The Regime-Change War Built an IRGC State

The U.S.-Israeli war did not open Iran for an externally directed transition. It concentrated authority inside the military-security institutions built to preserve the country under attack, while the opposition promoted abroad proved unable to convert recognition, money and access into a credible political organization inside Iran.

The United States and Israel began the war with a theory of political collapse. Kill the supreme leader, eliminate senior commanders, destroy military and civilian infrastructure, intensify economic pressure and invite Iranians to overthrow what remained. The expectation was that removing figures at the top would sever the connections holding the state together.

Five months later, Iran had demonstrated the opposite. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and numerous senior political and military figures were dead, but the state retained succession, operational command, diplomatic capacity and the ability to wage a complex regional war. Iran’s institutions did not wait for one individual to reconstruct the chain of authority. The system redistributed decision-making through structures designed to survive precisely this kind of attack.

That outcome was predicted in March. Our analysis of the war’s structural misreading argued that decapitation would not create a more moderate or negotiable Iran. It would eliminate experienced political intermediaries, reward the institutions controlling force and reorganize the state on more militarized terms.

Reuters’ April investigation now supplies substantial evidence for that prediction. Wartime power had concentrated around the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Supreme National Security Council and the supreme leader’s office. Mojtaba Khamenei remained formally at the apex, but people familiar with internal deliberations described him as legitimizing decisions developed through collective security institutions rather than imposing policy alone. Reuters found no major fracture capable of collapsing the state.

The war did not remove authority. It changed where authority was produced.

Decapitation Rewarded the Institution Built to Survive It

The IRGC entered the war with one decisive institutional advantage: it had prepared for the death of its commanders.

Before the February 28 attack, the Guards had delegated operational authority down the hierarchy. Deputy Defence Minister Reza Talaeinik said each command figure had designated replacements extending three levels below, allowing successors to assume duties immediately. Individual units could continue operating according to previously established plans instead of waiting for instructions from a surviving national commander.

This “mosaic” structure was developed over nearly two decades, partly from Iran’s study of the rapid collapse of Iraqi command during the 2003 U.S. invasion. The lesson was straightforward: a military organized around a small number of indispensable headquarters could be paralyzed by decapitation. A dispersed system with autonomous provincial and operational units could absorb losses and continue fighting. Reuters reported that the Guards used this structure to maintain missile and drone operations despite the deaths of successive senior commanders.

The arrangement carried risks. Decentralized officers operating under general instructions could miscalculate, exceed political intentions or widen the war. The Guards were not internally homogeneous, and Reuters identified factional, personal and strategic differences within the institution. But sources close to the organization described it as more unified under external attack, not less.

Decapitation therefore selected for the institution most capable of surviving decapitation. Political and clerical centres lost experienced figures, offices and communication channels. The IRGC lost commanders but retained an operating doctrine for replacing them.

The attacks rewarded organizational redundancy, delegated force and security-first decision-making. Those were IRGC strengths.

The Supreme Leader Became a Legitimating Centre

Mojtaba Khamenei inherited an office with enormous formal authority. Iran’s constitution gives the supreme leader command of the armed forces, the power to appoint the IRGC commander and senior military leadership, authority over war and peace and responsibility for approving Supreme National Security Council decisions. The office did not become ceremonial merely because power moved toward the security institutions surrounding it.

But formal authority and operational command are not identical.

Ali Khamenei had spent more than three decades becoming the undisputed arbiter among Iran’s clerical, political, economic and military centres. His authority came not only from the constitution but from accumulated relationships, appointments, institutional knowledge and the ability to decide which faction would prevail in a dispute.

Mojtaba inherited the office after being severely wounded in the strike that killed his father. He had not developed an equivalent independent position. Reuters reported that he communicated through IRGC aides and limited audio channels, had not appeared publicly and owed his elevation substantially to Guard support. By late April, insiders described him as endorsing outcomes forged through security-sector consensus rather than overruling the institutions managing the war.

This does not mean clerical power disappeared. Mojtaba remained a necessary source of constitutional and ideological legitimacy. Important decisions still passed through the supreme leader’s office, and the security leadership continued to govern in the name of the Islamic Republic rather than declaring a formal military regime.

