Regime Change in Iran Already Happened Three Months Ago
a song of Iranian oil fields
Imagine if aliens pointed a big laser at the United States and told its leaders to denounce the 2nd amendment, or else face annihilation. Bear with me here: how might different groups respond?
Some would suggest that this reinforces the need for the 2nd amendment, in case people are called on to resist alien occupation. I think this is mostly wishful thinking, but I respect the fighting spirit.
Some would threaten the aliens in return. This would probably be unwise (recall: they have a big laser pointed at us), but I wouldn’t want to just let aliens push us around either.
Others would negotiate with the aliens. Democrats might say: hey, we’re more liberal on guns than the other guys, can’t we compromise? Some (like me) actually do want the 2nd amendment repealed forever, so the aliens could see us as good faith negotiation partners.
Still, Democrats probably wouldn’t just come out against the 2nd amendment, because doing so would be politically suicidal. Alien lasers or no, a party isn’t just going to forfeit every foreseeable election and their ability to ever influence society again. If they did, it wouldn’t be great for the aliens either, since they’d rather be negotiating with the guys who are less crazy about guns.
The aliens should consider all of this too, if they’re rational actors. They’re not threatening to vaporize an entire country just for fun; more likely, they’re hoping to get something out of it. The point of a threat is usually to extract some concession. But being the recipient of a threat can cause people to act in unpredictable and irrational ways, which makes getting those concessions less of a cakewalk.
This is more or less how I think of Iran-Western relations, except with the West taking the aliens’ place. If you can resist the urge to nitpick at the ways this is disanalogous, your baseline understanding should be that there is a moderate faction of the Iranian elite, one constrained by various domestic and existential pressures. Them (or their Western counterparts) being discredited or pushed too hard empowers the more hawkish factions on both sides, which could culminate in bloody war. If you have strong opinions about Iran policy – or if you’d just like to copy my opinions, which I’m fine with – I would implore you to consider the conflicting pressures faced by the current regime:
They need to avoid decisions that might help elect Trump – for example, anything that might incur strikes on Iranian oil fields. Iran is so fucked if Trump wins that they may even be trying to assassinate him. Trump has reasons to be measured towards Iran, but he or his state department could conceivably roll the dice on regime change. Even if the chance of that is low, Iran has an interest in Democrats being in charge of foreign policy, since the Republican foreign policy establishment is literally an existential threat to it.
They (the reformists) need to avoid decisions that might get their opposition (the hardliners) elected. Iran does have elections, however flawed, that require pandering and management of public perception, just like our grownup elections in the West. There are third rails preventing reformists from appearing too soft, and they can get really excoriated by the local press if they’re insufficiently nationalistic.
They need to avoid decisions that might upset Ayatollah Khamenei, the highest authority in Iran (exceeding even the president). Iran has a dizzying system whereby various official bodies seemingly appoint and oversee each other’s members, but in practice, the head honcho (not his official title) is the Supreme Leader (his actual official title). Every relevant decision, if it’s not made directly by him, is made transitively or with his approval – including his replacement after he dies. Since the main oversight bodies are stacked with loyalists, tradition and self-preservation are the only checks on his power.
They need to avoid decisions that might alienate their few remaining allies, including their proxies. Ironically, Iran struggles with terrorism, and they probably don’t want to invite even more terrorism by crossing the wrong people. But also, if their proxies serve any legitimate security purpose, then they’d obviously want to preserve their proxies.
They need to protect their own interests generally. Every state, including Iran, has a legitimate interest in prosperity, security, and fair treatment by the rest of the world. Iran also has interests which are illegitimate and which sabotage their other goals, but that doesn’t completely negate the ones that are fair.
Some of these points clearly conflict with each other, posing a delicate balancing act that any state would struggle with. The good news is that if your favored policy is to annihilate Iran, then there’s lots of ways this can go wrong and lead to pointless slaughter. But the bad news is that if you’re sane, then there’s lots of ways this can go wrong and lead to pointless slaughter, and anything that can be done to avoid it – including electing Kamala Harris in November – becomes a humanitarian priority.
Israel, whose political culture has its own perverse incentives favoring hawkishness, seems open if not eager for war with Iran. These subtle signs bear the form of the Israeli press, the current prime minister, and the once and future prime minister all calling for regime change. That’s just from this month.
