A dangerous domino effect has been unfolding somewhat haphazardly across the Middle East over the past two years, gradually eroding Iran’s regional leadership and geopolitical influence. The collapse of the so-called “Shiite axis” began with the decapitation and massive weakening of Hezbollah, the Houthis and Hamas, followed by the erosion of more distant partners such as Venezuela. The regime of the mullahs has thus been shaken regionally as never before. With protests spreading across the country for several weeks now, the question of the survival of the Islamic Republic is openly raised. At stake, ultimately, is the possible liberation of millions of Iranians who have lived for more than forty years under the rule of an aging and sclerotic theocratic dictatorship led by the 86-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The question of possible American intervention in response to the regime’s repression of protesters has also been explicitly raised by Donald Trump in recent days.
A wind of historical revolution
Iran has indeed entered a political and social sequence of rare intensity since the 1979 revolution. Protests are multiplying in many cities, including areas once considered loyal to the regime. Slogans now explicitly target the Islamic Republic itself, symbolic sites such as mosques have been set on fire, and persistent rumors about a possible flight of the Supreme Leader in the event of major destabilization are circulating. All of this creates a climate of profound rupture. For the moment, this sequence is unfolding largely without direct external intervention. Iranians are, for the most part, confronting their own regime alone. This relative autonomy gives the movement particular legitimacy, but it also places the situation in a zone of strategic tension, where two opposing risks now coexist: an American or Western intervention that could delegitimize the internal protest by framing it as a foreign operation, giving the regime a powerful mobilizing argument and fragmenting an otherwise endogenous movement; and, conversely, total non-intervention, which could give the regime’s hard core the time and space to organize systematic repression, radicalize further, bunkerize itself and turn the political crisis into a prolonged security confrontation. Iran thus finds itself caught between two strategic dead ends: interference that discredits and abstention that may condemn the hope raised by the movement. A third parameter, rarely acknowledged but central, must be added: Iran is not a peripheral state. Any major destabilization immediately affects the regional balance from the Gulf to the Mediterranean, from Iraq to Lebanon, and mechanically involves the United States, Israel, Russia and China, even when they claim to remain on the sidelines.
Do not rush to conclusions
The current mobilizations display several new features. They are geographically more diffuse, socially more transversal and, above all, far more explicitly political than previous waves of protest. Where earlier movements mainly expressed social or sectoral anger, today’s slogans clearly target the regime’s very legitimacy, its right to govern and its claim to still embody the nation. This symbolic threshold is crucial: it marks the shift from social protest to political protest, and from political protest to existential contestation — not merely an economic protest about the cost of living, as some on the left are fond of claiming.
Yet such a rupture does not automatically lead to overthrow. The Islamic Republic is not only a regime; it is a dense power ecosystem. It combines a powerful security architecture controlled by the Pasdaran (the Revolutionary Guards) and the Basij (internal security forces alongside the police), structured economic control, a thick ideological apparatus and socially embedded coercive capacity. The Revolutionary Guards are not just a military force: they are a major economic actor, a political network and a territorial power. Religious foundations control entire sectors of the economy. Clientelist networks secure the loyalty of large social segments. This density makes the system resilient even when it is contested. A regime can lose legitimacy without immediately losing control. It can harden, militarize and close itself off rather than collapse — which is precisely what the current repression suggests. It can also sacrifice parts of its political apparatus in order to preserve its security core. This capacity for authoritarian recomposition is what makes any overly rapid reading of Iran’s possible tipping point misleading.
A now largely shared rejection of the regime
What has changed profoundly is the nature of the rejection. Protest no longer targets only corruption, inflation, sanctions or shortages. It targets the regime as a form of power, as a structure of domination, as a closed political horizon. The founding promise of 1979 — justice, independence, dignity — is now perceived as an official fiction contradicted by daily reality.
For a young, educated, urbanized and connected society, aware of its relative decline, the Islamic Republic appears as a blocked, corrupt and archaic system incapable of producing social mobility, prosperity or symbolic recognition. This rejection is therefore social, but also cultural, generational and identity-based. It reflects the growing gap between a power frozen in a revolutionary liturgy of the 20th century and a society already living in the 21st. This rupture is all the deeper because it is not, for now, carried by a structured alternative ideology: it expresses what is no longer acceptable without yet clearly articulating what could replace it.
But not necessarily a desire for monarchical restoration
This is why the illusion of a simple alternative — the return of the monarchy and nothing else — does not work easily. Reza Pahlavi, the son of the Shah, re-emerging in the media as an unavoidable figure from his residence in Washington, is a media personality, a voice of exile and a symbol for parts of the diaspora, but he does not represent a consensual internal political solution. His preparation, his 700-page program for the country and the hundred experts around him do give him some credibility and have earned him the support of several opposition movements. Yet he is still perceived by many as an external actor, a product of exile dependent on foreign — mainly American — support, and as the bearer of his father’s authoritarian legacy. The monarchy itself was also a dictatorship, something many Iranians reject as they try to free themselves from decades of authoritarian rule. We will quickly see, if the regime were to fall, whether Pahlavi becomes central or merely one figure among others in a plural opposition that includes liberals, democrats, ethnic movements and civil-society actors. This diversity relativizes any exclusive role for Pahlavi in a transition process.
The Shah’s regime was a modernizing dictatorship, but a dictatorship nonetheless: centralized, repressive, socially unequal, politically closed and supported by a brutal political police. The 1979 revolution was not only Islamic; it was also nationalist, social and anti-authoritarian. It was a rejection of the Shah as much as of the West that supported him. That memory remains alive. There is therefore no major political nostalgia for the old regime, but rather anger toward the current one — which does not automatically produce a credible alternative, even if many still see monarchy as a source of greater stability.
The risks of regime change
Here lies the core of the problem: there is no obvious third way today between an illegitimate but solid regime and a fragile, fragmented alternative. Transitions are rarely controlled. They are often chaotic, violent, hijacked and distorted. The Syrian case is emblematic: the fall of Assad’s regime has not produced democracy so far, but fragmentation, revenge against minorities previously protected by the regime, and the emergence of violent actors recycled into political figures, starting with President Ahmed al-Sharaa. The result is not liberation, but authoritarian recomposition under new forms.
Iran could experience a militarization of power, a post-Islamic security dictatorship, territorial fragmentation or a transition delegitimized by foreign interference. It could also become the theater of internal factional struggles between civilians, military figures, clerics, technocrats and economic clans, producing prolonged instability. The question is therefore not only whether the regime will fall, but what could emerge without producing more violence, more arbitrariness and more external dependence. For now, no internal figure seems capable of federating enough support to embody such a transition.
Iran is thus at a critical moment, but not a simple one. Rejection of the regime is deep, real and massive, but the alternative is absent, fragmented and uncertain. Between an illegitimate yet resilient system, a discredited authoritarian restoration and a transition without a clear bearer, the country of more than 92 million people finds itself trapped in a political grey zone. This is what defines today’s impossible third way: change without chaos, rupture without collapse, transformation without a new form of domination. And it is precisely this absence of a clear path that makes the current Iranian situation both decisive, unstable and potentially dangerous. An American intervention might accelerate the fall of the Islamic regime, but it would offer no clear answer as to what comes after.
