The Fantasy of Liberation by War

Interior damage at Golestan Palace in Tehran following recent American-Israeli bombardment.

The current U.S.–Israel war on Iran is being celebrated in some quarters as a long-awaited rupture. For certain policymakers, it is a decisive blow against a hostile regime. For some in the Iranian diaspora, it is something more: the beginning of the end — the moment when external force might accomplish what years of protest could not.

The underlying belief is straightforward: the Islamic Republic is weakened, isolated, and widely unpopular. Strike hard enough, and it collapses. Remove the regime, and political renewal follows.

This essay takes that expectation seriously — and evaluates it comparatively.

There are two possible paths from this war. The first is regime collapse. The second is regime survival under conditions of external assault. Political sociology and comparative politics suggest that neither trajectory is likely to produce democratic consolidation.

If war succeeds in dismantling the current government, the comparative record on foreign-imposed regime change warns of fragmentation, civil conflict, and weakened institutional foundations. If the regime survives, research on revolutionary authoritarian durability suggests that external war is more likely to harden its coercive and mobilizational infrastructure than to dissolve it.

Either way, war is structurally unfavorable to democratic development.

In a previous essay, “Removal Without Rotation,” I examined the killing of Khamenei as an episode of elite decapitation within Iran’s modern political trajectory. That analysis focused on leadership removal. This essay examines a different but related dynamic: the broader context of interstate war in which such removal occurs. The two arguments are complementary. Decapitation is one mechanism; war is the structural environment that shapes what follows.

To understand what this war may produce — whether collapse or survival — we must move beyond the language of rupture and ask a harder comparative question: what kinds of political orders typically emerge from war against revolutionary regimes?

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1) Lessons from Regime Change: Catastrophic Success

The record of foreign-imposed regime change is not ambiguous. It is grim.

In Catastrophic Success, Alexander Downes draws on a global dataset of regime-change interventions across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His findings are consistent: while military interventions often succeed in removing dictators, they substantially increase the risk of civil war, insurgency, and violent political instability in the years that follow. In many cases, the probability of civil war more than doubles within a decade.

The mechanism is political disruption. External regime removal dismantles existing power structures without replacing them with legitimate, domestically rooted authority. The result is fragmentation, armed competition, and prolonged instability.

Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria are not isolated failures; they fit this broader empirical pattern. When outside powers overthrow regimes, they create power vacuums that armed actors rush to fill. Elections held amid insecurity rarely generate durable democratic authority.

My own research, in Popular Politics and the Path to Durable Democracy, reaches a complementary conclusion from a different angle. Analyzing cross-national patterns of mobilization and democratic consolidation, I show that durable democracy emerges where sustained popular organization builds civic infrastructure and cross-cutting coalitions over time. Democratic stability is not simply about removing incumbents; it depends on the prior development of organized societal capacity capable of structuring post-transition politics.

Foreign military intervention short-circuits that process. It may eliminate rulers, but it does not generate the organizational foundations that make democracy resilient. More often, it weakens or militarizes them.

War can remove a regime. It does not build a democracy.

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2) The Iranian Exceptionalism Argument

Some Iranian commentators resist comparisons with other Middle Eastern cases by invoking a form of cultural or historical exceptionalism — the idea that Iran’s long imperial past, unique identity, or political sophistication makes it immune to regional patterns of collapse. Reza Zia-Ebrahimi calls this dislocative nationalism: a strand of Iranian nationalism that symbolically displaces Iran from its geography by casting it as a primordial, Aryan civilization distinct from its neighbors and only accidentally located in the Middle East. Zia-Ebrahimi shows how early modern intellectuals and later state projects incorporated European racial and civilizational ideas to define Iranian nationhood as separate from its Arab and Islamic environment, a narrative that persists in political imagination and elite rhetoric.

But structural vulnerability is not suspended by self-conception. Iran’s history contains multiple episodes of fragmentation when central authority weakened. After the collapse of the Safavid Empire in 1722, the country experienced much of the eighteenth century in conditions of political instability and violent competition before more durable consolidation emerged under the Qajars at the end of that century.

More recent history offers similar reminders. During World War I and World War II, foreign occupation and weakened sovereignty produced insecurity and severe economic hardship. In the aftermath of the 1979 revolution, violent clashes among revolutionary rivals in major cities — alongside regional uprisings and ethnic insurgencies in Kurdistan, Khuzestan, Turkmen Sahra, and Baluchistan — revealed how quickly authority could fracture. The revolution and the ensuing Iran–Iraq War also imposed profound and lasting economic costs, disrupting Iran’s growth trajectory for years.

