Two months ago, the Iranian regime was at its most perilous state since it came to power in 1979.

Already facing heavy international sanctions, the regime — itself born of a revolution sparked by popular discontent — confronted widespread unrest at home, as anger over dire economic conditions turned into nationwide anti-government demonstrations.

But excitement among regime opponents abroad over the prospect of its downfall quickly turned to horror as the Islamist theocracy launched a brutal crackdown, killing as many as 30,000 protesters, according to some counts.

The massacre showed the regime to be willing and able to do whatever it took to stay in power, even if it meant slaughtering its own people by the thousands.

While regime change is not an explicit goal of the joint Israeli-US military campaign against Iran, both US President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have made clear that they hope the offensive will create the conditions for the mass opposition movement to return to the street and topple the ayatollah rule, this time without being cut down.

But over three weeks into the war, the campaign’s success in creating those conditions is far less clear than either Trump or Netanyahu suggests. And talks announced by Trump on Monday aimed at ending the war indicate that the regime may indeed remain in power, even if the US leader claims regime change has already been effected.

While airstrikes and targeted killings of leaders have weakened the regime materially, they may also be reinforcing its internal cohesion, hardening its capacity for repression, and exposing the absence of any credible political alternative, experts say.

If the Islamic Republic is to fall — with a more welcome replacement taking power — it will require addressing all three factors.

Preconditions for a revolution

Historically, mass protest alone is not enough to bring about a political revolution — what matters more is whether popular unrest translates into cracks within the ruling regime itself. Otherwise, the united rulership tends to suppress opposition.

“There has to be some break in the security and elite apparatus. Without it, it’s difficult to see… almost any regime collapsing,” said Ray Takeyh, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

According to Jack A. Goldstone, Hazel professor of Public Policy at George Mason University, conditions necessary for a revolution to occur include “a fiscal crisis, divided elites, a diverse oppositional coalition, a convincing narrative of resistance, and a favorable international environment.”

Around the height of January’s protests, he assessed that the Islamic Republic was the closest it had ever been to meeting all of those conditions, the main impediment being that the regime’s security forces remained loyal.

As a broad rule, regimes fall when these forces either defect or are defeated on the ground by an opposition force.

But thus far, the US-Israeli campaign has not resulted in any such cracks visible from the outside, and it may have had the opposite effect, bolstering elite and military loyalty to the regime. Nor has it helped a viable alternative leader emerge, demoralizing the opposition and depriving it and any who might conceivably defect of a common point to rally around.

Iran’s January protests were an encouraging indication of approaching regime change, according to Goldstone, who said that a follow-on revolution would have been likely “within a matter of months.”

“The protests had spread to become national: crossing regions, ethnic groups, and even different economic classes,” he said.

While there were not yet defections in the elite and military apparati, the former appeared to be plausible: “There was clearly some fracturing in the political elite,” with some leaders calling for more meaningful negotiations with Washington, serious economic reforms, and the possibility of going in “a more moderate direction” once the 86-year-old supreme leader Ali Khamenei died.

Criticism of the regime’s immense investment in regional proxies had aired in public forums and on national TV in recent years, showing that dissatisfaction with the regime’s focus on fighting the US and Israel rather than dealing with domestic matters was not confined to the streets.

The Islamic Republic’s loss of important cadres and skilled figures, and its eroding political legitimacy resulting from years of purges, also made it especially vulnerable before the war, Takeyh said.

The war has created a new situation in which the leaders of the government and the military are more closely united than at any time in the last dozen years.

The war has created a new situation in which the leaders of the government and the military are more closely united than at any time in the last dozen years.

Rather than accelerate the process of regime collapse, though, the war may have derailed it.

“We were getting to the point where the regime was no longer seen as representing the country… but all of that has been thrown out by the intensity and breadth of the attack,” Goldstone argued. “The war has created a new situation in which the leaders of the government and the military are more closely united than at any time, I think, in the last dozen years… anybody who had a moderate position or who advocated negotiation has essentially had the ground cut from under them.”

He suggested that more limited, surgical strikes against top hardliners, combined with other incentives, sanctions relief, and a pathway back to negotiations, might have deepened internal divisions and emboldened protesters.

Instead, he said, “the remnants of the leadership have solidified around a hardline military government, and the foot soldiers, the guards, the army, and the Basij show no signs of defection or backing down.”

Goldstone’s analysis contradicts Israel’s public insistence that the regime is breaking apart from the inside.

At a press conference Thursday evening, Netanyahu claimed that “we’re seeing cracks” in the regime, both at the leadership level and in field units. “It’s sort of like a hollowed-out, rotten piece of wood that’s holding on the outside, but there’s a lot of rot inside. We’re seeing some defections.”

He was careful to add, however, that while “the regime could change… Is it guaranteed? No. And it is up to the Iranian people in the final accounting to make use of the conditions that we’re [creating], weakening the regime.”

Takeyh also disagreed with the idea that the military campaign had necessarily strengthened the regime.

“The overall odds are… still against regime change, but nonetheless the likelihood is higher than it was before the operation,” he said.

After being weakened, the regime would now need to mount an even more brutal and prolonged campaign of suppression against its own people if challenged internally, he predicted.

“Whether that strategy will work in a postwar period when they’ve been demystified, depleted, and dejected remains to be seen,” he said.

