Nation versus Regime: Why Iran Is Not Iraq — and Why Political Change There Could Unfold Differently from the Failed Regime Changes of the Past Decades

In Western debates about the Middle East, a powerful narrative has taken hold over the last two decades: regime change inevitably leads to chaos. After the experiences of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, many observers now assume that the collapse of authoritarian systems in the region can only produce fragmentation, civil war, or state failure. From this perspective, hopes for a political transformation in Iran appear naïve at best.

This skepticism is understandable. The interventionist strategies of the early 2000s—associated with figures such as Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Dick Cheney—did indeed leave a trail of geopolitical instability. Military campaigns intended to reshape political orders produced unintended consequences, destabilized entire regions, and severely damaged confidence in externally driven political transformation.

Yet from these failures a new and equally problematic assumption has emerged: that all political upheavals in the Middle East follow the same structural pattern. This generalization overlooks a crucial distinction—one that is particularly important in the case of Iran.

Many states in the modern Middle East are political constructions whose borders emerged from colonial decisions following the First World War. Their state structures were often superimposed upon societies where loyalty to tribe, sect, or region remained stronger than loyalty to the state itself.

In such contexts authoritarian regimes often played a paradoxical role. They repressed society, but they also held it together. Their fall therefore meant not only the end of dictatorship but also the removal of the last institutional framework capable of containing competing groups.

Afghanistan provides a clear example. When centralized authority collapsed, political life quickly reverted to tribal structures. A cohesive national political subject scarcely existed.

Libya experienced a similar dynamic after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi. Regional and tribal power centers reemerged almost immediately, turning the country into a fragmented arena of competing militias.

Iraq’s political order disintegrated after the fall of the Baath regime, exposing deep divisions between Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds.

And Syria’s civil war demonstrated how rapidly a political conflict can fracture along ethnic and religious lines once central authority weakens.

In each of these cases, social pressure operated horizontally—group against group, region against region. The collapse of the regime did not produce a unified revolutionary movement but rather a fragmentation of political order.

Iran represents a fundamentally different case:

Persia is not a recent political construction but one of the oldest continuous cultural civilizations in the world. The Achaemenid Empire in the sixth century BCE established one of the earliest large-scale political orders of the ancient world. Successive dynasties—from the Sassanids to the Safavids—shaped a cultural and historical identity that continues to influence Iranian society today.

The Persian language, a shared literary tradition, and a strong historical consciousness bind the population together across ethnic differences. Azeris, Persians, and many Kurds share a broader Iranian cultural identity. Iran is therefore not a fragile postcolonial state but a historical nation with deep civilizational continuity.

The Islamic Republic, established in 1979, is a relatively recent political structure within this much older national framework. It does not constitute the foundation of the Iranian nation; rather, it represents a political system superimposed upon it—one that many Iranians increasingly perceive as standing in tension with their society.

This historical context fundamentally alters the dynamics of political conflict inside the country.

Where states like Iraq or Syria are vulnerable to horizontal fragmentation along ethnic or sectarian lines, the conflict in Iran has largely taken on a vertical structure: state elite versus society.

Recent protest movements—most prominently those rallying under the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom”—have united students, women, workers, and large segments of the urban middle class. Repression has not targeted a single ethnic or sectarian group but broad segments of the population.

The central message heard repeatedly in Iranian demonstrations is not “we against them” in a communal sense. It is something more fundamental: the ruling system does not represent the nation.

This is why the common argument that demands for political change in Iran are primarily a geopolitical project of the West fails to capture reality. The protests against the Islamic Republic were not organized in Washington, London, or Brussels. They emerged in the streets of Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, and countless other Iranian cities—within universities, workplaces, and neighborhoods.

Over the past decades thousands of Iranians have been arrested, tortured, or killed by the regime. Their families, friends, and communities carry the memory of this repression. The desire for political change is therefore not an external projection; it is rooted in lived social experience.

