If the Iranian Regime Falls, What Will Follow?

A sudden collapse of the Iranian regime looks like a real possibility. 

As far as I know, the Israelis have no plans to take out Iran’s spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, but they are systematically dismantling the pillars of state power underneath him. The Ayatollahs are on the run, and the generation that put them into power doesn’t have a ton of support from average Iranians. 

Persia in the 1960s and 1970s was a rapidly developing and Westernizing country. It was the regional power, balancing the less Western-friendly Arab states. The women were treated with dignity and enjoyed the same freedoms as Western women–videos of Iranians living their daily life were not very dissimilar to those from a European Mediterranean city. 

But the regime was toppled by Islamists who were very unhappy with the trend toward Westernization. An unholy alliance between communists and Islamists systematically undermined the regime, and when Jimmy Carter withdrew US support for the Shah due to his repression of the opposition, the regime fell. 

The Shah was right and Carter was wrong. We have been in a low-medium level conflict with Iran for over four decades, and millions died in the Iran-Iraq war because of Carter’s foolishness. The Middle East was destabilized, and progress was set back decades. 

Still, the fall of the Ayatollahs and the reinstatement of a constitutional monarchy — a somewhat likely outcome — does not guarantee an Iran that returns to relative stability. Just as the fall of Gaddafi in Libya led to chaos, that is one possible outcome. The mechanisms of state power are being destroyed, and Iran’s economy has been devastated by sanctions and now war. 

Rebuilding a country is not easy, and reconstituting the institutions of state power is no small task. The country could fragment, and a rump resistance is inevitable. 

It’s clear that millions of Iranians want to be freed from the restrictions of the current regime. 

🚨BREAKING:

Netanyahu is going to interview with Iranian opposition media tonight

We are going for the fall of the Ayatollah 😎 pic.twitter.com/IbsV5AQJAF

— The Uri (@uricohenisrael) June 16, 2025

There is a government in waiting, but if the current regime in Iran falls, it’s unclear whether there will be a government to take over. You need more than a king and ministers; you need police, state institutions, and an economic foundation upon which to build. 

The Islamists will not disappear, and they will retain their small arms and some armor. They will not go quietly into the night. 

Nobody will want to put boots on the ground to restore order, so from where will order come?

The fall of the current government is to be strongly desired, but we can’t let that obscure the fact that if it happens, it will be only the beginning of a long and painful process of rebuilding a country that has suffered nearly 50 years of misrule, decades of propagandized and in some case militarized extremists, and a significant percentage of the country that is made very unhappy by the regime change. 

It’s a mess, and Jimmy Carter was the author of that mess. How we clean it up–if indeed it is we who have to–is a mystery.