The Iranian Regime’s Existential Crisis—and What Migh…
Q&A
The Iranian Regime’s Existential Crisis—and What Might Come After Khamenei
A Conversation With Karim Sadjadpour
February 28, 2026
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Article link: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/iran/iranian-regimes-existential-crisis-and-what-might-come-after-khamenei-trumphttps://www.foreignaffairs.com/iran/iranian-regimes-existential-crisis-and-what-might-come-after-khamenei-trump
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On the morning of February 28, U.S. and Israeli forces launched a joint attack against Iran. They have struck military targets, the residences and offices of Iranian leaders, and sites associated with Iran’s domestic security apparatus and its nuclear program. Iran has retaliated by launching missiles and drones at Israel and at U.S. military installations around the region. U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have both indicated that the ultimate objective of this assault is the toppling of the regime, and they have urged Iranians to eventually take to the streets and bring down their government. Unconfirmed reports suggest that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei might be dead, even though Iranian officials have disputed the claim.
For insight into the significance of these attacks, Foreign Affairs turned to Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Sadjadpour spoke with Deputy Editor Kanishk Tharoor on Saturday morning. The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.
This joint U.S.-Israeli campaign seems rather different in scale and in expectation than what took place in June 2025. It’s very early, of course, but from what you can glean so far, how are Iranians experiencing and reacting to these new attacks?
What we’re seeing is a mix of muted celebrations and the horrors of war. There are videos of people dancing in the streets, people cheering from their balconies as they watch the smoke billow from Khamenei’s compound [which according to satellite imagery was hit by missiles]. At the same time, there are reports of devastating civilian casualties. That includes news of a girls’ school that was bombed with several dozen children killed [in Minab in the south of Iran, according to news reports].
Trump implored people to stay indoors until the bombing stops and then to take back their country. He said this could be their “only chance in a generation.” We will know more in the coming days whether Iranians see this as an opportunity to rise up against the regime or whether they’re too fearful to rise up against the security forces that killed tens of thousands of them last month.
Trump has made regime change a clear goal of this campaign, but he has also claimed that the United States faces imminent threats from Iran. Why do you think the United States and Israel have decided to launch Operation Epic Fury now?
When historians look back at this moment in the not too distant future, they will view this not as a war of necessity but as a war of choice. There was no imminent threat of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons or launching attacks on the United States and its allies and partners in the Middle East. But both the United States and Israel see an opportunity to exploit the weakness of one of their worst adversaries. Iran does not control its own airspace as a result of last June’s war, its regional proxies are decimated, and it’s feeling existential angst as a result of the popular uprising.
Trump also has a personal stake here. In January, on at least nine occasions, he drew firm redlines, insisting that if Iran killed protesters the United States would come to their aid. Trump incited people to the streets during those protests, telling them to go seize state institutions and that help was “on the way.” For Trump, the greatest motivating factor seemed to be his own credibility, more than any imminent threat to the United States.
There are reports of Iranian strikes around the region in retaliation. What kind of response do you expect from the regime? What do you think it is still capable of?
This is an existential moment for a regime that has long been homicidal but never suicidal. What’s paramount for this regime is to remain in power and live to fight another day against the United States and Israel. So they have to make a critical decision, and that is, Do they unleash everything they have against the United States and its partners in the region—a course that could lead to a massive response that triggers the implosion of the regime—or do they retaliate in a measured way in the hope that this operation will soon cease and that they can emerge from the rubble?
Historically, they’ve chosen the path of restraint, because they want to remain in power. It’s too soon to say whether the regime in Tehran will choose to fight back in a meaningful way or whether it might be prepared to offer profound concessions—on the nuclear program, missiles, and proxies—to secure an end to U.S. and Israeli military operations. This regime recognizes that it is no match militarily for the United States, but it doesn’t need to win. It just wants to survive. The question is, What does it see as the key to its survival?
At the time of our conversation, there are unconfirmed reports circulating that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei might already have been killed. If, indeed, a decapitation strike has been or is eventually successful, what do you see unfolding?
Khamenei’s death could result in the regime and its security forces closing ranks in order to survive, or it could serve as the equivalent of a giant cannon blast blowing a hole in a ship, causing the ship to sink and its leadership to bail out to their own skins. The issue with this regime is that it’s one of the loneliest regimes in the world. There isn’t a good exit plan for any Iranian officials. There are very few places in the world where they can go into exile. For many of them, they assume that they must either kill or be killed.
It’s ly that they rush to close ranks behind a new leader, whether a cleric or a Revolutionary Guards commander, rather than allow some greater power transition to take place. But whenever someone who has been ruling for four decades abruptly departs, it creates a power vacuum that could take many years to fill.