The change was more specific. The office shifted from being the undisputed producer of final decisions toward becoming the institution that ratified, coordinated and legitimized decisions produced through the wartime security apparatus.

The clerical centre survived. Its dependence on the military-security coalition increased.

The Security Council Became the Wartime State

Iran’s Supreme National Security Council was structurally suited to become the centre of this new order.

Article 176 of the constitution assigns the council responsibility for setting defence and national-security policy within the supreme leader’s general directives, coordinating political, military, intelligence, economic and social activity and mobilizing state resources against internal and external threats. Its members include the president, heads of parliament and the judiciary, foreign, interior and intelligence ministers, senior armed-forces commanders, the head of the IRGC and representatives appointed by the leader.

The council is therefore not merely a military body. It is the institutional point where war can reorganize the whole state around security.

Reuters reported that the wartime leadership emerging through the council incorporated the IRGC, the supreme leader’s office and surviving political intermediaries. IRGC commander Ahmad Vahidi was identified as the pivotal operational figure and was present at senior meetings. Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi remained the diplomatic face of negotiations. Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, a former Guard commander, acted as a conduit among political, military and clerical elites.

This arrangement was collective without being pluralistic. It gathered institutions together, but the balance within the coalition favoured the organizations controlling military operations and internal security. Reuters reported that the IRGC drove both war strategy and major political decisions, while Mojtaba Khamenei functioned as a convening and legitimating figure.

Civilian figures did not disappear. Araqchi’s negotiating role, Qalibaf’s political weight and President Masoud Pezeshkian’s elected office still mattered. Their influence operated inside the wartime consensus rather than outside it. When Pezeshkian apologized to Gulf governments for Iranian attacks, he faced Guard opposition and partially retracted his remarks, illustrating the reduced room available for civilian initiatives that conflicted with military strategy.

The new structure should not yet be treated as permanent. A wartime council can lose authority when a war ends, and factions currently unified by external attack may divide over reconstruction, negotiations and economic policy. But the war has given the security institutions experience governing collectively, controlling information and determining which diplomatic concessions are politically survivable.

Temporary power can become institutional habit.

“Moderation” Lost Its Material Basis

Western reporting often describes the result as Iran becoming more “hard-line,” as though ideological temperament changed independently of the war.

The material sequence runs in the other direction.

Iran entered renewed talks with the United States in February while Washington was assembling military forces in the region. Foreign Minister Araqchi said an agreement was within reach if diplomacy received priority. Iran offered to discuss nuclear restrictions, enrichment arrangements and sanctions relief while refusing demands to surrender its missile programme. Four days later, the U.S.-Israeli attack began.

The strike delivered a political lesson inside Iran. Negotiations had not prevented war. Remaining below the nuclear threshold had not prevented war. Previous restraint after Israeli and American attacks had not prevented war. The death of senior figures demonstrated that participation in diplomacy did not protect negotiators, institutions or leadership from a decapitation campaign.

Accommodation therefore lost credibility not because every Iranian suddenly adopted the same ideology, but because the strategy failed at its stated purpose. It did not secure sanctions relief, protect sovereignty or prevent attack.

The security faction could point to the bombing and argue that Western diplomacy had functioned as pressure conducted beside preparations for war. Figures favouring compromise now had to explain why the institutions they proposed negotiating with had killed the country’s supreme leader while talks were active.

This is the political terrain created by the attack. The IRGC did not simply defeat “moderates” in an internal debate. The attacking powers destroyed the material argument those politicians needed to make.

Calls for moderation continued, particularly through Araqchi’s diplomacy and regional mediation. But the acceptable boundaries of negotiation were now defined by institutions that viewed resistance as the reason the state had survived. That dynamic was already visible in the earlier analysis of Iran’s deterrence strategy: moral appeal could not protect the state from an adversary committed to coercion.

Regime Change Had No Organized Replacement

The U.S.-Israeli theory required more than weakening Iran’s existing institutions. It required a political force capable of replacing them.

