By Almost Every Visible Measure, This Regime Should Be in Trouble
Iran regime collapse may seem increasingly plausible after a combination of pressures that would appear devastating to almost any political system: mass unrest, a six-month war, the deaths of senior leaders and commanders, severe economic deterioration, expanding sanctions, continued repression, and visible public defiance.
Inflation reached 66 percent in July, while food prices rose 128 percent year on year.
Yet Iran regime collapse has not followed. After everything Iranians have endured, and despite the risks people continue to take in defying the system, the Islamic Republic is still standing.
Sources:
Reuters: Battered by war, Iran’s rulers wary of more economic pain and unrest if US tightens pressure
Associated Press: Every facet of Iran’s military and theocracy is under assault. These images show the damage
Are We Measuring Regime Survival the Wrong Way?
Perhaps the problem is how regime survival is measured. Governments do not necessarily fall when a country suffers enough, when leaders are killed or when public anger becomes overwhelming.
They fall when the machinery that converts political authority into obedience begins to fail: when orders are no longer reliably transmitted, enforced, or obeyed.
That distinction may be the key to understanding Iran regime collapse, and why it has not happened yet.
Why Has Iran Regime Collapse Not Happened Yet?
Because despite extraordinary damage, the Islamic Republic still retains the institutions and people required to enforce its authority.
That requires separating the condition of Iran as a country from the condition of the regime that governs it. Economic hardship, damaged infrastructure, and public anger can make life increasingly unsustainable without automatically disabling the institutions that protect political power.
What Is the Regime Still Able to Control?
Iran’s leadership has suffered extraordinary losses, yet the command system has continued to function. Senior positions have been refilled, while the IRGC’s deliberately decentralized “mosaic” structure allows subordinate units to keep operating when commanders are removed. The state also retains intelligence, policing, detention, and military capabilities.
Political science research helps explain why that matters. Sharon Erickson Nepstad’s comparison of successful and failed challenges to authoritarian governments found that security-force defections were critical to successful revolutions. Regimes whose troops remained loyal were the least likely to collapse.
So the more useful question is not how much pressure Iran can endure. It is whether Tehran can still issue an order and expect somebody to carry it out.
For now, largely, it can. That is why the regime survives and why the first failures in that chain would matter so much.
Sources:
Reuters: With top figures dead, who is now running Iran?
Sharon Erickson Nepstad, Oxford University Press: Nonviolent Revolutions: Civil Resistance in the Late 20th Century
History Shows That Angry Populations Do Not Automatically Bring Regimes Down
Mass anger alone does not produce Iran regime collapse; it becomes regime-threatening when it begins changing the behavior of the institutions that protect political power.
When Mass Mobilization Is Not Enough
Iran has already demonstrated this. The 2009 Green Movement brought huge numbers of people into the streets, but the Islamic Republic retained the forces needed to suppress the challenge and subsequently strengthened the Basij’s role in controlling society.
Belarus offers a similar contrast. Hundreds of thousands mobilized after the disputed 2020 election, yet the police, military, and special forces largely remained with Alexander Lukashenko.
In China in 1989, mass mobilization reached a point of profound political crisis, but the Communist Party ultimately retained enough military obedience to clear Tiananmen Square by force.
Sources:
Saeid Golkar, Edinburgh University Press: Deep Society and New Authoritarian Social Control in Iran after the Green Movement
Sofie Bedford, Cambridge University Press / Nationalities Papers: The 2020 Presidential Election in Belarus: Erosion of Authoritarian Stability and Re-politicization of Society
Andrew Scobell, Cambridge University Press: Why the People’s Army Fired on the People: Beijing, 1989
Why Iran 1979 Was Different
The fall of the Shah followed a different trajectory. Mass demonstrations and strikes were accompanied by growing defections inside the armed forces. Recent cross-national research on security-force disloyalty describes the Iranian Revolution as involving thousands of individual defections before the military could no longer reliably sustain the monarchy.
Iran itself has already lived through this distinction once: the monarchy still looked formidable until the institutions required to defend it began to fracture.
That distinction matters. The same research finds that isolated defections alone do not significantly change campaign outcomes; widespread loyalty shifts do.
The difference between protest and revolution is often not how angry the street becomes, but what the men with guns eventually decide to do.
Sources:
Marianne Dahl, Mauricio Rivera Celestino, Scott Gates and Tora Sagård, Journal of Peace Research / Oxford University Press: Security Force Disloyalty in Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns, 1970–2013: Introducing a New Dataset
But Does Regime Weakening Have to Begin With Another Mass Uprising?
Not necessarily. Iran regime collapse does not have to begin with another mass uprising; political power can begin eroding much earlier, when ordinary enforcement becomes less automatic.
Historians and political scientists have long examined forms of everyday resistance that exist below the level of organized protest: refusal, evasion, noncooperation, symbolic defiance, and other small acts through which people contest or limit authoritarian control.
This matters because no regime can personally enforce every rule. It depends partly on predictable behavior. The officer gives an order and expects compliance. The shopkeeper cooperates. The witness remains silent. The neighbor stays out of it.
Sources:
Nathaniel Andrews, Kate Ferris and Ushehwedu Kufakurinani, Cambridge University Press / The Historical Journal: Writing Histories of Everyday Life in Authoritarian Regimes, from Europe to the Global South
What Happens When People Stop Assuming Resistance Is Futile?
