Since Israel launched its campaign against Iran, the whispers of regime change have swelled into roars. President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu now openly entertain the possibility of removing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Western press, as usual, salivates. Opinion writers speak of “freedom,” of “liberation,” of “a new democratic dawn.” They should know better. We all should.
This isn’t the first time America has overthrown a government in Tehran. In 1953, the CIA helped orchestrate the ousting of Mohammad Mossadegh — a democratically elected prime minister who had the audacity to nationalize Iran’s oil. That coup installed the Shah, a brutal monarch who fed dissidents into the meat grinder of SAVAK, his secret police.
Torture chambers, disappearances, censorship — the entire Cold War authoritarian playbook was handed to Tehran on U.S. government stationery. That regime change led not to liberty, but to the Islamic Revolution of 1979. In short: the last time America meddled, it turned a secular democracy into a theocratic furnace.
We have made this mistake before, and we are about to make it again.
Let’s not pretend the fall of the Islamic Republic would yield some Instagram-filtered liberal utopia. That fantasy is for people who read Foreign Affairs magazine like it’s a Marvel comic book. The reality? Chaos. Deep, tribal, sectarian chaos. A power vacuum that would make Iraq look smart.
If the Iranian regime collapses, the dominoes won’t fall politely. Iran isn’t just a nation — it’s a spider at the center of a vast web of proxy forces and regional entanglements. Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Shia militias in Iraq and Syria — what happens to them when the spider dies? Do they disband? More likely, they go rogue. Unleashed, uncoordinated and angry. They won’t sit for peace talks — they’ll torch what’s left of the map.
And these groups aren’t ragtag militias. They are disciplined, battle-hardened and ideologically committed. With Tehran gone, they would no longer be restrained by any centralized strategy. They would become freelance war machines, pursuing old vendettas with new ferocity — armed, funded and furious.
What about the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps? They are not going to hang up their boots and go quietly into retirement. They are a state within a state, with their own army, economy and ideology. They run ports, banks, and oil fields. They have more institutional muscle than many small nations. If the regime fractures, these war-hardened ideologues will carve out fiefdoms. Think Taliban with oil money. Think Lebanon’s civil war, but on steroids.
And unlike the Taliban, they don’t aim for isolation — they export chaos. Now imagine ten different Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps offshoots, each with its own turf war, trying to seize Iran’s critical infrastructure while gunning down ideological rivals. That’s not liberation. That’s Mogadishu, possibly with nukes on the menu.
And then there’s the nuclear wildcard. A destabilized Iran, fractured between militias and factions, becomes the world’s most terrifying flea market: ballistic missiles for sale, enriched uranium changing hands with no adult supervision. Intelligence services across the globe would scramble to secure loose weapons, only to find they have already vanished into the black market.
You think ISIS with a truck bomb is bad? Try Hezbollah with a suitcase nuke. Try a warlord with enriched uranium looking to make a name. The dream of a free Iran could birth a nightmare of a dozen failed mini-republics, each with its own flag, their own grudge and their own appetite for vengeance.
Let us not forget what happens when Washington gets high on its own mythology. Regime change never ends with ticker tape and smiling schoolgirls holding flowers. It ends with boots in sand, contractors feeding at the trough, and entire cities flattened because someone in D.C. thought history was a choose-your-own-adventure book. Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan — how many more lessons do we need? How many broken nations do we walk away from before admitting we are not exporters of democracy but arsonists in suits?
And those arsonists still don’t carry water. They still don’t rebuild. They hold press conferences. They slap flags on blown-up convoys. And when it all fails — again — they blame “tribalism” or “regional instability” instead of their own god complex.
And what of the wider Middle East? Saudi Arabia will see an opening to expand influence, while Turkey eyes northern Iran like a hawk. The Gulf States, already teetering on paranoia, will bankroll private armies and surveillance empires to keep the revolution from spilling over. The Sunni-Shia divide won’t heal — it’ll erupt.
Not a Cold War. A regional wildfire. Religious factions with tanks. Nationalist militias with drones. Oil fields turned battlegrounds. Refugee crises so large they dwarf Syria. All because the West once again mistook force for foresight.
Meanwhile, the people of Iran — those who’ve suffered under theocracy and deserve better — will get caught in the crossfire of empires and ideologues. Again.
The same people who rose up in the streets for women’s rights, for secularism, for freedom of speech — shot in the back by snipers under Khamenei — will now be crushed between collapsing regimes and foreign opportunists. They’ll be the first to die, and the last to be remembered.
The truth is ugly, but it must be said: toppling Khamenei won’t liberate Iran. It will unhinge it. The Ayatollah’s fall, however deserved, would not be a curtain call; it would be an opening act for something far more brutal. Revolution, after all, is rarely the final chapter. It’s the prelude to civil war.
And civil war in a country with roughly 90 million people, ballistic missiles, and regional reach isn’t a footnote. It’s a global event.
The West doesn’t need more regime changes. It needs a regime change of thought. The idea that we can shape the world in our image with drones and platitudes has led to an era of smoldering ruins and refugee camps.
This isn’t just hubris; it’s homicide dressed up as humanitarianism. And the victims aren’t dictators. They are doctors, shopkeepers, little girls clutching backpacks instead of rifles.
If Iran falls, it won’t be freedom that rises. It will be fire, and we lit the match.
John Mac Ghlionn is a writer and researcher who explores culture, society and the impact of technology on daily life.
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