Looking at the U.S., mainstream figures in the Republican foreign policy establishment have recently called for the military option against Iran. I shouldn’t leave out Trump’s contribution:
As you know, there have been two assassination attempts on my life … If I were the president, I would inform the threatening country, in this case Iran, that if you do anything to harm this person, we are going to blow your largest cities and the country itself to smithereens.
Iranian dissidents who live there also fear all-out war. This could really happen.
My fear is that these decisions won’t be made intelligently. Trump doesn’t understand the complexities of Iranian politics, having made choices as president that only radicalized the Iranian electorate, making confrontation more likely. Netanyahu may return the favor by striking Iran’s oil fields, which could rattle the global economy and influence the election to Trump’s benefit. If regime change seems inevitable, Iran may roll the dice on acquiring atomic weapons – since countries who relinquish their nuclear arsenals tend to get invaded – ensuring the very outcome we wish to prevent.
Dealing with Iran risks setting off all manner of other traps and vicious cycles that hasten confrontation, and possibly the regime’s collapse. The behavior of its adversaries – who are unscrupulous enough to do things like this purposely1 – should be understood through this lens. Since Iran is perceptive enough to pick up on all this, it should color our understanding of their behavior too.
Even if you read the Iranian regime differently, you shouldn’t entrust its overthrow to its most bitter enemies. Regime change is at best a tool, and at worst, a goal. Decisions that historically backfire and result in mass death shouldn’t be made by people who are just so desperately giddy to make them:
What should we do instead? Despite its grievances, Iran has breached longstanding regional and international norms, and should therefore be contained. We can’t fully trust them and we can’t fully be hands-off towards them. But we can at least manage them through shared interests.
We have an interest in propping up moderates and enticing them into not building nukes. If the Iranian economy recovers and their security improves under the rule of moderates, then Iranians will want to elect more moderates. Moderates will then gain more influence domestically, and if all goes well, it’ll be an endless asymptotic climb towards progress. They probably won’t ever be secular and liberal, but at least they’ll be harmless on their own.
Plus they’ll produce some Fields medalists, from all those oil fields. Iran has a relatively high-achieving population, which the regime is absolutely desperate to lure back home. To that and other ends, under their newly inaugurated (reformist) president, Iran has tried to soften its image. Maybe he’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but I’ll trust the Iranian diaspora on this: stunningly, over 90%2 of them vote for the lesser of two evils in their presidential elections. It seems they’ve been rewarded, as the new president will come up with obviously fake justifications for not being tougher on Israel:
This stands in contrast with his predecessor, who would just casually threaten to annihilate Israel. Did I mention that same predecessor died in a suspicious helicopter crash right as tensions were bubbling up? It’s truly remarkable how the president of an enemy country just happened to die by complete accident, coincidentally while he was starting to destabilize the region. Israel denies involvement, but they are absolutely capable of sophisticated assassination plots. Plus, the official explanation is that the helicopter crashed due to bad weather, which everyone knows the Jews control too.3
If Israel did in fact orchestrate the death of Iran’s last president, then they’ve already accomplished regime change. Iran hawks might treat reformists and hardliners as two sides of the same coin, but reformists are obviously saner – and, again, widely perceived that way by diasporic Iranians, who presumably operate with a stronger background in the subject of their own country. Whatever forces conspired to crash that helicopter, Iranian leadership is now warier, and we should all be safer as a result.
To preserve all of our options towards Iran, the scale can’t be tipped towards only one option, especially the one that’s riskiest and bloodiest. Even assuming, generously, that one day we’ll be forced to topple the Iranian regime, that decision shouldn’t be placed in the hands of hardliners – whether on their side or ours.
Not to be deceptive here: reporting as of today suggests that Saudi Arabia is against attacks on Iranian oil infrastructure because it could invite similar attacks on them from Iran’s proxies.
This is the most recent election for which there was data, but it’s still telling. The final margin of victory was about 59-40 – not quite a landslide by Iranian standards – showing how skewed international votes are towards the moderates.
If my read on the Iranian regime is wrong, then there’s a chance they killed their own president just to deescalate. The more you’re an Iran hawk, the more this theory makes sense, since under that paradigm the reformists are controlled opposition.