For nearly 50 years, the world has dealt with Iran under a straightforward premise: the sole source of danger is the theocracy installed by the 1979 revolution.
Western policies have split between containing the regime, changing its conduct, eroding its capabilities, or waiting for internal collapse. The record of these tactics, though, raises a tougher question.
Why does the Iranian threat return each time Tehran’s foes believe they have contained it?
The breeding grounds enabling centralized power
For decades, the world may have fixated on who governs Iran while ignoring the framework that lets central authorities rebuild their power project whenever conditions change.
The core issue is about more than the nuclear program, ballistic missile stockpile, and proxy networks. These are assets that can be disabled or partly destroyed.
They spring, however, from a large state with a huge population, energy reserves, a scientific and industrial foundation, geographic reach, and military institutions honed across decades.
Lost facilities, leaders, and munitions cannot wipe out technical know-how or erase recovery capacity. A single tool may break, but the underlying machine still can build a replacement.
History shows international dealings with Iran have targeted what can be destroyed; capabilities can be degraded. But such tactics leave unanswered the more fundamental question of how to stop a large, centralized state with people, resources and expertise from rebuilding losses once conditions ease.
So, the issue moves from disarmament to state structure, from who governs Iran to how power sources inside the country are administered.
One episode lays bare this disconnect. The July 2015 nuclear deal capped portions of Iran’s nuclear work. It left Tehran’s view of its regional standing intact. Missile work and proxy operations also proceeded without pause.
The January 2020 killing of Maj.-Gen. Qasem Soleimani jolted the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, although influence networks resumed activity once roles were reassigned.
Strikes on Iranian military sites have proved able to inflict damage and disrupt operations, but they cannot ensure permanent disablement.
Containment thus amounts to little more than managing repeated rounds of buildup, strike and rearmament.
Viewed this way, regime change in Iran offers at best a partial fix if presented as a final answer to the problem. The ruling system provides the country’s power project with its ideology, while the centralized state furnishes its resources and wealth.
Replacing the regime while leaving power administration untouched may soften rhetoric but offers no assurance of a different course. A more pragmatic, economy-focused government could emerge.
Geography, national interests and latent capabilities, however, survive leadership turnover. Long-held regional ambitions would likely resurface, framed in nationalist rather than revolutionary terms.
That said, casting the Iranian state as inherently hostile misreads reality. Most countries adjust conduct when their institutions, military doctrine, and balance between rulers and ruled evolve.
The objective is something other than indefinite weakening of Iran. It is blocking the convergence of unchecked central power, expansionist ideology, and exclusive control over military decisions.
Chaotic breakup of the Iranian state carries its own severe risks. Internal diversity, widespread weapons, and Iran’s strategic position could turn collapse into civil conflict, foreign meddling, and massive disruption of energy flows and shipping lanes.
Break the ‘buildup, strike, resurgence’ pattern
The most durable course therefore starts inside Iran, on the premise that Iranians alone hold the right to choose their governing system and its structure.
Broad decentralization or federalism, and possibly confederal arrangements if adopted through national consent and constitutional agreement, can curb the center’s monopoly on wealth and decisions, give regions greater say over resources and fiscal matters, and write institutional limits into the use of national capacities for foreign ventures.
Forcing such models from outside, by contrast, would let authorities cast themselves as defenders of national unity and turn reform into a pretext for harsher repression.
Decentralization hardly guarantees Iran will turn automatically into a peaceful country. Constitutional arrangements by themselves cannot dispel national ambitions or remove foreign frictions. Their worth lies in raising the price of decision monopolization, spreading oversight of resources, and making long-term foreign ventures far harder to pursue without broad consent and accountability.
Such rules constrain impulsive action while still falling short of an ironclad promise of responsible behavior.
No global requirement exists for a permanent Iranian adversary to justify alliances and defense budgets. Removing the regime with no plan for what follows promises an even more dangerous crisis.
What is required instead is ending the threat’s ability to regenerate, through four parallel steps: capping offensive capabilities, advancing institutional reform that disperses power inside Iran, upholding regional deterrence to block coercion, and pursuing diplomacy that links economic and political integration to revised conduct.
The world has repeatedly slowed Iran’s power project. It has never eliminated the country’s ability to rebuild it. The ruling system may fall one day, but its collapse would leave intact the building blocks of Iranian strength.
If a framework survives that lets central authorities marshal people, resources and expertise behind foreign ventures, any win will amount to a temporary pause between rounds.
A credible resolution comes when Iran’s strength changes from a source of fear for neighbors into a force bounded by institutions and directed by societal interests. Only then does the root problem resolve itself. The danger will not have sustained another setback – it will have lost the conditions that kept reviving it.
The writer is a UAE political analyst and former Federal National Council candidate.
