After decades of repression, war, and regional intervention, the regime’s survival strategy is reaching its limits—and the crisis facing it today is fundamentally different from the crises of the past.
There is a fundamental difference between saying that the Iranian regime must eventually be overthrown and saying that it is now trapped in the predicament of overthrow.
The first has been a political reality for decades. The second describes the regime’s present condition.
Since June 1981, when the regime closed the remaining avenues for political competition and entered an era defined by mass executions, repression, and systematic violence, its survival has depended on suppressing its opponents rather than resolving the crises that produced opposition in the first place.
For decades, however, the regime managed to survive. It repeatedly adapted its methods, shifted its tactics, exploited international circumstances, and used crises to postpone its reckoning with the Iranian people.
That period may now be coming to an end.
The regime today appears to be approaching what can be described as the “predicament of overthrow”: a situation in which the mechanisms that once prolonged its survival are increasingly contributing to its vulnerability.
From the necessity of overthrow to the crisis of survival
The overthrow of the regime has been a political necessity since it eliminated meaningful political pluralism and embarked on a systematic campaign of executions and repression.
But necessity is not the same as imminence.
For more than four decades, the regime survived despite repeated waves of unrest, organized opposition, international isolation, economic crises, and internal power struggles.
The Iranian people and organized resistance also survived.
That resistance represents a historical struggle whose significance, as history unfolds, may become increasingly apparent. The crucial point is that the regime never succeeded in eliminating the forces challenging its rule.
Instead, it repeatedly sought new mechanisms for survival.
One of the most important was the strategy of exporting its ideology and conflicts beyond Iran’s borders.
“Exporting reaction”: a strategy for regime survival
From the beginning, the regime’s leadership understood that its political model could not easily coexist with a restless Iranian society demanding freedom and political participation.
A document associated with the Islamic Republican Party in the early 1980s argued, according to accounts from the Iranian opposition, that the revolution would be suffocated if it remained confined within Iran and therefore had to be “exported.”
The concept became a cornerstone of the regime’s subsequent strategy.
The regime’s leadership used the Iran-Iraq War not merely as a military confrontation but also as a means of mobilizing society, suppressing dissent, consolidating power, and pursuing its broader regional ambitions.
The war continued for eight years despite its enormous human and economic costs.
The regime repeatedly presented continuation of the conflict as a matter of principle, even as the costs mounted. The war became an instrument through which the leadership could postpone confronting the internal contradictions threatening its rule.
This was not simply a foreign-policy strategy. It was a survival strategy.
War became an instrument of internal control
The regime’s insistence on continuing the war demonstrated how external conflict could be used to sustain internal repression.
As long as the country was presented as being under existential threat, dissent could be portrayed as betrayal, repression could be justified as national defense, and political opposition could be treated as an enemy of the state.
The Iranian resistance repeatedly warned that the regime was using war and regional expansion to preserve itself.
The argument was straightforward: a regime unable to resolve its domestic contradictions would seek to export them.
This logic later appeared in different forms through the regime’s regional networks, military interventions, and support for armed groups beyond Iran’s borders.
For years, these policies appeared to give the regime strategic depth.
But they also created enormous vulnerabilities.
When the strategy reached its limits
The decisive question is not whether the regime has faced crises before. It has.
The question is whether it can still use the same mechanisms to escape them.
The experience of the final phase of the Iran-Iraq War provides an important historical example.
After years of insisting that the war would continue, the regime ultimately accepted a ceasefire when the military and political costs became unsustainable.
The Iranian resistance argues that the advances of the National Liberation Army of Iran, including major operations in the final phase of the war, contributed to creating the conditions in which the regime was forced to retreat from its previous position.
Khomeini famously described accepting the ceasefire as “drinking the poison,” a dramatic acknowledgment of the depth of the reversal.
The lesson was significant: even a regime that presents retreat as impossible can ultimately be forced to retreat when the mechanisms sustaining its strategy become liabilities.
Today’s crisis is different
The current predicament is different from the crises of the 1980s, 1990s, or even the major upheavals of later decades.
The regime is no longer confronting a single crisis that can be managed through repression, war, economic concessions, or changes in personnel.
It faces multiple interconnected crises.
Its economic foundations have deteriorated. Social discontent has become persistent. Repression has failed to eliminate political opposition. Internal divisions have become increasingly visible. And the leadership has had to rely more heavily on its military and security apparatus to maintain control.
Most importantly, the regime’s traditional strategy of survival is producing diminishing returns.
Repression creates further resentment.
Regional intervention generates additional costs and vulnerabilities.
Economic mismanagement deepens social discontent.
And attempts to consolidate power increasingly expose divisions within the ruling establishment.
The result is a vicious circle: the measures taken to preserve the regime increasingly intensify the conditions threatening its survival.
A regime at the end of its strategic road?
This is why describing the present situation merely as another “crisis” understates what is happening.
The regime has survived many crises because it was able to move from one survival mechanism to another.
Today, however, the question is whether there is another mechanism available that can fundamentally change the equation.
The strategy of exporting conflict cannot indefinitely compensate for domestic legitimacy.
Military power cannot permanently resolve political grievances.
Executions cannot eliminate the causes of popular revolt.
And administrative reshuffles cannot resolve a structural crisis of legitimacy.
The regime may still possess considerable coercive power. It can still arrest, execute, censor, intimidate, and deploy its security forces.
But coercive capacity should not be confused with political stability.
A government can remain powerful while simultaneously becoming more fragile.
The resistance factor
The persistence of organized resistance is therefore critical.
For decades, the regime has attempted to portray organized opposition as eliminated, marginal, or incapable of challenging its rule. Yet the continued existence of resistance networks and recurring popular uprisings has repeatedly contradicted that narrative.
The Iranian people have demonstrated that repression has not erased their desire for political change.
The central issue now is whether popular discontent can converge with organized resistance to create a sustained challenge that the regime can no longer contain.
That is what makes the present moment different.
The question is no longer simply why the regime should be overthrown. That question was settled long ago by its record of repression, executions, corruption, and systematic denial of political freedoms.
The question is whether the regime has entered a phase in which its own survival mechanisms are accelerating its decline.
The beginning of the end?
The history of the regime shows that it has repeatedly survived by transforming crises into instruments of control.
War became a tool of survival.
Repression became institutionalized.
Regional intervention became strategic depth.
And political exclusion became the foundation of an authoritarian system designed to prevent any meaningful challenge to its power.
But every strategy has a limit.
When the cost of maintaining a strategy becomes greater than the benefit it provides, the strategy itself becomes a source of crisis.
That appears increasingly relevant to Iran today.
The regime is not merely facing another period of instability. It is confronting the accumulated consequences of decades of policies designed to postpone, rather than resolve, the fundamental conflict between an authoritarian ruling structure and a society demanding profound political change.
That is the meaning of the predicament of overthrow.
It does not mean that the regime will disappear automatically or overnight. It means that the political equation sustaining it is changing—and that the very tools it has relied upon for decades may no longer be sufficient to save it.
The regime has repeatedly bought time.
The question now is whether it has finally run out of time.
