As Israeli missiles struck Iranian territory and Tehran fired back, the Middle East veered closer to a full-blown regional war. For the first time since the 1980s, the Islamic Republic faced a direct military assault from another regional power that targeted not only its military assets, but the symbolic and political heart of the regime itself.
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Today, that war is paused under a tenuous ceasefire, and despite the hopes and near hysterical levels of speculation, the regime remains in power. Iran’s rulers may have survived this round, but their legitimacy is more fragile than ever. A tightening of its grip at home and the launching of internal purges to root out alleged Israeli collaborators is certainly on the horizon, if not already underway. The leadership will try to showcase its military resilience but underneath lies a deepening crisis and serious governance challenges remain. While Iranians demonstrated unity against the unprecedented Israeli and U.S. strikes, the war raised urgent questions about the regime’s survival and Iran’s evolution.
The immediate trigger was military. On June 12, Israel launched strikes deep into Iranian territory, followed by U.S. attacks on June 22 targeting nuclear sites. The Trump Administration framed the operation as a necessary step to “permanently eliminate” Iran’s weapons capabilities. In typical fashion, Trump followed up the strike with a promise to “Make Iran Great Again,” implying that regime change was the goal.
But on June 24, Trump reversed course and announced a cease-fire. The terms are vague and the enforcement mechanism unclear. What is clear, however, is that Iran’s political and military infrastructure remains largely intact. The idea that a decades-old regime could be brought down from an Israeli aerial campaign without boots on the ground or domestic support has once again proven to be fantasy.
The Islamic Republic is not a fragile dictatorship held together by a single man. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s health has long been the subject of conjecture, but the regime has built-in mechanisms for succession. The Revolutionary Guards remain powerful, deeply embedded, and invested in the system—if not their own survival.
Yet survival is not strength. The war exposed a regime unable to protect its own cities or citizens from foreign attack. The Islamic Republic is more isolated and heavily sanctioned. It has spent decades portraying itself as a guardian of sovereignty, but its projection of power and defense strategy has proved hollow. That failure has opened new space not just for criticism, but for imagination.
For years, Iranians have mobilized to protest what they don’t want: clerical rule, corruption, and repression. But in this moment of crisis, a more difficult and essential question of what Iranians want and who gets to decide is resurfacing.
That answer cannot come from exiled monarchs or foreign leaders. It must come from within. The Woman, Life, Freedom protests of 2022 offered a glimpse, as the most diverse and widespread protests in Iran’s modern history. The Iranian diaspora responded with unprecedented energy, organizing rallies and proposing blueprints for a post-Islamic Republic transition. But much of that momentum faltered, in part due to the re-entry of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the former Shah, who is again echoing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Nentayahu in his call for Iranians to “rise up.”
The path forward doesn’t lie in restoring monarchy, nor in a foreign-brokered government-in-exile. It lies in the hard, deliberate work of building a representative system that reflects and includes the full spectrum of Iranian society across ethnic, religious, regional, and gender lines. It means prioritizing transitional justice over revenge, and institutions over personalities.
Iranians know the perils of externally driven regime change. In 1953, a U.S.- and U.K.-backed coup toppled the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, restoring the Shah and burying Iran’s early experiment in parliamentary democracy. In 1979, a revolution for freedom was hijacked by a theocratic elite. In both cases, Iranians lost control of their future to opportunists who promised salvation and delivered repression.
Iranians have also long feared the prospect of a Syrian-style civil war, Libyan-style state collapse, or foreign intervention masked as liberation. These anxieties are not merely historical abstractions or distant lessons drawn from the broader Middle East. They are actively reinforced by the country’s ongoing experience of international sanctions and economic isolation. Decades of sweeping sanctions have eroded the economic foundations of everyday life, hollowed out state capacity, and left a broken social contract.
The war may be on hold. But the reckoning is far from over. The Iranian state is bloodied but intact, and will certainly seek a way out, possibly through a Trump-led deal that secures its survival, curbs further Israeli attacks, and brings long-awaited sanctions relief. But any diplomatic resolution abroad must be matched by a reckoning at home.
What’s at stake is not just foreign policy but political agency. The challenge ahead for Iran is to imagine a future not built by strongmen or imagined by external actors, but on pluralism and new governance that derives its legitimacy from the people.