Moreover, persistent political and economic marginalization of ethnic minorities — including Kurds, Arabs, Baluchis, and Turkmens — and recurring histories of armed insurgency demonstrate that Iran is vulnerable to different forms of instability, not shielded from them.

Exceptionalism in theory has not translated into immunity in practice.

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3) Authoritarian Resilience and the Myth of Weakness

It is true that the Islamic Republic is widely unpopular, battered by economic crisis, delegitimated by repression, and repeatedly challenged by mass protest. But unpopularity is not the same as structural weakness, and crisis does not automatically produce collapse.

In their work on revolutionary regimes, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way argue that autocracies born out of violent social revolution are unusually durable. Violent revolutionary struggle destroys rival power centers, fuses elites through shared conflict, builds strong party–security institutions, and makes coups extraordinarily difficult. Surviving revolutionary regimes — from the Soviet Union and China to Cuba, Algeria, and even the Taliban — endure not because they are popular, but because their organizational and coercive infrastructures are unusually robust.

The Islamic Republic fits this model closely. The 1979 revolution dismantled alternative centers of authority; the Iran–Iraq War further militarized and consolidated the regime’s core institutions. Decades of external hostility reinforced siege narratives rather than fragmenting elite cohesion. In this framework, foreign war does not necessarily expose weakness. It can activate the very mechanisms that sustain revolutionary regimes.

A critical feature of the Islamic Republic is its sustained capacity for organized pro-government mobilization. Iran has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to mobilize loyalist constituencies in significant numbers to occupy public space and counter opposition movements — a pattern I analyze in “Sanctuaries or Battlegrounds?”

Since Khamenei’s death, that dynamic has been visible again. The regime’s base has been mobilized in mosques, squares, and streets, signaling readiness to confront potential protest — which officials are already framing as armed unrest. In a revolutionary regime with entrenched coercive institutions and mobilized loyalist networks, external war is more likely to reinforce defensive cohesion than to trigger collapse.

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4) War’s Aftermath: Militarism and Political Backlash

To assess what this war may produce internally, it is useful to look at the last large-scale interstate conflict Iran experienced: the Iran–Iraq War. That eight-year war reshaped the internal political order. Under conditions of external assault, dissent was recoded as betrayal. Rival political parties were crushed. Universities were purged. Highly mobilized sectors that had been active after the revolution were systematically dismantled. Wartime emergency became a mechanism of consolidation.

The war also entrenched militarized institutions, especially the Revolutionary Guard, and embedded a siege narrative at the core of state ideology. Security imperatives justified expanded repression and normalized the subordination of pluralism to survival.

These dynamics begin the moment politics reorganizes around existential threat. External attack empowers hardliners, narrows the space for independent civic actors, and shifts the center of gravity toward coercive institutions.

Even if the regime weakens militarily, the political field that emerges in wartime conditions is typically securitized and militarized — not fertile ground for democratic consolidation. Durable democracy depends on organized civic capacity and sustained participation — precisely the forms of political life that war compresses.

The Iran–Iraq war hardened the Islamic Republic. There is little reason to assume the structural effects of this war will be different.

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5) Ethical Responsibilities and Historical Memory

Support for war, even when driven by frustration with authoritarian rule, carries moral weight. The atrocities of the Islamic Republic are real and grievous, but they do not absolve the ethical responsibility of those who support or normalize a mass violent campaign. Nor do atrocities by the United States or Israel erase the crimes of the Islamic Republic.

Some pro-war Iranians argue that earlier generations made catastrophic mistakes — especially in 1979 — but that this time is different. This time, they believe, history will vindicate rupture through force.

The Iraqi experience counsels caution.

In 2003, many Iraqis initially welcomed the fall of Saddam Hussein and, in some areas, the arrival of American forces. There was hope for renewal. But as state collapse, sectarian violence, insurgency, and corruption unfolded, that optimism eroded. Two decades later, large majorities of Arab Iraqis view the invasion as harmful rather than liberating. Exiled politicians who advocated for intervention are often remembered not as democratic founders, but as political actors tied to the instability that followed.

Political judgment shifts as consequences accumulate. Younger Iraqis tend to evaluate the invasion not by its intentions but by the political order it produced.

The lesson is not that Iran is Iraq. It is that today’s moral certainty can become tomorrow’s regret. If one generation condemns its predecessors for misjudging 1979, it should consider how future Iranians might judge this moment.

War is not only a strategic choice. It is a historical one.