For nearly half a century, Washington has treated the Islamic Republic primarily as a problem to be managed: Contain its nuclear ambitions, deter its proxies, sanction its institutions, disrupt terrorist networks, and periodically negotiate when escalation appears dangerous. That framework is increasingly inadequate. The more consequential national-security question is no longer simply how the United States should deal with the Islamic Republic while it survives, but what political and security landscape will emerge if the system begins to disintegrate.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, Washington — now led by the Trump administration — still has not fully absorbed one of the central lessons of modern national security: Political Islamism is not merely a regional ideology; when institutionalized by a state, it can become an engine of transnational instability.
Iran’s catastrophe was produced by an especially destructive historical convergence. The revolution of 1979 brought together two ideological currents that otherwise appeared irreconcilable: Revolutionary Islamism, ultimately dominated by Khomeinism, and radical currents profoundly influenced by Marxism, anti-capitalism, and Third World revolutionary politics. Their alliance did not survive intact, but their combined assault on Iran’s previous political and social order helped create the revolutionary environment from which the Islamic Republic emerged. The collision of revolutionary Islamism and communist-inspired radicalism helped devastate Iran; over time, the world discovered that the political theology of the revolutionary Shiite cleric could prove at least as destabilizing as the revolutionary doctrines once associated with Marx and Engels.
Khomeinism subsequently attempted something far larger than governing Iran. It sought to transform Shiite political identity into a revolutionary project transcending national borders. The regime institutionalized the language of martyrdom, sacred violence, revolutionary resistance, and messianic expectation while constructing organizations capable of projecting influence throughout the Middle East. Inside Iran, the state promoted what its founders called “pure Muhammadan Islam,” while religious superstition and ideological conformity penetrated public institutions. Abroad, Tehran developed a political theology in which history itself appeared to be moving toward an apocalyptic confrontation.
The regime even constructed mass religious spectacles around this worldview. The enormous Arbaeen pilgrimage has been promoted not simply as a religious observance but as an instrument of ideological mobilization and transnational Shiite identity. In competition with the symbolic power of the Hajj, the Islamic Republic has invested heavily in transforming Arbaeen into a vast political-religious theater — an ideological spectacle intended to demonstrate the demographic and emotional power of revolutionary Shiism. Religion, geopolitics, and regime legitimacy became deliberately intertwined.
Yet the great irony of the Islamic Republic is that a system obsessed with eternity has proved incapable of governing the present. Its rulers promised revolutionary transcendence but produced economic deterioration, international isolation, social alienation, and recurring political upheaval. The regime now appears trapped by the very mythology it created: after decades of invoking a promised Mahdi and an approaching historical triumph, its leaders confront a population increasingly exhausted by the political consequences of their manufactured messianism. A government that claimed to possess divine legitimacy increasingly relies upon coercion to preserve earthly power.
None of this means that democracy automatically follows the collapse of dictatorship. Quite the opposite. The road to democracy in Iran will be long, rocky, and dangerously uncertain, because the malignant cancer of political Islam has spread far beyond the institutions of the Islamic Republic and across much of the Middle East. Iran could face institutional fragmentation, struggles among armed organizations, separatist tensions, economic paralysis, and contests over control of the security apparatus. Nobody can know what will eventually happen to the monumental symbols — and even the tombs — of Khomeini and Khamenei. The more important question is what happens to a country of nearly 90 million people when the ideological structure that dominated it for almost half a century loses the capacity to rule.
That possibility should command Washington’s attention now. The danger is not merely regime survival; it is uncontrolled regime disintegration. Iran possesses powerful military and security institutions, ballistic missiles, sensitive nuclear infrastructure, and networks of armed partners across the region. A chaotic transition could therefore create consequences extending from the Persian Gulf to Europe and ultimately North America. The Islamic Republic may be weakening, but a weakening ideological state can become more dangerous — not less — when its leaders believe that history, power, and personal survival are slipping from their hands.
There is also a human dimension that strategic analysis cannot ignore. Thousands of Iranian families have mourned relatives killed during successive waves of repression, while executions, imprisonment, and coercion have remained instruments of political control. The accumulated trauma matters because post-authoritarian politics will be shaped not only by institutions but by memory. A society carrying decades of unresolved grievances does not enter political transition as a blank slate. Revenge, justice, reconciliation, and accountability can become competing forces almost overnight.
President Donald Trump has questioned why Iranians do not return to the streets. But American policymakers should ask another question as well: What signals has Washington itself sent to Iranian society? Why should ordinary Iranians believe that Washington is committed to fundamental political change when, at moments of profound internal confrontation, they have repeatedly watched American governments return to negotiations with the very establishment they are being asked to challenge? Once political credibility is lost among a population, declarations from abroad cannot easily restore it.
This is precisely where American strategy remains unresolved. Washington has developed sophisticated policies for sanctions, deterrence, nuclear negotiations, and counterterrorism, yet official American policy still does not rest upon an explicit doctrine of regime change in Iran. That may reflect understandable concerns about Iraq, military intervention, and the dangers of engineering another country’s political future. But refusing to impose a government on Iran is not the same thing as refusing to prepare for the possible collapse of the government already there.
THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC IS CRUMBLING. IT’S TIME FOR THE CIA TO FINISH IT OFF
Preparation should therefore begin before crisis makes preparation impossible. The United States needs a serious interagency framework for Iran’s potential transition: securing nuclear facilities, tracking IRGC and intelligence networks, preventing terrorist operatives from relocating abroad, identifying legitimate democratic actors, protecting regional allies, anticipating refugee movements, and preventing armed organizations from capturing the state. American intelligence must also distinguish between individuals who merely change their rhetoric as the regime weakens and those who genuinely possess democratic credibility.
America must not wait for the morning after the Islamic Republic collapses to decide what Iranian collapse means for American national security. The gravest strategic failures often begin not with a lack of power, but with a failure of imagination. Iran has already paid an extraordinary price for 1979. The United States should ensure that neither the Iranian people nor the wider world is forced to pay another one because Washington prepared only for the survival of the Islamic Republic — and never seriously prepared for its end.
Erfan Fard is a counterterrorism analyst and Middle East studies researcher based in Washington, with a particular focus on Iran, Islamic terrorism, and ethnic conflicts in the region.