Khamenei gone, now comes the dangerous part: Why Trump must resist regime change trap in Iran

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is dead. The fact that news of his killing has emerged within 24 hours of the beginning of the war shows how autocratic regimes often appear far stronger than they actually are. Their centralised authority projects infallibility and control, but history has repeatedly shown that such systems can fall abruptly like a pack of cards when faced with a formidable external adversary.

Khamenei’s death is particularly startling because this war has hardly come as a surprise. Regional tensions had been escalating for months, diplomatic moves were turning frantic, and military preparations were obvious. That the Supreme Leader of a nation that has never shied away from adopting a confrontational posture fell so easily to an enemy strike underscores the vulnerability of even the most entrenched regimes.

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More troubling, however, are reports of Iranian retaliatory airstrikes extending beyond Israel towards neighbouring Arab states, including Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, with civilian areas being specifically targeted. These countries had largely advocated negotiated settlements and de-escalation — something which suited the Iranian position more than the American and Israeli.

Targeting them risks losing goodwill even among Muslim nations who saw mostly Iran as a victim of the so-called American-Israeli hegemony, thus hardening both public sentiment and political resolve against Tehran. Such actions resemble political hara-kiri born either of panic, miscalculation or, worse, institutional breakdown.

The Iranian leadership may be attempting to demonstrate resolve and raise the stakes, signalling readiness for a prolonged confrontation. A darker, more dangerous possibility is internal fragmentation: the weakening of centralised command structures allowing mid-level ideological commanders to act autonomously, producing chaotic and strategically incoherent decisions.

This uncertainty exposes a recurring dilemma in modern geopolitics: removing a regime is far easier than replacing it successfully. Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya all illustrate the same disturbing pattern. Precision aerial campaigns and targeted assassinations can dismantle leadership structures, but they do not create an alternative political dispensation.

Sustainable regime transformation requires institutions, legitimacy and, most importantly, boots on the ground. Here lies the central paradox of contemporary warfare, especially the one led by the United States. The Americans have mastered what Italian philosopher Umberto Eco, in Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism, describes as “neowar”: a war “based so much on the principles of maximum happiness and minimum sacrifice”, and where “none of our men should die… and… as few enemies as possible should be killed”.

Neowar produces spectacular victories but, more often than not, disastrous aftermaths.

Libya offers the clearest warning. Muammar Gaddafi’s removal was a military cakewalk, but the country became a political minefield soon after. Libya did not democratise; it became far messier and conflict-prone. Iran, a far bigger player in the region geographically and politically as well as commercially, would magnify the impact of such instability exponentially, especially in the global energy sector.

History also suggests that the fall of an autocratic Islamist regime does not necessarily lead to liberal democracy. As author Fareed Zakaria writes in The Future of Freedom, the “Arab world is a political desert with no real political parties, no press freedom, and few pathways for dissent”. As a result, “the mosque became the place to discuss politics. As the only place that cannot be banned in Muslim societies, it is where all the hate and opposition towards regimes collected and grew”.

The aftermath of the Arab Spring demonstrated this dynamic clearly. Popular uprisings removed entrenched autocratic rulers but ended up empowering fundamentalist forces rather than liberal alternatives. Iran may not prove an exception. Public dissatisfaction inside the country is real, but it is largely economic and generational rather than ideological.

Economic hardship, especially following the currency collapse, and declining standards of living have fuelled public anger, while younger Iranians are seen to be resisting Islamist restrictions on their lifestyle choices. Yet, economic frustration does not automatically translate into Western-style liberal aspirations.

For this reason, the expectation that Iran will naturally transition into a liberal democracy, especially along the lines of the Shah’s dispensation before the 1979 revolution, reflects more wishful thinking than political reality. In fact, the Shah’s Iran, too, was hardly benign, particularly from Bharat’s perspective. During the Cold War, Iran aligned closely with Pakistan and supported its military generals during critical moments such as the wars of 1965 and 1971. Nostalgia for that era, therefore, rests on selective historical memory.

For Bharat, the stakes are enormous. After all, about 9.5 million people from the country work in West Asia, sending back $50 billion in remittance annually. Even more significantly, 60 per cent of Bharat’s energy imports come from this region. The country’s energy security, maritime trade routes and diaspora stability thus depend on regional equilibrium. A chaotic Iran disturbs this. This explains why New Delhi has long practised strategic compartmentalisation in the region, maintaining deep ties with both Iran and Israel without allowing one partnership to negate the other.

The larger lesson of a neowar scenario is that it rarely produces the political outcome its architects anticipate. The removal of a powerful figure may achieve an immediate strategic objective, but it often opens a far more uncertain chapter. If escalation continues unabated in Tehran, the Ayatollahs would in all probability be replaced not by moderates but by actors even more radical, fragmented and unpredictable. Political vacuums never remain constant; they are invariably filled by the most organised forces available. And, in the Arab world, Islamist outfits have always been more powerful and organised than others.

A more rational strategy for the US, thus, would be not to go overboard with the Iran project. It should keep its intervention limited to the minimum required actions: neutralising Iran’s nuclear capabilities, re-establishing deterrence and reopening diplomatic channels with those in authority in Tehran post-Khamenei’s death.

The future of Iran, and the region at large, depends less on instant military successes and more on long-term restraint, realism and realpolitik. In matters of geostrategy, some things are better left untouched. The democracy project is definitely one of them. Iran does not need democracy lessons if the people are not ready for them. But it definitely needs order, and it needs the least possible Western intervention. Of course, this must only be after the neutralisation of nuclear threats, if any.

(Views expressed are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)