Reza Pahlavi appeared to offer that force from abroad. He possessed international recognition, access to Western politicians, diaspora fundraising networks and the symbolic inheritance of the monarchy overthrown in 1979. During the opening phase of the war, he declared that Iranians had asked him to lead a transition and that he had accepted the responsibility. His reception at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March marked the peak of his visibility.

Visibility was mistaken for organization.

Reuters’ July investigation found no demonstrated mass movement inside Iran prepared to take control if the existing state collapsed. Pahlavi told Reuters that he communicated with leaders of more than a thousand groupings across labour, academic, religious and ethnic constituencies. Reuters could not independently determine how many such groups existed or what operational capacity they possessed.

That evidentiary limit must be preserved. An inability to verify clandestine networks inside a heavily policed wartime state does not prove that no networks exist. Nor does organizational weakness mean Pahlavi has no support. A large online survey cited by Reuters found that approximately 48 percent of respondents viewed him favourably, though polling under authoritarian conditions is difficult and favourability does not establish willingness to accept his leadership of a transitional state.

A political alternative requires more than name recognition. It needs cadres, communication systems, local authority, labour and community relationships, a programme for state continuity and a method for resolving disputes among rival constituencies. It must be capable of governing ministries, distributing food and fuel, preserving public services and preventing armed fragmentation after the collapse it anticipates.

Reuters found no verified apparatus of that scale.

The regime-change project offered a recognizable face where it needed an organized social force.

The Diaspora Could Not Substitute for a Domestic Base

Pahlavi’s strongest infrastructure existed outside Iran.

A private group of 28 Iranian-American business figures, whose companies were said to hold a combined market value exceeding $1 trillion, discussed supporting his campaign. Fewer than ten reportedly contributed more than $3 million. The money funded security, travel, payroll, media work and transition planning. Some donors also arranged meetings with senior corporate and U.S. political figures.

This network supplied resources and access. It did not create political organization inside Iran.

Some donors became dissatisfied with Pahlavi’s response to Trump’s threat to blast Iran “back to the Stone Ages,” his handling of violent or abusive conduct by radical supporters and his failure to unite opposition factions. One donor described expecting a “return on investment.” Pahlavi rejected the idea that benefactors could dictate his political mission.

The exchange exposed the limits of diaspora financing. Wealthy backers could pay for a campaign, build media visibility and introduce Pahlavi to officials. They could not manufacture authority among Iranians living under bombing, sanctions and state repression.

The organized opposition also remained fractured. The 2023 Georgetown Coalition, which included Pahlavi and other prominent dissidents, collapsed within weeks amid disputes over leadership and direction. Reuters reported allegations that Pahlavi’s wife had dismissed other participants as “nobodies,” which she denied. His aides and supporters were accused of attacking rival dissidents, including through harassment and violent rhetoric. Pahlavi denied responsibility and told Reuters he was implementing stricter rules for his team.

Reuters also reported physical attacks involving some Pahlavi supporters and a Canadian murder case in which two supporters were charged. The investigation found no evidence that Pahlavi directed or participated in those acts. That boundary is essential. The relevant political fact is not personal culpability but the movement’s inability to discipline its own factions while presenting itself as the vehicle for a national transition.

Pahlavi’s dependence on foreign intervention sharpened the problem. He had previously opposed external military action but later argued that foreign force was necessary to “equal the playing field.” He continued to describe Iranians as the boots on the ground, yet his proposed opening depended on a foreign attack powerful enough to break the existing state.

That relationship weakened the distinction between Iranian self-determination and an externally produced succession process. The more his route to power depended on American and Israeli force, the more his legitimacy became tied to the states bombing the country he proposed to govern.

The War Strengthened the State It Was Meant to Break

The two outcomes developed together.

Inside Iran, a pre-existing state with ministries, armed forces, security networks, provincial institutions, supply systems and diplomatic representation reorganized around wartime survival. Its military-security leadership gained authority because it continued operating after senior figures were killed.

Outside Iran, the promoted replacement possessed media recognition, donor wealth and political access but lacked a verified domestic apparatus capable of assuming state functions.