 The Israel Impact

The same distinction applies to the question of Iran’s foreign policy, particularly regarding Israel.

The Islamic Republic’s aggressive rhetoric toward Israel is often interpreted as evidence that any future Iranian government would inevitably maintain the same hostility. Historically, however, this assumption is far from inevitable.

Before the 1979 revolution, Iran maintained diplomatic relations with Israel and was at times one of the Jewish state’s most significant regional partners. The anti-Israeli stance of the Islamic Republic is therefore less an expression of longstanding Iranian state tradition than a core component of the revolutionary ideology that defines the regime.

Within the political logic of the Islamic Republic, hostility toward Israel serves an important internal function. It acts as ideological glue for a system that derives much of its legitimacy not from democratic consent but from revolutionary identity. The permanent confrontation with Israel is thus not only foreign policy; it is also a mechanism of internal mobilization.

At the same time, recent developments have revealed that this hostility is not uniformly shared across Iranian society. In certain moments of protest, demonstrators have openly expressed gratitude toward Israel—or even toward Israeli leaders—because they perceive external pressure on the regime as weakening the structures that oppress them.

Such gestures do not mean that decades of state-sponsored resentment have disappeared entirely. But they do suggest that anti-Israeli sentiment in Iran is at least partly the product of ideological state propaganda rather than a deeply rooted national consensus.

A future Iranian government would therefore likely define its foreign policy more pragmatically—based on national interests rather than the revolutionary confrontation that has characterized the Islamic Republic.

Geopolitics

Any discussion of Iran must also be placed within a broader geopolitical context. The era of large-scale Western interventionism that shaped the early 2000s has effectively come to an end. The failures of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya demonstrated the limits of attempting to impose political transformation through military force.

These experiences damaged not only the targeted states but also the credibility of external actors seeking to promote political change.

Yet this history also highlights an important distinction. The regime changes of those years were primarily external interventions. The political pressure now visible in Iran, by contrast, originates from within society itself.

 New wave of migration?

Another aspect often overlooked in European debates concerns migration.

Iran possesses one of the largest diasporas in the Middle East. Several million Iranians live abroad today, many of them highly educated professionals, entrepreneurs, and academics who left their country for political or economic reasons.

Historical precedents suggest that political change in such circumstances can produce not only migration but also return migration. After the fall of authoritarian regimes in countries such as Spain, Portugal, and Chile, many political exiles returned home to participate in rebuilding their societies.

A similar development is conceivable in Iran. Political transformation would not only dismantle a repressive system; it could also remove one of the primary reasons why so many Iranians left their country in the first place.

In European debates, dominated by concerns about migration pressures, regime change is often automatically equated with new refugee flows. In the Iranian case, however, the opposite scenario—a wave of remigration by the diaspora—may be just as plausible.

The discussion about Iran therefore suffers from two widespread misunderstandings:

The first is the belief that regime change in the Middle East inevitably leads to state collapse. The second is the assumption that calls for political transformation in Iran are primarily a Western geopolitical project. Both overlook the specific historical and social realities of the country.

The protests against the Islamic Republic were not conceived in foreign capitals but on the streets of Iranian cities. They are carried by students, women, workers, entrepreneurs—and by the families of those who have suffered imprisonment, torture, or death under the current regime.

The demand for change is therefore not a geopolitical strategy. It is an expression of the lived experience of Iranian society.

And this is precisely what distinguishes Iran from many of the failed regime-change scenarios of the past decades.

Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, and Syria were states where the nation itself remained fragile or contested.

Iran, by contrast, is a historical nation governed by a contested regime.

Where no cohesive nation exists, the fall of a regime often leads to fragmentation.
Where a nation exists, a regime can fall without the state collapsing with it.

Understanding this distinction is essential. The lesson of the past twenty years is not that political change in the Middle East is impossible.

It is that the outcome of such change depends fundamentally on whether a society possesses a shared national foundation strong enough to outlast the regime that governs it.