What will happen in Iran if the Islamic Republic’s regime falls? Would Iran descend into instability? This is a question — perhaps the question — often posed about Middle Eastern countries facing potential political transition. The thinking often goes that while dictatorships may be unpalatable, at least they guarantee stability. And that stability is better for the international community even if it comes at the expense of the people under oppression. It is time to abandon this problematic approach to the Middle East.
Syria provides some hard lessons. In 2011, the Syrian people protested peacefully against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. It was Iran and its main proxy Hezbollah that swiftly advised Assad that making concessions to the protesters would be a projection of weakness. After all, just two years earlier Iran had witnessed the Green Movement —peaceful protests calling for regime change, sparked by popular rejection of the results of that year’s presidential elections, which granted then President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a second term. The Iranian authorities violently and quickly cracked down on the protesters. Assad heeded Tehran’s advice. With Iran and Hezbollah’s help, the Assad regime brutally attacked the Syrian protesters.
Despite this, many in the international community expressed worry that were Assad to go, Syria would descend into war like what happened next door in Iraq following the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 or in Libya in 2011 after the ousting of Muammar Qaddafi. This line of thinking ignored that neither in Iraq nor in Libya was there a viable stabilisation and transition plan in place for the day after. It is not that the end of dictatorships automatically brings chaos. Chaos happens when there are no sober pre-emptive plans for handling obvious challenges like weak social cohesion or the absence of state institutions; deeply flawed, externally incubated governance formulas are parachuted on countries in transition; the voices of the local population are ignored; and foreign actors enter the picture as spoilers.
The result in Syria was not regime change but a conflict that lasted almost a decade and a half and which would have been preventable had the international community not largely regarded Assad as the lesser of two evils — the dictator vs the unknown. Following the harrowing scenes from Assad’s prisons that flooded the public domain after he was finally ousted in December last year, the world can now clearly see that virtually nothing could have been worse for Syrians than the continuation of Assad in power.
In clinging to his position throughout the Syrian conflict, Assad was following the Iranian regime’s playbook. He sacrificed the Syrian economy, state institutions, and the Syrian people for the sake of survival. The Islamic Republic is the same in its pursuit of regime preservation. Iran has been under sanctions for years and yet it has not modified its behaviour (such as funding foreign proxies) so that its economy can recover. Iran’s prisons may not be getting much attention from the international media, but they are rife with torture. The justice system is not independent, with many imprisoned or executed without a fair trial. The Tehran regime would rather see large numbers of Iranian citizens suffer than give up power.
The Assad regime was never defined by stability. Assad manipulated Islamist jihadists to cross the border into Iraq to attack British and American troops after 2003 and in 2011 he released many imprisoned jihadists to frame the uprising against him as an Islamist terrorist plot, paving the way for the emergence of Isis. He also allowed Hezbollah and Iran to use Syria as a thoroughfare for funds and weapons and a site for the training of militias.
Anyone worried today about instability spilling over were the Tehran regime to fall must remember that the spillover has already happened and has been going on for decades. Iran has been the Middle East’s main cause of instability since the birth of the Islamic Republic in 1979 and this threat has extended beyond the region. Iran has been cooperating tactically with al-Qaeda and Isis across the Middle East and Africa, in addition to supporting Shia militias in Iraq and Lebanon among others. Iran and Hezbollah have conducted numerous terrorist operations worldwide including in Latin America and Europe. And Iran bears part of the responsibility for Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel.
The Syrian people suffered unnecessarily because the international community selectively ignored Assad’s role in fostering terrorism both in the region and worldwide; was paralyzed by concern about who would rule Syria after Assad; and was not forthcoming about providing Syrians with the international assistance necessary for political transition. The Iranian people have been suffering for decades and deserve to be trusted to lead their country into a better future. But as the Iraq, Libya, and Syria scenarios demonstrate, the Iranian people need thoughtful and adequate international support in managing the transition. If the regime were to fall, the international community needs to abandon cliched thinking about the Middle East and work together with the Iranian people so that both Iranians and the world can recover from the ills of the Islamic Republic.
[See more: Will Iran surrender?]
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