Irina Tsukerman
The U.S.–Israeli campaign against Iran has reshaped the regional balance of power in ways that extend far beyond the battlefield. Military degradation of Iranian nuclear infrastructure and leadership networks alters deterrence equations, yet history shows that partial regime decapitation rarely produces clean political outcomes. Iraq after 1991, Libya after 2011, and Syria after the collapse of centralized authority — both after the civil war and in the aftermath of the fall of the Al Assad — all demonstrate the same trajectory. When coercive institutions sustain damage with no replacement, fragmentation is much more likely than liberalization. Iran is entering that historical pattern. The most plausible outcomes range from a Venezuela-style survival model driven by security-sector cohesion to a hybrid system where remnants of the Islamic Republic coexist with semi-autonomous military and economic power centers. Both scenarios extend instability rather than resolve it, creating an environment in which political fragmentation and narrative warfare matter just as much as military capability.
Lessons from the Post-Cold War Transition in Eastern Europe
Iran’s resistance to clean transition rests on the fusion of ideology and structure that defines the Islamic Republic. The regime is not a conventional authoritarian state that accumulated power gradually. It emerged from a revolutionary project that still shapes how its core institutions think and operate. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) exists not only as a military force designed for a specific mission in the Iran-Iraq war, but as the armed guardian of the revolution, embedded across politics, the economy, intelligence networks, and foreign policy. Loyalty inside that system flows from belief as much as patronage, raising the threshold for elite defection and making fragmentation slower and more uneven. Where many regimes fracture along transactional lines, Iran’s fractures are more likely to follow competing interpretations of revolutionary legitimacy.
No comments:
Post a Comment