One side had institutions without liberalization. The other offered liberalization without institutions.

The United States and Israel acted as though destroying the first would conjure the second. Instead, the attack transferred power within the existing state toward the institutions least vulnerable to bombing and most hostile to foreign pressure.

This was not merely a failure to identify the correct opposition leader. It was a failure to understand state power. Governments do not consist only of presidents, clerics or televised figures. They reproduce themselves through organizations capable of issuing orders, enforcing them, collecting information, distributing resources and surviving personnel losses.

The IRGC had those capabilities. Pahlavi’s movement had not demonstrated them.

The war therefore produced a double defeat for the regime-change strategy. The intended target became more cohesive around security authority, while the externally advertised replacement remained divided and external. Iran’s ability to preserve leverage over the Strait of Hormuz further demonstrated that the state had retained strategic coordination rather than dissolving into a vacuum.

Militarization Was a Result, Not an Iranian Mystery

Iran’s increased militarization should be criticized for what it means internally.

Greater IRGC authority can narrow political participation, strengthen surveillance, expand repression and reduce the ability of independent labour, feminist, ethnic, student and democratic movements to organize. A security state empowered by war does not limit itself automatically to resisting foreign attack. Institutions built to identify external threats can apply the same logic to dissent at home.

But that criticism becomes dishonest when it removes the war from the causal chain.

Research across political systems has repeatedly found that external threats favour centralization, military expansion and repression. Governments facing threats to territorial integrity gain stronger arguments for concentrating resources and removing institutional veto points. Those gains often persist after the immediate crisis passes.

Iran is not an exception to this pattern. It is an unusually direct example.

The United States planned attacks on individual leaders and considered regime change before the war. Trump publicly suggested replacing the government. Israel and the United States then killed Iran’s supreme leader and senior commanders while demanding that Iranians overthrow the surviving system. The character of that decapitation campaign was clear from the first day, as Spark Solidarity argued in Khamenei Killed.

Under those conditions, authority moved toward the forces capable of detecting attacks, replacing commanders, launching retaliation and suppressing efforts the state interpreted as collaboration with the aggressor.

This does not make every IRGC policy necessary, legitimate or permanent. It explains why the institution gained power. Treating that outcome as proof of an inherently militaristic Iranian character reverses cause and effect.

Washington and Tel Aviv did not observe Iran’s militarization from outside. They supplied the threat environment that accelerated it.

Demilitarization Requires Ending the Threat

The IRGC’s wartime authority may outlast the immediate conflict. Security institutions rarely surrender new powers simply because the event used to justify them has weakened. Command relationships, emergency procedures, economic controls and intelligence systems can become permanent features of the state.

But permanence has not yet been established. The wartime coalition could fracture over negotiations, reconstruction, succession, economic policy or the distribution of military and civilian authority. Araqchi, Qalibaf, Pezeshkian and other surviving political figures retain offices, constituencies and institutional resources. The supreme leader’s constitutional authority remains intact even where his practical independence is constrained.

The future balance will depend heavily on the external threat.

As long as U.S. and Israeli attacks remain active or credible, the IRGC can present its expanded authority as the condition of national survival. Every new strike validates its warnings. Every demand for unilateral Iranian disarmament reinforces the argument that the West seeks vulnerability rather than peace. Every externally promoted regime-change campaign allows domestic repression to be presented as counterintelligence.

This is why conditional solidarity does the empire’s work when it demands that Iran dismantle the institutions defending it before the attacking powers end the assault. Criticism of repression inside Iran remains necessary, as the politics of Iran and contradiction already demonstrated. But independent Iranian political space cannot expand while foreign states are killing leaders, destroying infrastructure and openly searching for a replacement government.

Demilitarization cannot be ordered from the cockpit of a bomber.

It requires reducing the material conditions that make military authority indispensable: ending attacks, removing regime-change threats, lifting coercive sanctions, recognizing Iranian sovereignty and creating enforceable security guarantees.

Washington demanded that Iran become less militarized while conducting the war that made military authority the basis of national survival.

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