Trump and Netanyahu have suggested that their attacks on Iran could soften the country’s domestic security apparatus and make it easier for those opposed to the regime to rise up and overthrow it. Is that a realistic possibility now?
Psychology is a much more valuable prism through which to try to understand this than political science. Iranian society has been traumatized by the events of the last six weeks because the killing was so widespread that millions of families around the country either lost a loved one or knew someone who lost loved ones. And for the last five weeks, people were just waiting to see what Trump was going to do.
Now I think they’re going to continue to wait to see how long this operation continues and what opportunities there might be to rise up. But the regime forces are highly armed, highly organized, and willing to kill to stay in power. And the opponents of the regime, while far more numerous, are broadly unarmed and disorganized. And because of the fact that they’re trying to separate mosque and state, not join mosque and state, it’s not a population that believes in mass martyrdom.
There are other challenges. We know from history that revolutions require two kinds of leadership—inspirational and organizational. Many Iranians both inside and outside the country have coalesced around the inspirational leadership of Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former shah, although certainly not all. The monarchists can be a polarizing movement. It’s not clear to what extent, if any, that movement has organizational leadership on the ground inside Iran.
The paradox of revolutions is that to be viable they need to attract a critical mass of people. But a critical mass of people won’t join the revolution unless they think it’s viable. No one wants to go out and get slaughtered; no one wants to join a losing team. And so the question remains whether protests start to emerge again and whether they snowball. Much will depend on how Iranians feel. Do they believe that the repressive apparatus of the regime has been defanged? They will be watching closely.
Could these attacks engender a kind of rally-around-the-flag effect that makes it actually harder for protesters to galvanize the necessary momentum and support to overthrow the regime?
What outside attacks tend to do is accentuate people’s existing political dispositions. If you’re a supporter of the regime, you have even more reason to disthe United States and Israel and to double down on your support for the regime. But if you’re an opponent of the regime, you blame it for bringing this upon Iranians. As a result of these military attacks, people won’t really switch teams.
If there is any rally-around-the-flag effect, it would be what happened last June, what I described as just a temporary sugar high. Once the dust settles, even if this regime manages to stay afloat, in time the daily economic, political, and social indignities of life in Iran will reemerge. And even if Khamenei is not eliminated, he’s still 86 years old, and Iran will in any case be a country on the cusp of a leadership transition and potentially on the cusp of a political transformation.
In your essay in Foreign Affairs last fall (“The Autumn of the Ayatollahs”), you mapped out various possibilities for change in Iran. How does this military intervention make any of those scenarios more or less ly?
Insecurity tends to benefit security forces, because when power vacuums are introduced it’s usually the men who can mobilize violence who prevail. It’s not writers and intellectuals and human rights activists who rise to the top when power vacuums form in a society.
Around three-quarters of authoritarian transitions lead to another authoritarian form of government. And when those authoritarian transitions are triggered by either external or internal violence, the lihood of democratic transition is much lower. The statistical odds are slim that Iran will transition to a stable representative secular democracy—even if I do believe that Iranian society is ripe for such a change.
As you see this unfolding, what do you see as the worst-case scenarios stemming from this intervention? And what might be a best-case outcome?
A regional war, for one. There are two types of actors in in the Middle East: those who are in the business of building and those in the business of destroying. The Gulf countries surrounding Iran have had very different priorities over the last five decades than Iran has. They’ve sought to become hubs of global finance, transport, and artificial intelligence. And Iran has been in the business of destroying and filling power vacuums and preying on the misery of failed and failing states in the region.
It’s a lot easier to destroy things than to build things. There is a danger of a regional war in which Iran attempts to destroy the positive things that have been built in the Gulf and to go after oil installations to spike the price of oil. Israel is better equipped to defend itself because of its military prowess and its distance from Iran, but those Gulf countries are more vulnerable.
Internally, the regime could emerge intact and become as brutal as North Korea—even more brutal than it has been in recent weeks after killing thousands of Iranians. There’s also the possibility of state collapse and a potential civil war, given how polarized Iranians are and because of agitation among ethnic groups.
But one can still hope that Iran fulfills its enormous potential as a nation. As I wrote last fall, this is a country that has the human capital, the natural resources, and the rich history to be a G-20 country. It has punched way below its weight. In the aftermath of this attack, if Iranians can cooperate and coalesce together, there could be a transition to, at best, a representative tolerant democracy or, at a minimum, a country that is stable and prioritizes its economic and national interest before ideology and allows people to live a normal life—as many Iranians have experienced firsthand in places such as Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.
It’s a fraught and perplexing moment. I see light at the end of the tunnel, but it’s not clear whether that tunnel will cave in.
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