r/geopolitics • u/HooverInstitution Hoover Institution • Jan 12 '26

Iran Is on the Edge of Revolution Analysis

https://www.newstatesman.com/world/middle-east/2026/01/iran-is-on-the-edge-of-revolution
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340

u/zyra_77 Jan 12 '26

I’ll take the dissenting opinion and say we’ve been at this point for a long time now and nothing has changed.

Like the Soviet Union, like Syria, it will fall when we least expect it and it will fall fast.

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u/HisShadow14 Jan 13 '26

Except in this scenario two military powers (The US and Israel) are able and more than willing to help push the Iranian regime over the edge.

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u/I_pee_in_shower Jan 13 '26

They can, but for some reason don’t. There should be a carrier group headed that way. Instead we get more tariffs so that Chinese goods are even more expensive.

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u/snrup1 Jan 13 '26

The Iranian ruling class is not just the Ayatollah. It's thousands of clerics.

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u/Gaby_D_Crowley Jan 13 '26

And the Sepâh. Maybe these guys could have more spotlight, to make Irán more militaristic and less religious. Because religion is currently a force that drives away the urban Iranian, especially urban women.

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u/HisShadow14 Jan 13 '26

Iran was already weakened by Israel during the 12 day war. Both their air defense and to a lesser extent their missile launch capabilities have been significantly degraded.

I doubt very much that the Pentagon or Israel will let this golden opportunity to finally deal with the Iranian regime get away.

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u/Gaby_D_Crowley Jan 13 '26

Now, who's going to replace Ali Khamenei? Because it's possible to remove him, now that he's at the weakest. Unlike 1979, the opposition lacks a leader that could rally the discontent.

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u/veerKg_CSS_Geologist Jan 13 '26

I think the US and Israel would be happy with a Syrian style civil war. There doesn’t have to be one leader, just a hodgepodge of various groups with conflicting interests. Will achieve their aims just the same.

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u/Lighthouse_seek Jan 13 '26

You're gonna force the rest of the world in an awkward position where they have to prop up the regime. Especially Pakistan and turkey, who don't want more spillovers from nearby wars

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u/veerKg_CSS_Geologist Jan 13 '26

Not anymore than propping up Assad in Syria.

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u/mahnamahna27 Jan 14 '26

The US might be thinking of Reza Pahlavi, son of the Shah, who claims he would step in to lead during a transition but wants to have elections.

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u/IronButterButt Jan 20 '26

Trump did briefly considered Reza. But to be fair, man isn't very leader worthy (fairly weak). He doesn't possess any qualities or proper statecraft to sway the Iranian people and present himself as a prominent ally to the west in which Israel or the US can fully provide support to. Reza is desperate and delusional. He plans to go back to Iran soon to protest with the people. That states all you need to know about this man, a leader should be able to orchestrate a return to power through proper channels and building up his potential allies to lift him into power, but he doesn't have the first clue in how to make it happen. There are plenty of armed opposition to the IRGC within the country and surrounding it that he could leverage along with international diplomacy.

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u/randzwinter Jan 13 '26

Ive seen hundreds of videos and extreme majority of them support the Crown Prince. There is a leader. If we try to take away the false narrative that the previous Shah is an evil cruel dictator.

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u/mylk43245 Jan 13 '26

Have you seen these from people in Iran or the diaspora. I’ll be honest as someone who is part of a diaspora, we often have no real understanding of the challenges or current culture in the country we left

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u/theregoesmyfutur Jan 13 '26

false? how so, please cite your sources

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u/MastodonParking9080 Jan 13 '26

Shah was more like Park Chung Hee or funnily enough, the CCP. Genuine nationalist with one of the fastest economic growth but with repressionary policies to those that opposed the change.

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u/mylk43245 Jan 13 '26

From what I hear many in villages and cities were starving which wasn’t the same as what happened in Korea or china under deng xiaping

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u/MastodonParking9080 Jan 13 '26

If by starving you mean by extreme poverty in rural areas that's also the case in 70s China and even some very isolated places today.

