Why Iran regime change has no clear path forward

Nearly half a century has passed since Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi climbed aboard his royal jet at Tehran airport and departed Iran for the last time.

His exit, in January 1979, was officially framed as a holiday — a claim few took seriously.

After 14 months of unrest, the Associated Press captured the moment by calling him “a weeping king driven from his kingdom”.

Within hours, statues of the Shah were pulled down and his image disappeared from banknotes.

Another 26 days would pass before the monarchy finally gave way, and Iran’s armed forces abandoned the throne as the revolution surged forward.

By any measure, it was regime change.

And regime change, as Iran’s modern history shows, can arrive in very different forms.

In 1953, it came through a coup orchestrated by the CIA.

In 1979, the upheaval was driven by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who the Shah had forced into exile in 1964. He went first to Turkey, then to Iraq, before Saddam Hussein, under pressure from Tehran, expelled him from there as well.

From a modest village outside Paris, Mr Khomeini helped direct a revolution thousands of miles away, using telephone calls and cassette tapes.

But he was not summoning a revolution out of thin air.

The Shah’s modernisation drive — the White Revolution of the 1960s — helped speed the growth of a new urban poor, people uprooted from rural life and poorly served by the reforms meant to benefit them.

They were discontented, and they were searching for a language that could give voice to that anger.

Mr Khomeini supplied it. At the same time, many of the country’s intellectuals and secular left believed they could use him to topple the Shah and then build something democratic in the aftermath.

Mr Khomeini’s decisive advantage was clear: as a senior ayatollah — a title marking the highest level of Shia Islamic scholarship — he stood near the top of the ulama, the network of Islamic clerics and legal scholars that had long underpinned Iranian civic life.

A portrait of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution

The Shah’s secularisation campaign had pushed them aside and stripped them of influence over land and education. But it had not destroyed their networks.

Across Iran, in towns and villages alike, mosques and seminaries endured — and the clerics who led them retained the trust of ordinary Iranians in ways the Shah’s state never could.

When the revolutionary moment arrived, in other words, there was already an opposition force inside Iran with organisation, reach and a functioning ground game. It was deeply rooted.

Some 47 years after the Shah boarded that plane — carrying, it is said, a small vessel of Iranian soil — the picture looks profoundly different.

Yes, the United States and Israel have said openly that regime change ranks among their goals — or, at the very least, that they hope Iranians will complete what military strikes have set in motion.

On the first day of the war, US President Donald Trump told Iranians: “The hour of your freedom is at hand.”

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged Iranians to “cast off the yoke of tyranny”, saying the operation would “create the conditions for the brave Iranian people to take their destiny into their own hands.”

It is not as if Iranians lack the will.

Lack of a political alternative

After decades of repression — and the brutal massacre of protesters in recent months — the divide between the regime and the people it says it represents has become impossible to bridge.

Iranians do not need outside leaders to tell them their government has failed them. They know that already.

But wanting change is not the same as being able to deliver it. Bombs and missiles can kill officials and wreck infrastructure.

What they cannot do is produce a political alternative — and in Iran today, no such alternative exists.

The Islamic Republic has spent nearly half a century making sure it does not.

Every spark of organised opposition has been stamped out.

Every reformist current has been absorbed, jailed, or gunned down.

The networks Mr Khomeini inherited in 1979 — the mosques, the seminaries, the coalitions, the organisational machinery — have no equivalent outside the state because the regime has spent decades ensuring that none can emerge.

There is no opposition with a ground game.

There is no figure waiting in a village outside Paris. There is no ulama prepared to turn on the state, because the state and the ulama have, by design, become one and the same.

The regime is not merely entrenched. It is embedded. Its survival does not hinge on any one individual leader.

A woman holds a portrait of Iran’s supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei as people march in support of the Iranian armed forces in central Tehran last month

While Mr Trump has suggested in recent days that his country has, in effect, already secured regime change — citing the number of senior Iranian leaders killed since the war began — few serious observers accept that view.

What remains intact is the same system, the same structures and the same logic of control, only with different faces at the top.

It hardly needs saying that one of those new faces — the Supreme Leader himself — is the son of the man he succeeded.

There is another reason this regime is unlikely to crumble simply because pressure is applied, and it has little to do with ideology. Iran’s political elite and security establishment have nowhere to go.

The Shah’s inner circle had villas on the Côte d’Azur, bank accounts in Switzerland and safe havens in California. When the end came, they fled.

The men who rule Iran now have no comparable escape route.

They are sanctioned, isolated and, in many cases, wanted.

For them, preserving the regime is not just a political choice — it is a personal imperative. They are not only fighting for a system. They are fighting for themselves.

In 1979, a king got on a plane and the system behind him collapsed.

Today, there is no plane on the runway and no replacement waiting in the wings.

That is the difference — and why, this time, calling for regime change is far easier than bringing it about.