In early February, according to The New York Times and other outlets, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convinced U.S. President Donald Trump that airstrikes could help catalyze an anti-regime rebellion within Iran. But after the Israeli and U.S. militaries launched a war on the Islamic Republic at the end of the month, eliminating Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other key regime figures, the Islamic Republic did not collapse. Instead, internal pressure appears to have consolidated it around hard-line elements.

It didn’t have to be this way. The protests that erupted in Iran in late December—one of the country’s most serious waves of unrest since the 1979 Islamic Revolution—were only the most public illustration of a process of internal change that had been gaining momentum. The regime was under severe economic strain and faced profound popular discontent. Even after a January brutal crackdown on demonstrators, the government remained very fragile. In response, it had already begun to loosen some socially repressive policies and seek a deal with the United States that would exchange military and nuclear advancements for sanctions relief.

But instead of accelerating that change, the U.S.-Israeli war set it back. Khamenei’s death disrupted Iran’s evolution and provided the regime with an opportunity to consolidate. Paradoxically, the external pressure meant to topple the Iranian regime has helped preserve it.

Before the recent war, the Iranian regime had been suffering from a legitimacy crisis. Voter turnout for Iran’s March 2024 parliamentary election barely topped 40 percent, the lowest since 1979. The selection of the relatively moderate Mahmoud Pezeshkian as president suggested that the regime knew it needed to respond to public discontent. Later that year, Tehran paused implementing a stricter hijab law, and by late 2025, Iranians had become increasingly willing to flout regulations, with women appearing unveiled in public and socializing in mixed-gender groups. According to a November 2025 Reuters report, Iranian officials and analysts claimed the regime was altering its policies because it feared public anger. Pressure for change, in other words, had become strong enough to shift the regime’s tactics.

But these shifts were not enough to avert mass protests. Starting in December 2025, hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets in response to unbearable economic misery. In 2025, the rial lost half its value, and inflation crept up to nearly 50 percent. The World Bank forecast a 2.8 percent contraction of the economy in 2026. Tehran was able to quell the protests with unprecedented violence, but Iran’s failing infrastructure, visible corruption, and economic frailty remained. Staying the course would only continue to erode Iran’s internal stability. The Islamic Republic would have to change the regime’s ideology in order to preserve it. (A genuine ideological........

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