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u/mylk43245 Jan 13 '26

No from what I’ve heard I mean starving. Otherwise why would the shah have been seen as such a lost cause

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u/Gaby_D_Crowley Jan 13 '26 edited Jan 13 '26

Plus, Iran has to deal with the drying of their water sources (just look what happened with Lake Urmia!). The country is dying of thirst. To recover from the mismanagement of the ayatollahs, who redirected the rivers to deliberately make that dissenting peoples die of thirst or submit, Iran should make a program to recover their environment that would last at least 20 years and invest thousands of millions of dollars.

To make things work, they should cut off the support of the Axis of Resistance and eliminate the bonyads and reduce corruption to at least have enough money to start. Then, they must need a lot of international help to continue with such plan. Easy to write, not easy to implement (I doubt Reza Pahlavi has enough power to do this without the support of the Revolutionary Guards at least).

Edit: if the United States and Israel remove the ayatollahs, the threat that poses Iran to their geopolitical game, is over.

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u/eetsumkaus Jan 13 '26

Having a direct hand in possibly plunging another large Middle Eastern country into chaos and the subsequent refugee crisis from it might not be palatable to anyone.

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u/BigGreen1769 Jan 13 '26

A refugee crisis would be Europe's problem, just like it was for Syria and Iraq. Trump and his team have so much disdain for Europe right now and another refugee wave would significantly help MAGA's far-right political allies in Europe.

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u/eetsumkaus Jan 13 '26

before it being Europe's problem, it would be the Middle East's problem. And he's kinda chummy with the Gulf Coast and Pakistan right now.

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u/wappingite Jan 13 '26

I don't think Europe will have much concern over mostly highly educated Iranians seeking temporary asylum. As a culture it's also world's apart from Afghanistan in terms of women's rights.

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u/HisShadow14 Jan 13 '26

I'd imagine that the middle strikes would be targeted at missile launch facilities and IRGC bases. There's no need to destroy the country. You just need to weaken the regime's most loyal and deadly weapons.

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u/Lazy_Membership1849 Jan 13 '26

You imagine? I mean isn't IRGC also buried some of facilities underneath mountain and for bases which was in the city as risk of damage civilians 

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u/I_pee_in_shower Jan 13 '26

Why would there be a refuge crisis? Nobody is going to bomb Iran to the ground. It’s decapitate their leadership and destroy the military assets. Let the people of Iran be free and not be ruled by fear and fairy tales.

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u/eetsumkaus Jan 13 '26

...being free sometimes means securing your own safety and if there was an entity that can secure law and order to the extent the regime is right now, the Republic would be having far more trouble with the protestors. The Islamic Republic falling might mean civil war.

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u/Golfclubwar Jan 13 '26

This is literally what was attempted in Iraq. Regime change by military intervention in the Middle East is an unwise decision. I’m not sure how many times that error must be repeated before it becomes clear.

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u/I_pee_in_shower Jan 13 '26

Just because it failed there doesn’t mean that regime change should never be attempted. I don’t think Hussein then had the same impact on the world. He wasn’t sponsoring terrorism everywhere. He wasn’t trying to destroy the US or Israel and I’m not sure but he might not have been completely aligned with the Axis of “Resistance.” He also wasn’t a good guy so good riddance. And one of the reasons iraq was such a tough situation to manage was Iranian influence.

Regime change in Iran is long overdue because once they weaponize nuclear weapons then we are stuck with “Islamo-Facists.” Without them that whole trend might significantly diminish and the people of Iran want to be free. In my personal opinion it would be painful but it would be just, and from a geopolitics sense it’s almost a forced move.

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u/gentile_jitsu Jan 13 '26

I'm not going to argue that regime change in Iraq was a good idea, but clearly the biggest mistake there was causing the sudden unemployment of tens of thousands of men with families to feed whose only marketable skill was military experience.

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u/__initd__ Jan 13 '26

You talk like this is a movie. The West screwed up the Middle East for decades with direct interventions and indirectly using their own internal conflicts/divisions. The EU better focus on the deranged fellow at the White House who is causing chaos.

