ByMENAHEM MERHAVY

In the opening days of the war, an alluring expectation took hold among

some advocates and analysts of military action against Iran: decapitate 

the leadership, shatter the security apparatus – and the Islamic Republic

 might collapse from within. 

It was an understandable hope. After the mass killings of protesters in 

January, the regime appeared not only brutal but politically exhausted, 

despised by much of its own population and increasingly incapable of 

offering anything beyond coercion.

But hope was never an adequate theory of regime collapse. The Islamic

 Republic did not fall during the war because the conditions that make 

authoritarian systems collapse were largely absent, and because war 

itself made them less likely, not more.

This is not an argument that the Iranian regime is strong, legitimate, or 

secure in the long run. It is an argument that military assault was never 

likely, by itself and in real time, to convert public hatred into revolutionary action.

The war has damaged the regime profoundly. But expecting Iranians to 

bring it down while their country was under bombardment misunderstood

 both the nature of the state and the political psychology of a society at war.

The decline and survival of Iran's regime

This was also the logic of an argument I made in New Lines before the 

war: that Iran’s political condition was one of prolonged decline rather than

 imminent revolutionary rupture. The war has now tested that proposition 

under far more extreme circumstances. 

The regime suffered blows of a kind it had never before endured, yet its 

coercive institutions held. Its survival does not disprove its decay; it shows 

why decay and collapse should never have been confused.

That outcome should not have been surprising. The Iranian people may 

loathe the Islamic Republic; they do not, therefore, welcome foreign attacks

 on their cities, infrastructure, or country.

An external assault blurs the crucial distinction between Iran and the regime

 that rules it. It gives the authorities the patriotic language they have long 

struggled to regain: not the defense of an unpopular Islamic order but the 

defense of the homeland.

The Islamic Republic was never merely a personal dictatorship whose found-

ations would disappear with the death of its leader. The killing of Ali Khamenei ,was a historic humiliation for the regime. It exposed the vulnerability of the ,,

state, shattered the aura of protection around its highest office, and violently

 ended the rule of the man who had overseen Iran since 1989.

But Khamenei was not the regime. Behind him stood the Revolutionary 

Guards, intelligence bodies, clerical institutions, patronage networks, and 

vast economic interests whose survival depended on preventing the system 

from falling.

The rapid succession of Mojtaba Khamenei illustrated this point. His appointment should not be read, as some commentary has suggested, as evidence that 

the war suddenly handed Iran to a more radical leadership. Mojtaba had long

 been discussed as a plausible successor and had cultivated close relations 

with the Revolutionary Guards, which reportedly pressed hesitant clerics to

 approve his elevation.

How the system survives

The war accelerated a process already underway; it did not invent it. More 

broadly, it did not radicalize an otherwise malleable Islamic Republic. It 

exposed how decisively the security establishment already dominated it.

Institutional density explains why hopes for an internal “night of the long 

knives” proved misplaced. Iran’s governing elite is divided, suspicious, and 

far from harmonious. There are rivalries among clerics, commanders, 

technocrats, and families with access to money and power. But division 

does not automatically lead to rupture.

Under military attack, those who benefit from the system have a compelling 

reason to close ranks: If the regime falls, they may lose not merely office but

 wealth, protection, and possibly their freedom or lives. The war did not allow

 competing factions an opportunity to dismantle the system. It gave them a 

reason to preserve it.

Most importantly, the Iranian public had already been savagely disciplined 

before the war began. In January, nationwide protests were met with mass 

killings that human rights organizations described as unprecedented.

The point of such repression is not only to clear the streets at that moment. 

It is to implant fear, disorganization, and uncertainty long afterward: Who 

can be trusted? Who is still alive? Who is under surveillance? Who will risk 

joining a protest that may again be met with live ammunition?

A population can be enraged, bereaved, and deeply opposed to its rulers, 

yet still be in no position to launch an immediate uprising – especially when

 missiles are falling and the security state is mobilized for war.

The regime has also exploited the war to do what authoritarian regimes do 

in moments of external danger: equate dissent with treason. Arrests, 

executions, street mobilization, and accusations of espionage were not 

signs of popular reconciliation with the state. They were instruments for suppressing the possibility that wartime confusion might turn into organized opposition.

In March, the authorities feared economic collapse after the war and 

intensified their crackdown on dissent. This is not the behavior of a 

confident regime; it is the behavior of a frightened one that understands 

how fragile its control may become once the emergency ends.

Distinction matters here. The regime’s failure to collapse during the war 

does not mean that the war strengthened it.

In important respects, the opposite is true.

How the regime might fall

For decades, the Islamic Republic built its regional strategy on the promise 

that its enemies would be fought abroad, through Hezbollah, Iraqi militias, 

the Houthis, and other armed partners, before war ever reached Iran itself.

That promise has been broken. Iran was attacked on its own territory, its 

supreme leader was killed, and its formidable network of proxies could 

neither prevent the assault nor impose a sufficient cost to stop it.

The regime has therefore survived, but it has survived stripped of a central 

claim to competence: that its costly regional architecture kept Iran safe. For 

a state that has demanded enormous sacrifice from its citizens in the name 

of strategic depth, this vulnerability will not easily be forgotten.

The most dangerous moment for the Islamic Republic may thus come not 

during the war, but after it. A ceasefire, if it holds, will deprive the regime of 

the patriotic cover that a foreign attack temporarily supplied.

It will also return attention to January’s dead – to the families who lost 

children, to the unanswered demands for accountability, and to a government that proved capable of killing its own citizens but incapable of protecting the 

country from devastating attacks from without.

Economic relief could sharpen this reckoning. If an agreement brings oil 

exports, unfrozen assets, or sanctions relief, the new leadership will need to 

use these gains to prevent economic desperation from turning into mass 

protest again.

But it faces a trap.

Too little improvement, and the public will conclude that even relief cannot 

rescue a bankrupt system. Too much official celebration, too many promises 

of recovery, and Iranians will reasonably ask why a wealthy country remains

 mired in inflation, corruption, and inequality once the external excuse of 

sanctions has weakened.

At that point, the question may cease to be what America or Israel did to Iran. It may become what Iran’s rulers did to their own country – those still alive, 

and those who inherited the machinery they built.

The Islamic Republic did not collapse because wartime collapse was always

 the least likely form of its undoing. Regimes such as Iran’s rarely fall merely because they are struck hard from outside.

They become vulnerable when fear begins to fade, when economic expectations collide with political corruption, when mourning becomes memory and then accusation, and when a society concludes that a government able to survive

 at any cost can no longer justify the costs it imposes on everyone else.

The war did not bring that moment. It may, however, have brought it closer.

The writer is a senior fellow at the Harry Truman Institute at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.