Military campaigns by external powers, combined with psychological warfare against authoritarian regimes, can be highly effective in weakening morale, encouraging dissent, and creating instability. However, if poorly calibrated, it may also generate excessive excitement and emotional overreaction among the population, ultimately exposing opposition networks to the regime’s security apparatus.
In highly totalitarian systems, emotional mobilization without sufficient operational security, discipline, and organizational protection can unintentionally strengthen the regime rather than weaken it.
A real-world example from Iraq illustrates this danger clearly. During Saddam Hussein’s rule, the Iraqi National Congress radio broadcasts into Iraq, operating from Kurdistan in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War and Saddam Hussein’s defeat in Kuwait, frequently reached young Iraqi Army officers, including some at middle and relatively senior ranks. Motivated by fiery anti-regime messaging, several crossed into Kurdistan at enormous personal risk and volunteered to organize coup attempts or destabilize the regime from within their military units. Yet in many cases, we advised them to quietly return and abandon such plans. We understood Saddam Hussein’s extraordinary surveillance capabilities and the vast network of informants embedded throughout the military and Iraqi society. The probability that these officers would eventually be exposed, arrested, tortured, and executed was extremely high.
Over time, we learned that even successful psychological warfare must remain carefully measured and controlled. Excessive enthusiasm and impulsive action can become a strategic liability when confronting highly organized totalitarian systems. Authoritarian regimes frequently exploit emotionally driven opposition movements to identify, penetrate, and destroy underground networks before they become operationally effective. A tragic example was George H. W. Bush’s 1991 call for the Iraqi people to rise against Saddam Hussein. The appeal contributed to a massive popular uprising in southern Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan, during which Shiite rebels and Kurdish Peshmerga forces seized control of 14 out of Iraq’s 18 provinces. However, under the eyes of the United States and its coalition allies, Saddam Hussein was ultimately able to crush the revolt. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed, tens of thousands of Shiite rebels fled toward the Saudi Arabian desert seeking refuge, and millions of Kurdish civilians fled toward Iran and Turkey.
This historical lesson is directly relevant to understanding why regime change did not occur in Iran despite years of protests, sanctions, economic hardship, and anti-regime sentiment. Destabilization, demonstrations, weakening army morale, and fragmenting state authority may all contribute to political pressure, but they are not equivalent to regime change itself. Massive demonstrations and civil unrest do not automatically overthrow regimes; rather, they create conditions that may eventually lead to regime change if other decisive factors emerge.
Over the years, I came to ask a fundamental question whenever discussions of regime change arose: “Show me the tank that will enter the palace and remove the dictator, then we can talk about regime change.” In other words, no regime truly falls unless the coercive institutions protecting it collapse, defect, or are physically defeated.
The Arab Spring provides important historical precedents. In both Egypt and Tunisia, millions of demonstrators filled the streets demanding the removal of long-standing dictators. Yet the decisive factor was not the demonstrations alone. What ultimately determined the outcome was the decision of the military establishments in both countries to abandon the sitting presidents. The armies concluded that they no longer had a future tied to the regimes and therefore aligned themselves with the population rather than suppressing them indefinitely.
This decisive shift never occurred in Iran. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the ideological iron fist of the Islamic Republic, remained loyal to the Supreme Leader and preserved the regime’s power structure. Unlike conventional national armies, the IRGC is not merely a military institution; it is an ideological security apparatus deeply intertwined with the survival of the regime itself. Its leadership, economic interests, intelligence networks, and religious legitimacy are directly tied to the continuation of the Islamic Republic. Therefore, the Iranian regime retained its most critical pillar of coercive power.
Historical experience demonstrates that authoritarian systems built on ideological loyalty, overlapping intelligence agencies, surveillance networks, and paramilitary organizations are exceptionally difficult to overthrow through demonstrations alone. While sanctions, political warfare, economic crises, cyber operations, and information campaigns may weaken and destabilize the regime, they do not necessarily produce decisive political transformation.
TRUMP IRAN DEAL: IT’S NOT A VICTORY IF THE REGIME SURVIVES
In fact, prolonged destabilization without a decisive mechanism for removing the ruling structure can instead evolve into civil war, state fragmentation, militia warfare, humanitarian collapse, and regional instability. The experiences of Iraq, Libya, and Syria demonstrate the dangers of weakening state authority without a stable replacement structure or a decisive shift within the regime’s coercive institutions.
The Iranian case ultimately reinforces a central historical lesson: regimes rarely collapse solely because populations demand change. Successful regime change usually requires a decisive fracture within the state’s coercive institutions, particularly the military, security services, or ideological enforcement structures. As long as the IRGC remained unified, loyal, and willing to suppress opposition through force, the Islamic Republic retained the capacity to survive even severe political, economic, and social crises.
Entifadh Qanbar is a former Spokesman for the Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq and a Doctoral candidate at the Institute of World Politics.