Is This the End of the Iranian Regime?

By Judson Berger

Friday, June 20, 2025

 

Lenin may not have ever said that “there are weeks where decades happen,” but we’re passing through another one all the same.

 

As Israel conducts its devastating campaign against Iran’s nuclear and military sites and leadership, the very survival of the country’s theocratic regime is in question.

 

Whether “regime change” is an explicit goal of Israel or, as Benjamin Netanyahu described it to Fox News, a potential outcome of its military operation (or both), the scenario is now openly contemplated. Most recently, Israel’s defense minister said in response to Iran’s strike on a hospital that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei should not “continue to exist.” Reza Pahlavi, Iran’s exiled crown prince and son of the toppled shah, this week declared from afar that the Islamic Republic is “in the process of collapsing” and called for a “nationwide uprising to put an end to this nightmare once and for all.” He claimed that “Iran will not descend into civil war or instability,” citing preparations for “the establishment of a national and democratic government.”

 

Those are ambitious statements. Ayatollah Khamenei, for his part, issued a defiant message on Wednesday, rejecting President Trump’s all-caps demand for “unconditional surrender” and warning that “any U.S. military intervention will undoubtedly be accompanied by irreparable damage.”

 

Trump, who taunted that the supreme leader is an “easy target” but said he’s safe “for now,” is currently prodding Tehran to negotiate, as he weighs a strike. On that debate, National Review’s editorial makes the qualified case for U.S. intervention to take out Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility — but cautions about the many unknowns associated with regime change or regime collapse:

 

It is true that the regime, weakened by Israeli hammer blows, eventually could fall. This would presumably be a strategic boon for the West in taking off the map an inveterate, dangerous enemy that has destabilized the region for decades. But no one could know with certainty what would come next, and chaos and civil war might ensue.

 

“We know through our experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq that ‘regime change’ always looks easier before you get started,” Jim Geraghty writes. (As one administration official told Axios, “It’s the Ayatollah you know versus the Ayatollah you don’t know.”)

 

Of course, the ayatollah we know is . . . really, quite awful (though his health and level of control during the war are a subject of debate). Jim notes, too, the risk of the alternative:

 

There’s a cost to regime preservation, as well.

 

Since the first days of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the men who rule the Islamic Republic of Iran have been a cancer upon the world. The regime is the globe’s foremost sponsor of terrorism, beginning its reign of terror with the hostage crisis and continuing it in the Beirut barracks of American servicemen, the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, the hijacking of TWA flight 847, Khobar Towers, and in the cities of Iraq. They hate Americans and Israelis but don’t care whom they hurt in their global campaign of chaos. The Iranians have bombed a Jewish community center in Argentina, Israeli diplomats driving through the streets of New Delhi, a tourist bus in a coastal town in Bulgaria, a taxi in Bangkok, Thailand. Their “diplomats” have been found supplying explosives to terrorists. It goes well beyond Israel; Iran stands accused of supporting terrorism, bombings, cyberterrorism, planned assassinations, attempted assassinations, successful assassinations, and other mayhem in Albania, Bahrain, Denmark, France, Kenya, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Thailand.

 

NRO has hosted a vigorous debate all week about the merits and demerits of U.S. involvement in Iran, and the proper conditions for it, not to bring about the collapse of the government but to help Israel take out Fordow. (You can read the takes from Phil, Charlie, Michael, Noah, Mark, Andy, Jim, and others.) Andy McCarthy argues that “there is no reason to believe President Trump contemplates more than a lightning strike that destroys Iran’s potential to besiege our nation and our allies with nuclear weapons,” and he notes: “We who favor regime change in Iran as an American foreign policy goal have never favored achieving it by an American military presence.” Michael Brendan Dougherty is dubious that U.S. intervention and all that follows would play out neatly: “I hope that magic button exists, that Donald Trump presses ‘bombs away’ and we get everything we want and nothing we don’t. . . . But I’m not counting on it.”

 

The hopes, as expressed by Pahlavi, for a tipping-point wave of anti-regime protests may also be misplaced. For all we know, Israel’s strikes could serve to inspire at least the short-term appearance of national solidarity inside Iran, giving the mullahs the most gossamer thread of popular will with which to hold together their oppressive syndicate. Trump could swoop in to make a deal, or not.

 

But the question of what comes “After the Ayatollahs,” as Shay Khatiri explored in a 2024 magazine piece that is well worth revisiting in this moment, is one that may have to be answered much sooner than we thought.