As of the time of writing, it has been four weeks since the United States and Israel launched their joint military operation against Iran. The spectre of regime change looms large — compounded by ambiguity regarding the goals of the operation. While President Trump urged Iranians to “seize control of [their] own destiny” [1] at the outset of the war, members of his government including the Secretary of War dismissed regime change as an outright objective [2]. Meanwhile, the Israel Defense Forces continue to carry out targeted decapitation strikes against senior Iranian leaders in a bid to topple the Islamic Republic, including the strike that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on 28 February [3].
Since the Cold War, regime change has been a defining feature of American foreign policy, and so have its repeated failures, from Cuba to Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. In fact, research suggests that foreign-regime change operations are more likely to fail than succeed in their stated aims, leading instead to heightened risk of civil war, increased repression and less democratic societies [4].
A Brief History of Regime Change in Iran
Foreign-imposed regime change, or simply regime change, refers to the force applied by international actors to targeted states to change their governments [5]. Since WWII, the United States has pursued it through two broad methods: covert operations, including CIA-backed coups and the arming of proxy forces, and overt military intervention, up to and including full invasion and occupation.
Iran is no stranger to American (and British) regime change operations. In August 1953, the CIA and British intelligence carried out a covert operation to overthrow Mohammad Mosaddegh, Iran’s elected prime minister at the time. Mosaddegh had moved to nationalise Iran’s oil industry, then controlled by the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, and partner with the local communist party, a decision that drew fierce opposition from Western governments. Under Operation TPAJAX, CIA-funded agents incited unrest through disinformation, bribed religious and political figures, organised street demonstrations, and coordinated with sympathetic military officers to seize control of the government. Mosaddegh was overthrown on 19 August and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.
While the coup achieved its immediate objectives, it also reshaped politics in the Middle East in ways which Washington has spent the years since contending with. The coup restored Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, previously the weakened constitutional monarch of Iran, to power. In the years following the coup, the Shah pursued a program of rapid modernisation and Westernisation, including land reform, the expansion of education, and women’s suffrage. He also, however, sought to suppress his opposition and consolidate authoritarian power. The creation of SAVAK, Iran’s intelligence and security service, in 1957 institutionalised state surveillance and repression, and by the 70s political dissent was tightly constrained through the use of arrests, censorship, and in some cases, torture.
The repressive regime significantly weakened secular nationalist and leftist movements associated with Mosaddegh. At the same time, the monarchy’s efforts to control political life proved less effective in fully subordinating religious networks, which retained a degree of autonomy and social reach. By the late 1970s, widespread unrest drew on a broad coalition of social groups — secular intellectuals, merchants, students, leftists, and clerics alike — but it was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a senior Shia cleric in exile, who ultimately became the revolution’s central unifying figure. Amid mass protests, strikes, and defections within the military, the Pahlavi dynasty collapsed, and the monarchy was formally abolished following Khomeini’s return and the establishment of an Islamic Republic in April 1979.
The 1979 revolution fundamentally reshaped the political landscape of the Middle East and beyond. Khomeini’s political project in Iran, in his own words, was only the starting point of “the revolution of the great world of Islam” [6]. Supporting terrorist groups as foreign policy proxies across the region, even in times of domestic dysfunction, has been an ideological and constitutional commitment of the Islamic Republic ever since. The export of revolutionary Shia Islamism has galvanised extremist groups across the Islamist spectrum, intensifying instability, regional rivalries, and the threat of terror around the world [7].
A Misdiagnosis
Following in the footsteps of history, the Americans and Israelis targeted and killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on 28 February, in line with a strategy of leadership decapitation as a means to topple regimes. For many around the world, this was a cause for celebration — the death of a dictator and, perhaps, an indication of the imminent end of the current regime. Historical precedent might have supported this conclusion — see Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011, where the deaths of Saddam and Gaddafi did indeed lead to institutional collapse, however disastrous the consequences.