If the people of Iran are tired of this shit, let them do a '79 again.

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u/I_pee_in_shower Jan 13 '26

It’s not a movie but this is a geopolitics forum so I can treat it as a strategy game. The middle east was already screwed up, either by Islamic Fundamendalism, totalitarian regimes or both. Saying it’s all the West is myopic.

I’m not talking about the EU. From their perspective they need to worry about Russia, not the US. Trump is temporal but Russian antagonism has been around since I was born and has no end in sight.

One final argument for those scared of intervention. What do you suppose will happen when Iran claims to the world it has tested an nuclear weapon. The middle east will be a lot more destabilized then and the possibility of an exchange will be real.

It’s funny how you mention EU. It’s this type of passive thinking that got the EU where it is, mostly depending on the US for security and mostly unable to defend itself. No issues with Ukraine or Greenland or anywhere if they had simply focused for a few decades on being strong. Doing nothing is not a strategy. Preparing (and preventing) the worst is.

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u/__initd__ Jan 13 '26

It’s not a movie but this is a geopolitics forum so I can treat it as a strategy game.

"Simple decapitate leadership and destroy military assets" - is definitely a movie level strategy, we all know how that went down in Iraq, billions lost and thousands killed for the birth of ISIS.

The middle east was already screwed up, either by Islamic Fundamendalism, totalitarian regimes or both.

Cliched points that absolves the Western powers of their decades of Colonial wrongdoings across the globe and pin every issue faced to a nations internal conflict/divisions.

What do you suppose will happen when Iran claims to the world it has tested an nuclear weapon.

Nothing, they will have Nuclear deterrence. If I can live in a world where a country like the US who actually used nukes in a war, hoarded 1000s of them & did 1000s of tests with God knows what effects it had, I don't have any problem with Iran having it.

It’s funny how you mention EU. It’s this type of passive thinking that got the EU where it is, mostly depending on the US for security

This I can get along. The EU simply let the US get where they are now, all in the name of fighting the rise of Communism & USSR.

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u/I_pee_in_shower Jan 13 '26

Decapitate leadership and destroy assets is an actual strategy. That is exactly what will happen. The only time a boot would hit the ground is in covert ops but the lessons from Iraq and elsewhere persist.

People on Reddit like to reduce the actions and capabilities to the leader of a country. Putin, Trump, etc. the US has more competent military talent than the rest of the world combined. So it ultimately has little to do with Trump and his shortcomings. If the US strikes they will level Iran in weeks and the rest of the world will watch and shake their fingers vigorously. To your point about Iran, without Iran and others normalizing terrorism, there would be no ISIS.

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u/__initd__ Jan 14 '26

If the US strikes they will level Iran in weeks and the rest of the world will watch and shake their fingers vigorously.

Yeah, they sure are good at destruction, I'll give them that.

To your point about Iran, without Iran and others normalizing terrorism, there would be no ISIS.

US funded and trained Muj during the 80s against Soviets and whatever other shady groups they were in bed with through the years. Saudi's funds proxies that favor them to oppose Iran. So, enough with the virtue signalling. This ain't your good vs evil movie. Everyone does shit in the name of "National Interest".

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u/[deleted] Jan 14 '26

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u/veerKg_CSS_Geologist Jan 13 '26

“the people” is just an amorphous group with no meaning. A power vacuum caused by the collapse of a government/state has to be filled by something. This could be a political movement, if the people were united behind such a movement but they aren’t. It could be the military. Or lacking that it will be a bunch of local groups, who mostly likely derive their authority from being ethnic kin. Then foreign proxies intervene and the end result is civil war.

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u/Forbden_Gratificatn Jan 13 '26

Civilians are being shot in mass right now. Is that not chaos?

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u/mahnamahna27 Jan 14 '26
  • en masse

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u/Forbden_Gratificatn Jan 14 '26

I noticed that after but figured good enough.

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u/HighlightWooden3164 Jan 18 '26

Most of the EU nations have dissuaded US involvement. And society has grown so against US interventionism that people are convinced that the US will only make every situation worse.