Smoke rises after a missile strike on a building in Tehran on Sunday.ATTA KENARE/AFP/Getty Images
Hussein Banai is an associate professor of international studies at the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University-Bloomington.
There is a temptation, when a genuinely evil regime finally meets the force it has long invited, to treat the moment as a kind of justice. The Islamic Republic of Iran has spent 47 years imprisoning, torturing, and killing its own people. It massacred thousands of protesters in the streets from December through February. It has exported violence across the region, subsidized militias, and built a nuclear program it refused to account for. It is possible to feel that war means a reckoning has arrived. That feeling is earned. It answers nothing about what comes next.
What ultimately produced this war was not the Islamic Republic’s cruelty but the Trump administration’s inability to decide what it actually wanted. Containment treats a hostile government as a permanent feature of the landscape and works to modify its behaviour through pressure and negotiation. Regime change treats every negotiation as a performance and every concession as a lifeline to a system that deserves to fall.
The administration oscillated between these two positions, undermining each with the other, until the oscillation became unsustainable and the bombs provided a kind of resolution. The war was the end point of a policy that had ceased to function, reached for when the contradictions could no longer be managed any other way.
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That distinction matters enormously now, because the question that will dominate moving ahead is not the one the administration has been asking. It is not whether Iran’s nuclear facilities can be degraded or its missile inventory depleted. It is this: what comes after the Islamic Republic, and who decides?
History offers a consistent and dispiriting answer to that question. The United States spent months preparing for post-Saddam Iraq, deploying the State Department’s Future of Iraq project, consulting exile groups, and gaming out reconstruction scenarios, and still produced a decade of sectarian violence, institutional collapse, and an opening for forces far more destabilizing than the government it removed. In Libya, NATO’s intervention was followed by years of civil war between competing factions with neither the legitimacy nor the capacity to govern. These are not arguments against ever using force; they are arguments for treating the day after the bombs fall as at least as important as the day the bombs are dropped. In Iran, there is no evidence that this calculation has been made at all.
The figure the Trump administration is most likely to put forward as the political face of what comes next is Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the deposed Shah, who is already Israel’s preferred candidate and has spent the past several years building a transitional road map and cultivating relationships with both governments. The problem is not simply his poll numbers or his contested legitimacy inside Iran, though both are real. The deeper problem is structural: the Islamic Republic is not Saddam Hussein’s brutally effective but institutionally shallow regime, which was decapitated from above and dissolved almost overnight, however catastrophic the vacuum that followed.
The Islamic Republic has spent 47 years building something far harder to dislodge. The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) alone control an estimated third of the national economy, and clerical networks, bonyad foundations and security institutions penetrate the judiciary, the energy sector, the banking system, the media, and local governance. Any leader who takes power in a post-Islamic Republic Iran will not be building on a cleared site, but governing on top of structures that have survived, and whose co-operation or at least acquiescence they will need. How Mr. Pahlavi, or anyone, manages that negotiation is the central question of the day after.
That uncertainty points toward the likeliest outcome. An institution that has spent four decades building patronage networks, parallel bureaucracies and ideological coherence among its officer class does not dissolve when the clerical system above it is removed; it reorganizes. The most probable outcome of this war, then, is an Iran governed by the Guards themselves, under new branding. Mr. Trump’s offer of “complete immunity” to the Guards if they stood down was an inadvertent acknowledgment that this institution cannot be dismantled, only co-opted.
None of this absolves the Islamic Republic. The regime was cruel, corrupt and willing to kill on a massive scale to preserve itself. The Iranians who filled the streets and found ways to resist even as the internet was cut and the security forces fired into crowds were right about the system that governed them.
But power exercised without responsibility for its consequences is its own kind of wrong. Iranians deserve far better than the regime that has ruled them. They deserve equally better than an intervention that treats their future as an afterthought.