Foreign military intervention can cause or accelerate regime change — but historically, regimes are only defeated militarily in ground campaigns. Air power is not seen as sufficient to weaken a regime to the point where defections become possible, or so that the threat of suppression they pose to opposition groups is neutralized.

Yet Israel has seemingly pursued the idea that its air power can clear enough space for an internal revolt.

In an English-language video statement last week, Netanyahu told Iranians, “Celebrate, and Happy Nowruz. We’re watching from above,” apparently hoping to spark demonstrations despite reported Israeli assessments that anti-regime protesters would be “slaughtered.”

According to a New York Times report citing former US and Israeli intelligence officials, Netanyahu embraced a Mossad plan to spark a popular uprising at the start of the campaign but is now frustrated that those promises have not come to pass. US and Israeli officials now reportedly feel that conditions do not appear ripe for a popular uprising.

The apparent strategy to spark and defend a revolution from the sky is “a novel idea” and a largely untested model, said Alex Vatanka, senior fellow and founding director of the Iran program at the Middle East Institute.

NATO’s 2011 intervention in Libya provided air cover for rebels to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi, but in that case, military forces had partly defected, he pointed out. In Iran, no such conditions exist.

He suggested that Israel’s targeting of regime figures who have experience governing made strategic sense by degrading Iran’s ability to operate with competency in the civilian sphere.

Speaking a day before the IDF struck Iran’s South Pars natural gas field, Vatanka said Israel could target “economic infrastructure, like electricity grid and stuff like that, to accelerate discontent.”

But making life harder for Iranians only exacerbates discontent in an already unhappy population. No matter how miserable you make them, unarmed protesters cannot overthrow the regime so long as those with the weapons remain arrayed against them, in Goldstone’s estimation.

As long as the IRGC, army, and Basij remain organized and loyal, “even an unpopular and unsuccessful regime can survive decades,” he said.

Changing the situation, Goldstone estimated, would only be possible if the military defected, but neither air cover for the opposition nor strategic targeting of the regime is enough to do the job.

Outside force usually hardens resistance instead of breaking it, and without military defections, unarmed protesters cannot overthrow the regime, according to Goldstone’s assessment.

A more likely way for war to break a regime would be a ground campaign severe enough to cause military collapse, yet the idea appears implausible for now.

Kurdish forces or exiles appear unlikely to achieve internal organization. For the US, such an invasion appears politically impossible, as it raises fears of prolonged occupation and insurgency similar to those in Iraq or Afghanistan.

“People [in the US] would rather live with what’s left of the Islamic Republic than put half a million troops on the ground in Iran,” said Vatanka, adding that more broadly, “it’s unlikely that Western populations would support a long, expensive, and difficult occupation.”

For his part, Netanyahu has admitted that a ground component is required, and in his press conference, vaguely left the door open for Israeli involvement in some sort of ground operation to bring the regime down.

“You can do a lot of things from the air, and we are doing, but there has to be a ground component as well… There are many possibilities for this ground component, and I take the liberty of not sharing with you all those possibilities.”

An alternative leader

Even if the Islamic Republic is further weakened, the central question surrounding regime change is not military but political. Beyond degrading Tehran’s military capabilities, neither Israel nor the US has identified a clear alternative ready to replace it.

Iran does have the social foundations to support the eventual emergence of a better political order — a large middle class, literacy, and a demand for accountability — even if the transition would be unpredictable and disorderly. Still, the opposition itself currently lacks a unifying national leader or organizational structure ready to take power, making any expectation of rapid collapse unrealistic.

The absence of a credible political pathway is demoralizing not only to allies but also to the opposition inside Iran, said Vatanka. In his view, any real transition would require someone ready to take risks, absorb losses, and organize people on the ground.

Unlike the rallying around Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979, there is no unified opposition leader in Iran today.

Iran’s exiled crown prince, Reza Pahlavi, “wants to be the leader, but the fact is he’s not on the ground,” Vatanka said.

Revolutionary leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Lenin, Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh, and the Islamic Republic’s own Ruhollah Khomeini all spent years in exile before returning to replace the governments that had forced them out, but circumstances have not yet put Pahlavi in the same position.

Trump has several times downplayed Pahlavi’s aspiration to leadership due to him not having lived in the country since he was a child, and has reportedly referred to him as a “loser.”

A US official told Politico putting him in power would “mean chaos.”

The most plausible candidates for alternative rulers may come not from the opposition, but from within the regime’s technocratic middle ranks — administrators or former officials who know how the state works and can bring enough insiders with them.

They would need to both mobilize what’s left of the regime to end the conflict and signal coexistence with the US and Israel, Vatanka noted.

Figures like Hassan Rouhani or Hassan Khomeini, grandson of the first ayatollah, could play such a role, he suggested, though the decisive figure may not yet be widely known. Revolutionary Guard commanders, by contrast, are “too tainted” by their role in repression, he said.

But with Trump’s administration reportedly negotiating an end to hostilities with Iran’s hardline parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the rise of such a leader may prove more difficult in the short term.

Washington’s engagement raises questions about whether regime change remains a strategic objective for the US. But even if the goal or outcome is limited to weakening the regime enough to force concessions, rather than replace it outright, the postwar regime can still fall.

“If the regime is significantly weakened, in terms of its security apparatus… then when there is the next uprising… it has a greater chance of success than the previous ones,” Takeyh said. “The regime that comes out of this war will be more radicalized… less capable of governing, and more brittle.”

But, he quickly added, “that doesn’t mean it will collapse.”

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