In a startling turn of events in the Israel-Iran war, six hours after Iran attacked the Al Udeid Air Base— the largest U.S. combat airfield outside of the U.S., and home of the CENTCOM Forward Headquarters — President Donald Trump announced a ceasefire in the 12-day war, quickly taking effect over the subsequent 18 hours. Defying predictions that the Iranian response to the U.S. attack on three nuclear facilities could start an escalatory cycle, the ceasefire appears to be holding. For now.
While the bombing may have ceased, calls for regime change have not. President Trump has backtracked on his comments, but other influential voices have not. John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, said Tuesday that regime change must still happen, “…because this is about the regime itself… Until the regime itself is gone, there is no foundation for peace and security in the Middle East.” These sentiments are echoed by many others to include, as expected, Reza Pahlavi, exiled son of the deposed shah.
Yet for many Iranians, regime change would represent a profound betrayal of their long-held democratic aspirations through peaceful protests. It also raises several uncomfortable but necessary questions: What person or what organizations are ready to govern the day after, and is there a viable roadmap for what comes next?
The answer, according to leading Iran scholars and analysts, is bleak.
“Absolutely no one,” says Hamid Dabashi, professor of Iranian Studies at Columbia University.
“The monarchists and the Mojahedin are positively despised by the overwhelming majority of the Iranian population with no grassroots support,” he adds. “Despite a significant opposition to the ruling regime, it is still widely and passionately popular among many others.”
The vacuum left by the regime’s collapse would not be filled by democratic forces, but likely by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the military organization dedicated to regime control and survival, or violent power struggles.
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