The only realistic path for the US and Israel to topple the Islamic Republic - oped

Every serious option for dealing with Iran seems to create a worse problem than the one it solves. Sanctions have enriched the Revolutionary Guards. 

Diplomacy has bought time for centrifuges. Air strikes, however devastating, produce ninety million powerless, hungry people, and a regime that calls the resulting chaos a victory. The question isn’t whether to act. The question is whether there is a strategy that can actually work.

The United States and Israel have no choice but to pursue the outright overthrow of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI). The regime’s survival threatens American interests, global energy markets, the security of key allies, and the stability of the entire Middle East.

Pure air power, no matter how devastating, cannot finish the job. The US and Israel possess the capability to plunge the entire country into blackout within days and to destroy Iran’s oil, petrochemical, gas, steel, cement, and other critical industries in two to three weeks. But what comes next? 

A population of 90 million, powerless, without running water, gas, or reliable food supplies, would trigger a refugee crisis fifty times larger than Gaza’s, spilling into the Middle East and Europe and destabilizing the entire region. 

The Strait of Hormuz would remain closed. The IRGC would almost certainly escalate attacks on neighbouring countries’ oil facilities and desalination plants. And executing such a campaign would require thousands of combat sorties. 

The recent downing of a U.S. F-15E Strike Eagle over Iran, with one crew member evading Iranian forces for more than 24 hours before a high-risk special-forces rescue, vividly illustrates the dangers: mechanical failure, surviving air defences (weak but not zero), and the very real risk of American pilots being killed or captured. Air power alone creates more problems than it solves.

Why arming separatist groups is a dead end

One frequently discussed option is to funnel money and weapons to armed separatist movements in the border regions, Kurdish, Baloch, and possibly Arab groups. This approach suffers from at least three fatal flaws.

First, even if these groups can defeat regime forces locally, they show no interest in marching on Tehran or the major non-ethnic cities. In Iraq and Syria, Kurdish forces seized large swaths of territory but never tried to take Damascus, Aleppo, or Homs. The same pattern would repeat in Iran. Komeleh and the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan might hold Sanandaj, Mahabad, and a handful of Kurdish cities for ten, twenty, or fifty years, but they would remain irrelevant to the regime’s survival in the Persian heartland.

Second, the separatist character of these groups allows the IRI to rally Iranian national sentiment against them. What begins as an anti-regime war would be reframed by Tehran as a foreign-backed campaign to dismember the country. The regime would gain recruits and legitimacy it currently lacks.

Third, even if the strategy somehow succeeded in collapsing the central government, the separatist militias would almost certainly turn on one another, Kurds against Turks in West Azerbaijan, for example, plunging Iran into a civil war worse and longer-lasting than Syria’s. 

President Trump himself recently highlighted the unreliability of this route: when the U.S. tried to deliver weapons to Iranian protesters earlier this year by routing them through Kurdish groups, the Kurds simply kept the guns for themselves.

The realistic alternative: arming the Iranian people

A far more promising, and far cheaper, approach is to distribute light weapons directly to the Iranian population, especially in ethnic-Persian and Lor-speaking regions that form the national core.

A Kalashnikov rifle with 1,000 rounds costs roughly $600 on the regional black market. Add another $400 for smuggling it across the border, and the total per weapon is about $1,000. For roughly $100 million, it is possible to put 100,000 assault rifles into civilian hands. Scale that to $1 billion and you can arm one million Iranians. That sum is less than the cost of a single day of current U.S. military operations in the region.

If even a fraction of those weapons reach motivated civilians, the probability of regime collapse rises dramatically. 

At a minimum, the IRI would be so weakened that it might be forced to negotiate with the West and its neighbours. The risks are real, some arms could fall into regime hands, some could be used in limited attacks on U.S. forces, and post-regime chaos is possible. But separatist groups are already armed. Arming the broader, non-separatist population may actually reduce the danger of civil war and fragmentation rather than increase it.

Five measures to accelerate collapse

Beyond arming the people, five targeted actions can dramatically speed the regime’s demise and ensure a stable, legitimate transition.

