Revolutionaries out, Republicans in? The Illusion of Regime Stability in Iran

Authoritarian regimes are brittle.

Much of the discussion surrounding the aftermath of the Israeli and U.S. strikes against Iran’s nuclear and missile personnel and facilities, as well as regime leaders in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, has centered on whether or not the Islamic Republic will endure.

Although it is impossible to predict the fate of the theocratic dictatorship in Iran, instability and dramatic change in the nature of the government seem likely given historical precedents.

Consider this passage from Battlegrounds, pp. 337-339, written in 2020:

The IRGC and mullahs in Tehran are in a weakened position. The country’s infrastructure is deteriorating. The corruption of the bonyads and the IRGC-controlled companies are a further drain on the economy. Iranians with the means and opportunity are leaving; the country is experiencing a massive brain drain. Approximately 150,000 educated Iranians emigrate abroad every year, costing the country up to $150 billion annually. Pressure on the regime to focus on nation building at home instead of destruction abroad may mount, as it did during the widespread demonstrations of 2018, 2019, and early 2020. It was not an unprecedented reaction to the diversion of resources to the military. During the oil boom of 1973–74, vast expenditures on military hardware instead of investments in industry, agriculture, and education led to resentment of the Shah’s military establishment.

Revolution in Iran can be sudden and violent. The Iranian regime today has created conditions that are analogous to 1979. The Shah fell, in part, because the economy was collapsing, corruption was rife, military spending was excessive, and efforts to develop political alternatives to his rule were stifled. The Shah thought he had escaped historical dangers of porous borders, hostile neighbors, and internal divisions. He had not. There are earlier historical precedents for the regime’s problems. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the rulers of the declining Safavid dynasty governed their empire through a system that balanced theirs and their military’s power against that of the clergy. The clergy sometimes shifted its allegiance between the regime and the merchant class. Today, the Supreme Leader finds himself in a position redolent of that of his monarchical predecessors. As the economy worsens, clerics and Iranian citizens increase their criticisms; Khamenei has responded by tightening his grip on Qom, which, in turn, strengthens the clerics of Najaf, who adhere to the quietist tradition and oppose the rule of the jurisprudent, or velayat e faqih, which underpins Khamenei’s power. Khamenei has to prevent internal opposition, defend against those he has provoked, and continue the pursuit of his messianic vision to export the revolution. Paradoxically, he and his fellow revolutionaries may have created political, economic, social, and military conditions similar to those that led to the demise of both the government they overthrew and the empire they want desperately to restore.

The tension between religious tradition and secular modernity is also not new. The Shah’s suppression of the Shia ulema (scholars of Islamic sacred law and theology) contributed to his fall. The revolutionaries’ brutal repression of republicans who prefer secular representative government to theocratic authoritarianism may also generate growing internal opposition. The Guardian Council’s denial of approximately seven thousand candidates for parliamentary elections in 2020 made clear that the revolutionaries remained unwilling to grant political space to the reformers. The Shah was unable to reconcile tensions between the traditional and the modern, the religious and the secular, the rural and the urban. The Supreme Leader faces the same dilemma.

The Iranian people may tire of and reject velayat e faqih. The concept is not inherent to Iranian culture. There are signs that Shia clerics of the quietist tradition in the Iraqi city of Najaf and the Iranian city of Qom are increasingly critical of clerical rule, and those criticisms are inspiring others. As Shiism’s preeminent Marja’, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, entered his ninth decade and Ayatollah Khamenei was well into his eighth, it was not clear how their successors might influence clerical rule in Iran.

It is possible that the Iranian regime can evolve such that it ceases its permanent hostility toward the United States, Israel, its Arab neighbors, and the West. Although, since 1979, the Iranian regime has proven consistently hostile and the revolutionaries are ascendant, the Iranian regime is not a monolith. Also, the IRGC and the Iranian regime are particularly vulnerable to a concerted multinational effort to force them to choose between Continuing their murderous proxy wars or behaving like a responsible nation. The United States and other nations can encourage them to choose the latter if we implement a long-term strategy to defend against the Iranian regime’s aggression, and force Iranian leaders to make a choice.

As mentioned in the last post, The Danger of Historical Narcissism in U.S. Policy Toward Iran, “any change in the nature of the Iranian government will come from Iranians.” But given the regime’s hostility to the United States and our allies, Washington should evaluate its policies, actions, programs, and initiatives based on whether they contribute to or detract from the desired change in the nature of the theocratic dictatorship that has caused so much suffering in Iran, the Middle East, and across the world.