Why Dictatorships Actually Fall - And What It Means for Iran’s Future
How stable is the Iranian regime - really?
Since Israel launched its strikes inside Iran and Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu made it clear that one of the goals of the operation is a regime change, it reignited a debate over an age-old question: Will Iran’s regime survive? And how vulnerable to collapse it actually is?
And it’s not an easy question to answer. On one hand, Iran’s highly unpopular regime has looked quite shaky for years, even before it lost control over its own airspace, but at the same time, despite being unpopular, it’s proven remarkably resilient and it survived a series of mass protests without ever facing a real threat of its existence.
And so when people debate the regime’s future, they tend to split into two camps:
One saying that Iran’s government is widely hated and becoming more unpopular by the day - and so it’s just a matter of time before it collapses.
And the other that this doesn’t matter because the regime has crushed uprisings before - and so it will just do it again.
But even though both views make a compelling argument, they also both miss the deeper question of why do dictatorships actually fall in the first place? Why do some authoritarian and totalitarian regimes collapse after a few days of protest - while others survive even through famines and devastating economic collapse? Why do decades-old regimes that seem like they will be around forever suddenly fall - and why do others survive even when their collapse seems inevitable?
Well, the answer to this question is far from simple and it’s surprisingly counter-intuitive. But it can tell us a lot about the chances of Iran's regime to survive both the current war with Israel and the months and years ahead. So, let’s try to answer why do actually regimes fall - and what that means for Iran.
The Three Pillars of Dictatorship
The core insight from decades of political science research is that at the core of the answer is a counter-intuitive paradox. One of the big assumptions that people typically make when thinking about revolutions and regime collapse is that dictatorships fall when they become sufficiently unpopular. It’s an intuitive thought - after all, no regime can survive if it loses popular support and when enough people see through the propaganda, become disillusioned with reality and eventually turn against it and take to the streets…right?
Well, no. Not at all, actually. The thing is that although dictatorships try to create the impression that their entire populations are enthusiastically supporting them, in reality the opposite is true: these regimes typically don't survive because they would be popular - they survive despite being unpopular.
And how do they do that? Well, as a successful dictator, what you really need to survive are these three things:
a) Muscle (i.e. coercive institutions like the police, military and intelligence services) to suppress dissent - all the pesky citizens who might try to overthrow you.
b) Money to buy off the muscle (also called patronage) so that they keep working for you and have an incentive to keep your regime alive.
c) Elites to coordinate everything. Even as a dictator you can't govern alone - you still need a small cadre of loyalists that you can rely on to help you run the machine.
You don’t actually really need mass public support (although it never really hurts to have it). You mostly need to keep the 10–20% of the population, including the part that has the guns, firmly on your side - and if you can do that you can remain in power for decades, even generations.
It’s when one or more of these pillars erode that regimes start to collapse - and they almost always fall quickly once the internal scaffolding starts to give. In almost every modern case of authoritarian collapse, whether it’s the USSR, Romania or Tunisia, you’ll see one or a few of these three things playing out: the coercive forces refuse to fight, the money runs dry, or the elite starts to fracture and turn on itself.
And so, going back to the beginning, what does that mean for Iran? How likely is a collapse of the Iranian authoritarian regime - and how did that likelihood change since Israel launched its attack on Iran?
What Does This Mean for Iran?
Well, to understand the real risk that the Iranian regime is facing we have to look at those three pillars - not just how angry people are.
1. The Money
This is where the cracks are most visible.
Even before the current escalation, Iran’s economy had been spiraling for years. Crippling sanctions, mismanagement, and corruption have produced a toxic mix of high inflation, rising unemployment, collapsing infrastructure, and chronic budget shortfalls. The country has been dealing with electricity cuts, water shortages, depleted sovereign funds, and a shrinking middle class. And while its revenue keeps shrinking, it spends way too much on funding its military, revolutionary guards and its network of proxies across the region.
But here’s the key point: that alone doesn’t actually doom the regime. What matters is whether the state still has enough money to pay off the people who matter most - the IRGC, the internal security apparatus, and the top layers of the ruling elite. And so far, it probably does. Even as state revenues decline, the portion of oil profits going to the IRGC this year has increased - a sign that the regime is prioritising the loyalty of its enforcers above everything else and that although the money’s running out, there’s still enough to keep the system somewhat stable for now.
But the margins are shrinking and recent developments could quite likely change this balance. Even before the current escalation, the U.S. has resumed its “maximum pressure” sanctions strategy to squeeze Iran’s economy even more, while Israeli strikes have hit Iran’s oil and gas infrastructure directly, including attacks on storage sites, refineries, to further harm its oil and gas revenues.
Unless something changes (which is very unlikely), the regime will likely find itself forced to squeeze the civilian economy even harder just to keep its core supporters paid as there will be less and less money to go around. And while that won’t necessarily trigger collapse yet, it will increase the pressure across the system even more.
2. The Muscle
On the other hand, Iran’s coercive institutions still seem to remain pretty capable and loyal. During the mass protests of 2022, the regime didn’t hesitate to use lethal force on a wide scale and the security forces have shown that they are both willing and able to crush dissent when ordered to do so.
That said, Israel’s campaign seems to be trying to change this as well. It has targeted senior security officials tied to domestic control, such as Ahmad-Reza Radan, who served both as the police commander of Tehran and as the chief of the national police command. But for now, there’s no indication that has had a major impact and whether operational capacity has been meaningfully weakened.
3. The Elite
This is the hardest pillar to observe from the outside but it’s arguably the most important.
So far, there’s been little sign of what would be called elite fracture: fractions within the regime’s inner circle going against each other or trying to take over. The regime's top circles, specifically the clerical leadership and senior IRGC commanders, seem aligned and in fact, external pressure might even force the inner circle to set aside their disputes to focus on survival.
But that unity may not last forever and this is where the Israeli campaign might change things quite fundamentally.
it has both shown quite clearly that it can eliminate almost any member of the elite and it has humiliated the regime quite profoundly. Both of those are likely to make a lot of people within the elite quite unhappy - and especially once the attacks stop eventually, they might quite likely result in some pretty bitter internal feuds.
Israel’s campaign has shown every member of the elite that literally no one is safe and the regime can't do anything about it which is likely going to make a lot of people inside Iran’s elite very unhappy. That kind of embarrassment might lead to discontent and conviction that the leadership is exposing them to risk without delivering results - after all, personal safety is apart from money a very, very strong incentive.
Once the bombing stops and the dust settles, internal blame games could begin and if they do, they might escalate into serious infighting.
So..What Happens?
We still don’t know how this phase of the war ends and until then, it’s hard to say how much weaker the Iranian regime might be once the dust settles. But what’s clear is that while the regime is not as weak as it is sometimes made out to be, the idea that Iran’s regime is stable just because it’s survived this long is deeply misleading.
The reality is that its economy is in deep trouble, it's not getting any more popular and unless it somehow turns things around, it might soon find itself blamed for letting Iran suffer strategic losses at the hands of a much smaller regional rival.
Nothing is certain but regimes always seem stable until they are not. And as so many regimes of the past learned time and time again, the way collapse happens remains always the same: gradually, then suddenly.