Will Israel and America Together Overthrow the Iranian Regime?

 The Iran-Israel Conflict

Iran, the hitherto glorious empire of Persia, has had a magnificent past of cultural, academic, economic and socio-political heights. But for some time now, the country is an eyesore for the West, and its economy is in dire straits. The country’s nuclear programme and long-standing hostilities with Israel have now culminated in an all-out war. 

What is Happening in Iran Now?

As Israeli fighter jets rain bombs and rockets on Tehran and Iran’s nuclear sites, and in retaliation, missile barrages from Iran hit Israeli cities, including Tel Aviv, two leaders and their policies hold the maximum responsibility for this devastating beginning of a new war: one is Benjamin Netanyahu and the other, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Much is known about Netanyahu, but Khamenei still remains a leader very little understood and analysed in the public sphere due to his religious stature and inaccessibility to journalists. 

The relationship between the supreme leader and the prime minister or the civil society and political leadership in Iran has not always been smooth. As depicted by Israel or the West, Iran is not a monolithic entity but a democracy where dissent and debate still play a role, though in a limited sense, mostly so after the formation of the Islamic Republic. The readers might remember the killing of Mahsa Amini in Iran for not wearing a head scarf and the nationwide protests in 2022 named the ‘women, rights, freedom movement’ that followed, against an oppressive regime. 

If news reports are to be believed, Israel has a half-hope that the people of Iran would rise up against their leadership, and maybe Israel and the US have even elaborately planned a coup to overthrow the current Iranian regime. These speculations aside, the fact remains that Iran is a sovereign state with every right to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes just like the US or Israel. 

The world nations generally agree that Israel has made a reckless move by attacking Iran when negotiations for a nuclear deal were on the table. On the other side of the argument, the International Atomic Energy Agency had expressed concern over the lack of transparency in Iran’s nuclear programme, and the American president was frustrated by the lack of readiness from the Iranian side to agree upon a nuclear deal with the US. Israel’s version is that Iran has crossed a crucial threshold towards making a nuclear weapon, so it has become an immediate threat to Israel.

 The rights and wrongs of this war in the given geopolitical context are beyond the scope of this article. What this article seeks to clarify, however, is the dynamics of Iranian politics and the relationship among its society, its Supreme Leader, and political leadership, and the socio-political complexities that work for and against them.  

Iran Before it Became an Islamic Republic

The story of modern Iran could not be understood unless one understands the role oil played in shaping it. Iran was not always an Islamic Republic ruled by a religious ‘Supreme Leader’, an all-powerful head of state positioned above the elected prime minister. The country had a Western-styled society before the Khomeinis and Khameinis took over and established the world’s first Islamic Republic. 

The story begins here, even if its historical roots could be further deep, embedded in a more remote past: after the Second World War, the Shah rulers of Iran’s Pahlavi dynasty became close allies of America and opened Iran’s oil fields to the US and Britain, much to the disdain of a major part of the population. The Shahs were, however, liberals in the sense that they permitted individual freedom; universal education; art and culture, including cinema; and an electoral system with a powerful parliament. Still, public mistrust against the Shah's Western connection and religious revivalism combined to stir unrest against them.   

The Islamic Revolution

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini created present-day Iran by tapping into the public dissent, as he led a revolt against the semi-liberal, semi-autocratic Shah. Since the 1951 nationalisation of oil in Iran, as mandated by the parliament, the US and Britain had been trying to install a regime in Iran favourable to their oil exploitation. The result was a fragile state with conflicts simmering within. In 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini succeeded in subverting the Shah rule and establishing Iran as a theocratic state, an Islamic Republic. The revolution represented the anti-colonial aspirations and a conservative religious stirring within the Iranian people.   

Iran’s Supreme Leaders

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is an Islamic scholar and astute politician, and he was involved with the Islamic revolutionary movement led by his mentor and leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, since its early beginnings. After the passing of Khomeini, he assumed office as the Supreme Leader. Even before that, he had functioned as the founding member of the loyalist Islamic Republican Party (IRP) and twice as the president of Iran. He lacked the religious standing that Khomeini commanded, and to rectify this, a referendum was carried out, and based on that, the constitution changed to accommodate him.    

 

The constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran specifies that the highest constitutional authority is the Supreme Leader. The Supreme Leader of Iran is the unquestioned authority in the country on not only religious but also political matters. The present leader, Ali Khamenei, has been in power for the last 35 years. 

 

Iran-Iraq War

In 1980, paralell to all the developments inside Iran, Iraq’s leader Saddam Hussain initiated a war with Iran expecting an effortless victory knowing that Iran was weak from the revolution-imparted instabilities. The war raged until 1988, foiling Saddam Hussein’s expectations of an early victory. One year after the UN-mediated truce, Khomeini died, leaving his legacy and position to be carried forward by Ali Khamenei. The war showed that Iran was not easily to be defeated and was resilient and strong.

Iranian Hardliners and Moderates

Meanwhile, Iran swayed from moderate ideological positions to extreme ones, and back, a few times. Since 1989, Iran has had two relatively liberal presidents, Akbar Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami, who promoted a liberal economy, private sector, and diplomatic relations with the rest of the world. Yet, the Supreme Leader, Khamenei, was a conservative, and in an election shrouded in an acute lack of transparency and severe criticism for that from the opposition, he facilitated the conservative candidate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the presidency. Ahmadinejad initiated the nuclearisation of Iran like never before. 