The first is the targeted elimination of senior political and IRGC officials. Washington must stop treating these actors as potential negotiating partners. The current leadership is, in most cases, more hard-line and less flexible than even the notorious Larijani brothers. Locating and removing them, without hesitation, is a prerequisite for any serious regime-change strategy.

The second is the systematic dismantling of the repression apparatus through drone strikes. Checkpoints, Basij gathering points, and the mass pro-regime rallies that the IRI stages nightly, thousands assembled under bright lights, loudspeakers, and scaffolding, as documented extensively by outlets such as Iran International, should be treated as legitimate military targets. 

There is no moral or strategic reason to leave these instruments of domestic terror untouched. These gatherings are not spontaneous outpourings of support, they are choreographed displays of power. Denying the IRI this theater of dominance is both militarily feasible and strategically essential.

Third, the regime’s propaganda machine must be neutralized. Figures such as Alireza Raeefipour, Haj Saeed Hadadian, and other prominent regime clerics and media personalities function as the IRI’s Julius Streichers, architects of a system of ideological enforcement without which the clerical state cannot sustain itself. Their elimination is long overdue. So is the physical destruction of state television and radio facilities. In the eyes of both supporters and opponents, the Islamic Republic is not truly overthrown until its official broadcasting organs are silenced.

Fourth, Washington must let authentic Iranian leaders emerge organically and firmly reject imported transitional schemes. The true leaders of a post-IRI Iran will arise from the on-the-ground struggle for freedom and self-determination, forged in the same way that effective revolutionary leadership has always been forged, through combat, sacrifice, and demonstrated legitimacy on home soil. 

Consider the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty, the great Reza Shah. He rose through the ranks of the Cossack brigade and through sheer force of will managed to save a country on the brink of collapse. The same principle applies to Iran. Arming the people will produce exactly the credible, battle-tested negotiating partners President Trump has said he wants, and it will produce them on Iranian terms, not American ones.

Fifth and finally, Washington must impose firm boundaries on what any post-regime transition is permitted to look like, not by dictating outcomes, but by refusing to legitimize processes that circumvent Iranian sovereignty. This means rejecting any self-proclaimed “transitional government” that arrives pre-packaged from exile circles tied to one American political party or another. 

It also means confronting head-on the pseudo-legal frameworks that some prominent activists have begun proposing in the name of human rights. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi, for example, has openly stated that she intends to establish a court that would determine in advance what laws and punishments a post-IRI Iran may adopt, including a pre-emptive ban on capital punishment and blanket amnesties for regime officials. Whatever one thinks of those outcomes in the abstract, the process she is describing is a fundamental violation of Iranian self-determination. No foreign-based figure, regardless of how many prizes she holds, has the authority to pre-write the legal order of a country she does not govern. 

Such proposals do not protect human rights, they protect the guilty, remove any incentive for regime operatives to defect or surrender, and strip the Iranian people of the right to render their own verdict on those who oppressed them. Iran’s 1906 Constitutional Revolution produced a living document that already articulates rights and the rule of law. That foundation belongs to Iranians alone to build upon. Washington’s role is to prevent it from being hijacked, not to hand the keys to someone else.

In short: the United States cannot avoid the task of regime change. It cannot accomplish it from the air alone. It cannot rely on separatist proxies who have no interest in governing Iran as a whole. And it must not outsource the post-regime future to exile politicians or imported “transitional” formulas. The only viable ground force, and the only source of legitimate future leaders, is the Iranian people themselves. Arm them, support them with precision strikes on the regime’s enforcers and propagandists, reject any deals that let the guilty walk free, and the Islamic Republic’s days will be numbered. Anything less is wishful thinking dressed up as strategy.

Dr. Daniel Jafari is a critical care emergency physician and assistant professor at Hofstra University’s Zucker School of Medicine, as well as a human rights advocate and media contributor.

Mitra Jashni is an art professional and executive director specializing in Middle Eastern cultural and political affairs, and founder of Mythra Gallery and the “Turquoise Women” initiative.