Why the Iranian Regime's Collapse Would Come From Within (2/2)

In a previous article, we analyzed the military and industrial impact of the joint “Epic Fury” and “Lion’s Roar” operations on Iran’s conventional capabilities. In this second and final installment, we examine the possible combined effects of economic strangulation and grassroots mobilization that could lezd to the implosion of the Iranian regime.

The naval blockade has taken over from the February and April 2026 strikes.

The blockade is a necessary condition for weakening the Iranian regime, but not a sufficient one. Several factors help explain why the economic sanctions imposed over many years – compounded by the ongoing American naval blockade and its consequences, including supply chain disruptions and the halt of oil exports –struggle on their own to bring about the regime’s collapse. The Iranian regime has repeatedly proven its capacity for adaptation and restructured itself following the decapitation strike of last February.

Military Restructuring and National Identity

The eliminated Iranian command has been replaced by a new one, heavily militarized in character. It is clear that President Masoud Pezeshkian, considered a moderate, has been sidelined, and strategic executive power is now vested in a junta dominated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). At the top, coordination is centralized at the “Khatam al-Anbiya” Headquarters, which, under new leadership figures, is overseeing the rapid reconstitution of missile and drone capabilities. To limit the vulnerability of the decision-making center, the chain of command is no longer pyramidal but flattened: regional commands have been authorized to take the initiative and now enjoy greater tactical autonomy, particularily in conducting naval and aerial ambushes and harassment raids should contact with Tehran be severed.

This decentralization aims to multiply decision-making nodes and complicate the targeting of the chain of command. At the same time, the regime is leveraging a sense of national belonging in the face of an external threat by stigmatizing the opposition as a foreign agents and consolidating the loyalty of its hard core.

The Weakening of a Still-Resilient Embargo Economy

For decades, the Islamic Republic developped parallel trade networks and channels to circumvent Western sanctions imposed since the 1980s. These included black markets, shell companies scattered across the globe, and geopolitical partners such as China, Russia, Turkey and Iraq – all willing to bypass embargoes. As a result, the economic impact of the sanctions was softened, despite their having reduced Iran’s GDP by roughly 23% and caused revenue losses estimated at between $10 and $12 trillion between 2010 and 2022. The current sanctions and blockade continue to target Iran's economy, heightening internal sociopolitical tensions, constraining its regional influence and its ability to fund allies like Hezbollah. As such, sanctions and the blockade act as catalysts rather than triggers of an internal implosion.

What factors could accelerate the regime’s collapse?

Four factors stemming from a convergence of the current acute economic crisis and internal fractures could constitute tipping points leading to the collapse of the Islamic Republic.

The Fracturing of Economic Pillars

Iran, despite its outward appearance of resilience and ideological solidity, is under an extremely heavy economic burden. The regime is contending with a sharp devaluation of the rial, runaway inflation, the cost of rebuilding infrastructure, the reconstitution of its military arsenal, and the erosion of Iranian citizens’ purchasing power. Merchants, entrepreneurs and salaried workers had converged in protest last January, signaling that the regime’s economic base was already weakened: falling tax revenues, an inability to subsidize essential goods and supply difficulties.

Today, the situation is far more severe, and the regime would be hard-pressed, over time, to contain discontent through repression alone.

Divergences Among Elites and Reformist Pressures

The Islamic Republic rested on a political architecture centered on Khamenei senior and a network of interconnected elites. But today, it is the IRGC that holds the reins of power. Faced with economic catastrophe, how will it deal with reformist factions? How will it manage elites whose internal divisions are currently masked by a state of war? Will those divisions come to the surface? What will the country’s 8 million Kurds, 3 million Baluch and a fraction of its 18 million Azeris – who have been demanding autonomy for decades – do? This abrupt shift toward decentralized command structures is pushing the regime to over-militarize its peripheries and increase pressure on minorities, justifying this by the “risk of the country’s partition,” which in turn tightens the ranks of the Persian population around the regime.

Yet the destruction of economic and industrial infrastructure severely limits the regime’s capacity to buy social peace in these historically neglected provinces.

Defections Within the Security Forces

The most decisive factor for the regime’s survival will remain the loyalty of its coercive instruments, notably the IRGC, the police and the Basij popular militias. These forces remain, for now, united and disciplined. They are therefore able to contain waves of protest through force and intimidation. Should units or officers refuse orders, defect, or side with protesters – driven, for instance, by interruption in salary payments – popular discontent could turn into insurrection, and possibly revolution. The early warning indicators of such a scenario have not yet been reported, but the moment they do appear, it would indicate a crisis in its terminal phase. In peripheral regions such as Kurdistan or Baluchistan, the combination of deep social discontent and weakened local command structure could facilitate this fragmentation dynamic.

The Erosion of Collective Fear

Since 1979, the Islamic Republic has drowned five major waves of protest, each of which challenged the foundations of the theocracy: the purges of the early years (1979-1988), marked by the elimination of opponents and minorities and culminating in the clandestine execution of between 3,000 and 5,000 prisoners; the 2009 Green Movement, sparked by the disputed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and crushed by the Basij, leaving between 100 and 150 dead; the 2017-2018 social uprisings, triggered by inflation and corruption, suppressed with roughly 30 deads; the “Bloody November” of 2019, sparked by a fuel price increase and quashed by the killing of at least 1,500 people in ten days; and the Woman, Life, Freedom movement (2022-2023), ignited by the death of Mahsa Amini and crushed through live fire and public executions, leaving more than 550 dead. The bloodiest was the most recent uprising, in January of this year, which served as an indirect trigger for American military intervention. During this revolt, economic grievances quickly turned political, with protesters calling for the overthrow of the regime. The IRGC, police and Basij crushed the uprising, killing 5,000 people according to official authorities and over 40,000 according to the highest estimates.

The complete internet blackout, imposed as of January 8, isolated the country and made independent verification of information about ongoing events difficult.

Each of these crises illustrated the regime's systematic recourse to disproportionate state violence as an instrument of survival. But collective psychology is not immutable. Younger generations, confronted with recurring state violence and economic hardship, have shown signs of a waning fear. When public perception shifts – under the combined effect of the absence of freedoms, sociopolitical discontent and the inability to meet basic daily needs – mobilization can then reach a critical scale and break the threshold at which collective fear effectively disappears. In the absence of internet and social networks, this would spread rapidly through local solidarities, crystallizing into a sustained protest dynamic.

In conclusion, the American blockade functions like a slow pressure cooker: it reduces the resources needed to subsidize the economy, pay public services, and maintain the loyalty of the armed forces. As these capabilities are depleted, the regime loses crucial material levers. But collapse could only occur if, in parallel, the Persian population and peripheral ethnic communities cross certain thresholds, and/or if significant fragments of the security forces break away. In other words, without an internal breaking point – economic collapse combined with mass mobilization, and/or military defections – the blockade will remain a factor of attrition rather than a final instrument of overthrow.

Should that breaking point prove distant or unattainable, three alternatives to the outcome of the crisis remain: either Washington blinks, which would mean a weakening of Trump; or Tehran blinks, which would mean a weakening of the regime or its collapse; or a return to war – a contingency for which both the IRGC and the U.S. Navy are preparing.

Read also:
Dismantled, Yet Still Dangerous: Iran After Operations “Epic Fury” and “Roaring Lion”: (1/2)