Flipping the Script: Why Tehran Should Welcome the Regime Change Narrative
Amid a destructive war – and now a welcome, if fragile, two-week ceasefire – can the Islamic Republic and the United States see eye to eye? Perhaps, if Iran flips the script and welcomes regime change on its terms. After threatening Iran with genocidal war crimes that included attacks on civilian infrastructure, President Trump announced at literally the eleventh hour that a short-term deal had been struck with the Islamic Republic to avert doomsday. In advance of the deadline Israeli had already struck several bridges and threatened railways across the country. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi announced that the Strait of Hormuz would reopen under the coordination of the Iranian armed forces, but that issue remains unresolved in light of the continued Israeli bombing of Lebanon. Despite its limitations, the ceasefire, brokered with the assistance of Pakistan and China, gives all parties a chance to address other thorny issues and move toward a lasting peace.
The war on Iran has intensified patriotic sentiment among an already nationalistic society. To win lasting public trust, however, the regime will need to adopt a fresh vision to define itself and its role in the region. Only then does any peace plan stand a chance of success.
In his speech to the American nation, President Trump stated that the war’s end was never about regime change – an objective whose definition has since changed. Trump claims that regime change has already taken place in the Islamic Republic, given the killing of the country’s top ranks. Meanwhile, Israel has consistently maintained that it wants a different government in place. This signals a clear divergence in US-Israeli war aims. Regardless, the fate of the Islamic Republic in the aftermath of this conflict remains a key consideration.
The war did not exactly go as planned. The Islamic Republic has suffered heavy damage to its infrastructure and losses to civilians, including hundreds of children, but America and Israel have encountered a far more resilient foe than anticipated. Despite sustaining a barrage of preemptive strikes and relentless bombardment, the Islamic Republic retains some punch. It appears to have attracted unforeseen sympathy in certain quarters—positioned as the underdog in a fight cast as Armageddon. This was hardly the outcome that many anticipated or hoped for. The ten-point deal proposed by Iran suggests that the ceasefire could yield unprecedented benefits, including recognized control over the Strait of Hormuz and much-needed revenue.
For Americans, to prevent this storyline from taking hold, diplomacy should be given priority over military action to secure compromises on lingering thorny issues such as highly enriched uranium, regional security, and relief for the Iranian people. Humanitarian aid and reconstruction efforts must be insulated from domestic politics and sanctions, as well as supported by the international community. Finally, Iranians should no longer be treated as subhuman in the prevailing international system, kept out of financial prosperity and security through policies that have hurt the ordinary, not the elite. Of course, this outcome also depends on the Islamic Republic’s behavior domestically and abroad.
The regime’s confrontational posture, combined with unreasonable international pressures and expectations, has stymied efforts to reimagine a constructive role for Iran. Some actors have tried to minimize and even eliminate Iran’s legitimate place regionally, not only because of rival nationalist preoccupations, but also because of the Islamic Republic’s ideological excesses and military interventions. However, this policy is short-sighted, as it has sought to deny the obvious: that Iran was, and remains, central to any security or strategic arrangement in the Persian Gulf. It is striking how these arguments even migrated to Western academic circles, where contemporary scholarship on the Persian Gulf has veered toward perspectives that diminish Iran’s historical legacy.
At the same time, the Islamic Republic should appropriate and recast the regime change narrative as a pathway from ceasefire to peace. The state can embrace the underdog image and capitalize on public sympathy to hold public domestic fora for debate; pardon the protestors it has arrested; and invite all Iranians, including the opposition abroad, to national unity in the aftermath of a devastating conflict. It should signal a commitment to creating an accountable state and an inclusive society by broadening economic and domestic political spaces. In other words, Tehran should welcome the regime-change narrative on its own terms and redirect the prospect of peace and prosperity toward all its citizens, not just an entrenched, privileged class bound to the mullah-military complex it has built.
While this framework will fall short of the radical overturning that many deserve or have died for, it is pragmatic and runs counter to current predictions. It is also preferable to a post-war Islamic Republic bent on exacting revenge on many of its citizens, most of whom desire a different political framework. The government can surprise the world again by showing renewed resolve at home and righting at least some of the wrongs committed by the Islamic Republic. It can announce open elections that would allow the participation of political parties, including those based abroad. This war has shown that the state needs the global engagement of its people to restore Iran's international standing by reorienting its domestic agenda. To win that allegiance, however, it needs to allow their involvement and safe participation in shaping the future of Iran. In a more radical move, the state can even rename itself and redesign its flag to signal this transformation and a break with the past, affirming the turn to political inclusion and openness that the country so urgently needs.
Internal dissent remains the regime’s Achilles’ heel. It will never be able to mobilize its most important resource – its people and human capital – without a fundamentally different domestic agenda. The Islamic Republic may believe it has won the international fight in this war, but it can never achieve any kind of lasting victory if it continues suppressing its people. Coercion and crackdowns have not helped but have actually worsened this dilemma.
Flipping the script gives Iran the off-ramp from the adversarial doctrine and philosophy of intolerance that the Islamic Republic cemented after 1979. An ideology built on hate will have inherent limits and can only achieve so much. Eventually, it will give way to moral consciousness. This dynamic was evident in the fall of the Berlin Wall and in Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost policy, both of which contributed to the demise of the Soviet Union.
A postwar Islamic Republic is unlikely to change its foreign policy much, given Iran's geographic encirclement and isolation as a minority ethnic and religious state in the Middle East. But that does not mean conditions won't improve. A more tolerant successor to the Islamic Republic – finally breaking with the violent and misguided priorities of 1979 – can work toward détente with the United States, Israel, and the Gulf Arab states. Now is the time to reorient the regime’s ideological underpinnings and move it away from confrontation.
A different storyline will enable a postwar Iran to work constructively toward a permanent peace and to end its decades-long standoff with the United States, Israel, and above all, its population. Stability in the Persian Gulf and the Levant demands a collective security framework, not arrangements that ignore or target any single state. This new outlook would open the door to improved regional partnerships. It should also prompt the government to create civic space for dissenters by undercutting the security rationale long used to suppress political opposition.
This pivot would finally ferry the region – and Iran itself – from choppy waters into smooth seas.
