not come under attack, it would have eventually been forced to respond to explosive bottom-up pressure for change.

A peaceful transition with Iranians at the helm could come in different ways. In recent years, Mir Hossein Mousavi, a former prime minister currently under house arrest, and several prominent jailed dissident leaders have been calling for a referendum to change the Constitution, a path to structural change that is more likely now that its most powerful opponent, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is gone. There is precedent for such changes: In 2022 and 2023, the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising — after much bloodshed and oppression by the regime — managed to ease enforcement of the compulsory dress codes for women in the country.

Today there is a range of statements and petitions from trade unionists, lawyers, student groups, journalists, writers and artists demanding freedom for political prisoners, free elections and an end to unelected clerical rule. Many also want to see a change of course in foreign policy. Iran’s enormously costly nuclear program, for instance, has produced nothing but the enmity of powerful adversaries now invading the country.

These civil society organizations are active outside of and independent of the formal confines of the Islamic republic. Figures like Mr. Mousavi and the former reformist president Mohammad Khatami, who has been politically sidelined and lives under virtual house arrest in Iran, still command political capital and could serve in a transition council. Widely respected political prisoners, such as Mostafa Tajzadeh, a former deputy interior minister and popular politician, and other outspoken critics of the Islamic republic could also be a part of the process.

The fact is that there is no successor who will be able to fill the power vacuum left by Ayatollah Khamenei. That might persuade elements in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps to support a less repressive caretaker regime. The power broker role of the military and security forces is recognized by the most prominent personality in the Iranian diaspora opposition, former Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, who has called on them to break with the regime.

But Mr. Pahlavi has no visible institutional support in Iran. A transition movement has its best chance of success if the Iranian diaspora amplifies demands for peaceful change from inside the country instead of encouraging President Trump to liberate Iran at gunpoint. For any of this to gain traction, this horrible and pointless war must stop. Iranians must be able to return to tending their battered house and decide their future in full sovereignty and peace — without outside interference.