Ever since, Iran’s political scene has been strife with ideological and power tussles between the hardliners whom Ahmadinejad represented and the moderates like Hassan Rouhani. It was during Rauhani’s time that Iran became part of a nuclear deal with the US, China, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, Germany (P5 +1), and the European Union. In 2018, the first Trump administration withdrew from the deal. Soon after withdrawing from the nuclear deal, America had assassinated  Qasem Soleimani, the leader of the most powerful branch of Iran’s armed forces, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Rouhani’s successor, Ebrahim Raisi, was a hardliner who, along with Khamenei, reshaped Iran in a new mould: as a nation that sponsors extremist armed groups such as Hezbollah and Houthis of the Middle East and relentlessly pursues nuclear enrichment. Kamran Matin of the University of Sussex told DW News in a programme broadcast in June 2024 that Iran’s nuclear project has so far produced no electricity at all, though the country has been claiming that its nuclear programme was meant for energy alone. 

Iran also began a proxy war against Israel’s occupation and invasion of Gaza using these armed groups. After President Raisi was killed in a helicopter crash in 2024, Masoud Pezeshkian assumed office. Parallel to this, Israel succeeded in weakening Hezbollah by killing its leaders, thus depriving Iran of a strong ally in Lebanon, a country that shares a border with Israel. Syria’s al-Assad regime was another ally of Iran which was recently dismantled by a rival militant group, allegedly with the help of the US. 

Is Iran Ready for a Coup or Regime Change?

There are two relevant questions here: ‘How powerful is Iran?' is the first, and ‘Do the people of Iran want a regime change?’ is the second. 

One might expect Iran to have immense economic prowess given the financial and military support that it provides to different militant groups and also to Hamas, the elected ruling party in Gaza. Experts have constantly warned that Iran, internally, has been “extremely fragile” due to its diminished economic health. The only ally that Iran has is Russia, which has assisted it in its defence and space programmes, and China is also a friend in a limited sense. Other than that, Iran remains too isolated a nation to be a regional superpower that it envisages it is destined to be. One deep schism that exists between Iran and the rest of the general Arab world is the Shia-Sunni divide. Iran is a Shia-majority country, whereas most of the other Arab countries have a majority Sunni population. Countries such as Saudi Arabia are US allies and hence Iran cannot put much trust in them. 

In terms of arms power and military capabilities, Iran is formidable but not superior to either Israel or the West, though it possesses an assortment of effective indigenous drones and ballistic missiles. It also exports drones to other countries including Russia. Yet, the US sanctions have crippled its ability to develop state-of-the-art defence systems. 

Then there is Iran’s nuclear programme, which it believes is a serious deterrent for the West. Whether the nuclear agenda of Iran involves weapons has not been proven beyond doubt, even though Israel bases its new escalation on that presumption. Many see the withdrawal of the US from the nuclear deal involving Iran in 2018 as a mistake that worsened the threat of Iranian nuclear armament. Similarly, many see the attacks Israel carried out on Iranian nuclear sites in June 2025 as another mistake that removed the entire possibility of a nuclear deal from the table. Negotiators and those in the know of the details have already stated on various international television channels that Iran was ready to let go of its enriched uranium, a potential ingredient of a nuclear weapon, if it were to get the sanctions against it revoked. Anyway, Israel is convinced that Iran’s nuclear programme has crossed a threshold where it has become an existential threat to it. 

One might also remember the way in which Benjamin Netanyahu tried to thwart the earlier Iran-US-involved nuclear deal by using his US Congress speech as a platform to undermine the US policy regarding Iran in 2015. What happens now is a similar instance: when the US is in the middle of negotiations with Iran that Netanyahu broke the peace. It is clear that Netanyahu wants to stop any deal that allows Iran to go ahead with its nuclear programme. 

Do the people of Iran want a regime change?

The current Iranian regime’s popular support has suffered a setback in recent years, as was witnessed in the ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ movement. The country has been diveritng its resources to the proxy wars and nuclear programme while the lives of ordinary people have suffered from economic hardships. In the given geopolitical situation, Iran sees its proxy wars and nuclear programme as bargaining chips to protect itself as it stands in a crucially strategic spot buttressed between the rest of the Middle East and Asia.

The Iranian people, even those who see the current regime as autocratic and oppressive, however, will not possibly yet ally with the West or Israel to topple their leadership given the colonial past the country has suffered through. This is why the message of Benjamin Netanyahu to the Iranians asking them to differentiate between the people’s aspirations and the leadership’s oppressive rule, will only seem hollow and manipulative. 

As Hamid Dabashi, an expert on the Middle Eastern affairs and a Columbia University professor, pointed out in his new book, ‘Iran in Revolt’, which deals with the 2022 protests in Iran, help for the Iranian people has to come from within and from other oppressed people across the world and not from Israel, the US, or the West. But such a dream of solidarity does not show any sign of materialising yet, to be honest. The problems of political corruption and oppression within the country and the threat against national sovereignty are the twin problems before Iranians now. They are mutually contradictory: the people have to stand with their regime in these testing times, no matter how unsatisfactory the regime is, no matter how little it has delivered to the well-being of its people.

Iran will be left with only a few options, deadly and having great consequences, if this war turns out to be a prolonged one: in order to curtail Israel's powers, Iran would have to attack the US bases in the Middle East, an action that would drag America directly into this war. Iran believes already that America is behind this war but a direct US engagement will take matters to another new and dangerous level. There are also experts who say that things became worse in the Middle East after Iran 'hijacked' the Palestinian cause and made it into a weapon for its own geopolitical battles.

Imagine the millions caught in this cruel situation and in a war they did not wish for. Imagine the innocent lives lost on both sides.             

Iran has been the centre of civilisational grandeur. It has given the world poets such as Jalaluddin Rumi and Omar Khayyam in ancient times, and the contribution of Iranian cinema in the modern era is unparalleled. A country so vast and culturally rich, a country that for centuries occupied the central stage of civilisation, the world owes Iran, and Iran owes the world, to deliver peace.