Yet in Iran’s case, it is unlikely that any targeted killings of the senior leadership will lead to regime change. Despite the death of Ali Khamenei, US intelligence itself confirms that the Iranian regime is not currently in danger of collapse [8]. For Kenneth M. Pollack, Vice President for Policy at the Middle East Institute, the most likely scenario is that the regime survives the war, and what emerges is a new Iranian leadership that is “more reckless, aggressive, anti-American, and anti-Israeli than its predecessor” [9]. This is because the strategic logic of decapitating a leader as a means of inducing regime change relies on historical precedent set by the examples of Gaddafi and Saddam — what Samriddhi Vij calls ‘personalist dictatorships’, or states that are hollowed out to serve as the personal instruments of autocrats which cannot survive the removal of the central figure. The Islamic Republic, however, is designed for “institutional survival”, based on an architecture of three foundational pillars: the military, clerics, and state bureaucracy that has been designed to facilitate succession rather than a power struggle [10]. This is demonstrated, of course, by the fact that Iran has already selected a new Supreme Leader — Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the previous Ayatollah.
Jon B. Alterman, the Brzezinski Chair in Global Security and Geostrategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, provides the example of Israel’s repeated targeting of Hamas leaders since its founding in 1987 as evidence of the limits of the decapitation strategy in dismantling an organisation. Instead of changing political direction, Hamas simply “absorbed its martyrs and lives to fight another day” [11]. As with the Islamic Republic, the resilience of Hamas in the face of abrupt removals of leadership can be attributed to the fact that it is a “well-established and diversified bureaucratic institution”, with military, political, and social wings with their own responsibilities, hierarchies, and deep benches of leaders [12].
The lesson, then, is not that a regime’s leadership does not matter — it is that leadership is a product of its institutional environment, and that environment rarely dies with the man at the top. Alterman writes that “removing a leader often exposes the pathologies of a country that was struggling”, leading to strife in the wake of a power vacuum [11] — but it can also expose the resilience of the system underpinning the regime. The Islamic Republic has lost its Supreme Leader as a result of the war, and continues to lose high ranking officials, but its state apparatus remains intact. Decapitation, as a strategy, assumes that a single autocrat is the linchpin of a regime’s success. Its enduring appeal lies in its promise of a quick and decisive solution to complex geopolitical problems. Iran’s trajectory thus far into the war suggests that this promise is illusory.
Edited by Félix Dubé.
References
[1] Associated Press. (2026, February 28). Read Trump’s full statement on Iran attacks. PBS NewsHour. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/read-trumps-full-statement-on-iran-attack
[2] Hegseth, P., & Caine, D. (2026, March 2). Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine hold a press briefing [Press briefing transcript]. U.S. Department of Defense. https://www.war.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/4418959/secretary-of-war-pete-hegseth-and-chairman-of-the-joint-chiefs-of-staff-gen-dan/
[3] Metz, S. (2026, March 19). Israel is rapidly killing Iran’s top leaders: Experts warn the strategy could backfire. PBS NewsHour. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/israel-is-rapidly-killing-irans-top-leaders-experts-warn-the-strategy-could-backfire
[4] Denison, B. (2020). The more things change, the more they stay the same: The failure of regime-change operations (Policy Analysis No. 883). Cato Institute. https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/more-things-change-more-they-stay-same-failure-regime-change-operations
[5] Reiter, D. (2017). Foreign-imposed regime change. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.335
[6] Khomeini, R. (1989, March 22). Speech to the people during the Imposed War [Speech]. Islamic Republic News Agency. http://www.irna.ir/fa/News/81494977
[7] Aarabi, K. (2019, February 11). The fundamentals of Iran’s Islamic revolution. Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. https://institute.global/insights/geopolitics-and-security/fundamentals-irans-islamic-revolution
[8] Banco, E., & Landay, J. (2026, March 11). U.S. intelligence says Iran government is not at risk of collapse, say sources. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/us-intelligence-says-iran-government-is-not-risk-collapse-say-sources-2026-03-11/
[9] Pollack, K. M. (2026). How to raise the odds of regime change in Iran. Foreign Affairs. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/iran/how-raise-odds-regime-change-iran
[10] Vij, S. (2026, March 20). Why regime change in Iran is difficult. ORF Middle East. https://orfme.org/expert-speak/why-regime-change-in-iran-is-difficult/
[11] Alterman, J. B. (2026, March 3). Why decapitation will not solve the United States’ Iran problem. Center for Strategic and International Studies. https://www.csis.org/analysis/why-decapitation-will-not-solve-united-states-iran-problem
[12] Wermenbol, G. (2024). Why Hamas cannot be destroyed. The Cairo Review of Global Affairs. https://www.thecairoreview.com/essays/why-hamas-cannot-be-destroyed/
[Cover Image] AaSyd. (2020, December 1). Nile River [Photograph]. Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AaSyd.jpg
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