The war is a week old. Khamenei is dead. And the Islamic Republic is still standing.
It will be standing for some time yet. Iran is protected not just by a regular army, but by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — a powerful parallel military force constitutionally tasked with protecting the very system now under attack, supported by the Basij, a paramilitary militia embedded in every neighborhood, trained specifically to crush internal dissent. The Iranian regime entered this war already weakened — by years of sanctions, by the twelve-day war of June 2025, by the collapse of its regional allies — and yet it was precisely that weakened posture that Washington and Tel Aviv read as opportunity. They may be right. But a weakened regime is not a collapsed one, and the distance between the two has swallowed more than one American military adventure.
Surviving officials have already begun reframing what is happening: not as a defense of the clergy, not as a theological cause, but as a defense of Iranian territorial integrity. The flag, not the turban. That pivot matters. It is what regimes under pressure do when their founding ideology starts to crack under the weight of bombs and economic ruin. They find a different story. Sometimes it works.
The IRGC needed two things simultaneously: control and legitimacy. They appear to have moved with speed to secure both. Mojtaba Khamenei, the late supreme leader’s son, reportedly carries deep ties to the Guard’s command networks and has, according to sources close to the IRGC, effectively run his father’s office for at least two decades. He is not a cleric in any meaningful public sense. He is a security state actor wearing clerical lineage as a credential. If the system chooses a bitter deal, it needs someone who can own it and stop the hardcore from turning on the leadership. If it chooses to fight on, it needs someone who can keep the IRGC united and keep the security state functioning under sustained attack. Either way, the apparatus endures.
This is the scenario the architects of Operation Epic Fury appear not to have planned for. The assumption embedded in the strikes was essentially teleological: that a decapitation would produce a collapse, that the Iranian people, exhausted after the January massacres — in which security forces killed tens of thousands of protesters in the streets — would sweep the theocracy away once its head was gone. The real lesson of Iraq in 2003 is instructive here: the regime fell swiftly enough, but the vacuum it left behind consumed the country for two decades and destabilized an entire region. Removing a government from power and replacing it with something better are not the same operation. Air campaigns alone have never bridged that gap — not in Libya, not in Syria, and not now in Iran.
The Trump administration announced regime change as a key goal but provided few details as to what the regime’s end means, and what new political dispensation it would find satisfactory. Trump himself has hinted that something like the Venezuela outcome might suffice: cosmetic leadership change, continued repression, but gestures toward American oil interests. That option would suit Netanyahu by preserving the Islamic Republic as a threat to dangle over the Israeli public. It would satisfy almost no one else, least of all Iranians who watched their protesters massacred in January and their cities bombed in March.
So if the regime survives the next month, what then?
The conventional diplomatic playbook has already been exhausted. Sanctions are maximal. Military pressure has been applied at a scale not seen in the region since 2003. The February talks in Muscat, barely three weeks before the bombs fell, collapsed over the unbridgeable distance between American demands for complete disarmament and Iranian insistence on sovereign enrichment rights — the same fault line that destroyed the 2015 nuclear agreement, the JCPOA, after Washington’s unilateral withdrawal in 2018. Iran was reportedly willing to make major concessions, reinstating many of the JCPOA’s guardrails, yet the strikes came anyway, reflecting how deeply the concept of diplomacy had been devalued even in the final stretch of negotiations.
That devaluation has consequences. Any new Iranian leadership now faces a particular internal logic: Trump carries not only Soleimani’s blood but also Ali Khamenei’s. That makes any compromise far harder to sell. A supreme leader who opens negotiations with Washington in the weeks after his predecessor’s assassination would be signing his own political death warrant. The hardliners do not need to win the argument. They just need to make accommodation politically fatal, which at this moment requires very little effort.
Europe is watching from an awkward distance. It triggered the snapback sanctions in October, watched diplomacy collapse entirely, and has now condemned the strikes as lacking legal foundation while worrying about energy prices, Iranian proxies in the Eastern Mediterranean, and the precedent of assassinating a head of state. These are not abstract concerns for Greece. Athens depends heavily on energy imports routed through corridors now under direct threat. Greek shipping — a pillar of the national economy — is acutely exposed to any prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz or disruption to Red Sea trade routes. And a wider regional conflagration, drawing in proxies across the Levant and the Gulf, would land on Europe’s southeastern doorstep before it reaches Berlin or Paris. And yet Europe has no leverage of its own. Its role in any post-war settlement depends entirely on whether Washington decides it wants European cover.
Russia and China are unlikely to come to the regime’s military rescue, despite their strategic partnerships. But they will offer Tehran an economic lifeline, not out of solidarity but out of interest. A grinding, inconclusive war in the Gulf keeps American attention anchored in the Middle East, oil revenues elevated, and the narrative of Western recklessness alive. Their interest is in prolonging the stalemate, not resolving it.
Here is the hard truth: if the regime survives the coming weeks, the conditions for any diplomatic breakthrough become radically worse, not better. The architecture will have to be built from rubble, with a new Iranian leadership that needs a face-saving framework as badly as the West needs nuclear constraints. Any future negotiation will require intermediaries with genuine credibility in Tehran. That currently means Beijing, possibly Ankara, certainly not Washington or Brussels. It will require the United States to accept something far short of the complete disarmament it has demanded, because a regime fighting for survival, with its nuclear knowledge intact even if its facilities are degraded, now has every incentive to race for a weapon rather than give one up.
The most likely outcomes for leadership change in Iran are also the least auspicious for U.S. interests. A new supreme leader drawn from Khamenei’s orbit, or a shift to military leadership, would likely extend the theocracy’s most destabilising policies. The bombs have not changed that calculus. They may have hardened it.
The international community will eventually have to choose between two options it has spent decades avoiding: engage a deeply hostile, ideologically rigid, and now militarily humiliated government on terms that feel like concession, or accept a permanent low-intensity confrontation with a nuclear-capable state that has no reason to moderate and every reason to escalate. Neither is clean. But one leaves room for a future. The other just keeps the fires burning, and waits to see who runs out of patience first.
History suggests it will not be Tehran.
Dr. Nikolaos Lampas is Associate Professor of International Relations and European Affairs at The American College of Greece.