What Does a Recent Street Confrontation in Iran Tell Us?
Why Does the Passive Crowd Matter?
The political significance is not the rubbish bin. It is the disappearance of the passive crowd.
For the woman being targeted, solidarity changes the confrontation immediately. For the system enforcing the rule, repeated solidarity could eventually change the cost of enforcement itself.
That matters because recent research into resistance against Iran’s compulsory hijab argues that isolated acts of defiance are limited partly by a lack of collective solidarity. When bystanders instead intervene, the social calculation changes.
One incident proves no wider trend, and it is not evidence that Iran regime collapse has begun. But if such responses become repeated and expected, enforcement becomes less predictable, more resource-intensive, and potentially riskier.
The question is therefore not whether one regime loyalist loses control of one confrontation, but whether others begin expecting that they might.
Sources:
Anonymous author, Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence: Everyday Resistance Against the Mandatory Hijab and the Lack of Collective Solidarity in Iran
What Does the Shadow Rider Reveal About the Balance of Fear?
The Shadow Rider story shows a far more extreme form of resistance: instead of merely surviving repression, Nick Berg found a way to make the people pursuing him vulnerable themselves.
How Did the Shadow Rider Turn Pursuit Against the Regime?
During the Iranian Revolution, Nick Berg, the real-life inspiration behind Ricardo in Shadows of Tehran, became known as the Shadow Rider. Riding through Tehran, he deliberately drew regime pursuers after him and led them into traps where resistance fighters could attack them with Molotov cocktails.
The tactic mattered because it reversed something the security forces normally relied on: control. The Shadow Rider did not make the Iranian state disappear. What he challenged was the assumption that those hunting opponents could always dictate the terms of the encounter.
Pursuing a dissident was no longer necessarily a safe, one-sided operation. And these activities eventually made him a priority target of the IRGC and forced him to flee Iran.
Why Does That Matter to Iran Today?
The recent street confrontation is fundamentally different. Bystanders protecting a woman from a regime loyalist is spontaneous collective resistance; the Shadow Rider was part of organized violent resistance.
The connection is therefore not the method. It is the loss of certainty for the enforcer.
In the recent street confrontation, a regime loyalist discovers that targeting one woman does not necessarily mean confronting one woman; the people around her may refuse to stay passive. In the Shadow Rider’s case, security forces pursuing an opponent discovered that the pursuit itself could be deliberately turned against them.
Neither proves that violence or confrontation causes regime collapse. The important question is whether repeated experiences of resistance eventually make those enforcing the system more hesitant to act.
When Would These Small Acts Actually Matter for Iran Regime Collapse?
They become strategically important only if resistance outside the regime begins producing behavioral change inside the regime.
When Does Resistance Become More Than Defiance?
The progression matters. Civilian refusal may encourage others to intervene. That can make enforcement less predictable and force authorities to spend more resources achieving the same level of compliance. If that pressure spreads, some low-level enforcers may begin avoiding confrontations, selectively ignoring violations or failing to carry out orders.
But none of those steps should be assumed. A major 2026 study of security force disloyalty found that small acts of shirking, desertion, or side-switching do not, by themselves, significantly improve an opposition campaign’s chances of success.
The relationship becomes far stronger when disloyalty spreads across much larger numbers. The strategically important threshold comes when hesitation or disloyalty stops being isolated and begins spreading through parts of the security apparatus.
Sources:
Kara Kingma Neu, Political Science Quarterly / Oxford University Press: Explaining Types of Military Defections during Major Anti-authoritarian Protests
Is That Process Visible in Iran Yet?
There are reasons to watch closely. Open defiance of compulsory hijab remains widespread, while authorities are again closing businesses for failing to enforce the rules. Separate reports have also documented isolated attacks on IRGC personnel.
What is still missing is more important: there is no reliable evidence of systematic Basij refusal, widespread IRGC defections, or security units openly rejecting Tehran’s orders.
Iran is under enormous pressure. But the decisive institutional break is not yet established.
That is not a reason to dismiss the smaller acts. It is a reason to watch what they become.
Sources:
Ghazal Golshiri, Le Monde: Iran’s increasing repression of civil society
Hengaw Organization for Human Rights: IRGC Member and Jash Salar Rangamiz Killed in Armed Attack in Sanandaj
What Should We Watch for Before Saying Iran Regime Collapse Is Near?
Watch less for another dramatic headline and more for evidence that Iran’s system of obedience is beginning to fail.
War has not brought the Islamic Republic down. Neither has economic deterioration, killed leaders, nor mass demonstrations. Those pressures still matter because together they can make repression harder to sustain and increase the cost of maintaining control.
But the more decisive warning signs lie elsewhere: citizens refusing more openly, bystanders increasingly protecting them, enforcement becoming less predictable, and low-level regime supporters becoming more reluctant to intervene. Beyond that lies the threshold that history suggests matters most: police, Basij or other security personnel beginning to ignore, refuse, or collectively abandon orders.
Why Does That Still Leave Room for Hope?
The recent street confrontation does not demonstrate revolution. The Shadow Rider did not defeat a regime by himself. But both expose something fundamental about political power: fear works best when it travels in only one direction.
The Islamic Republic has survived because, despite everything Iran has endured, enough people inside its institutions still turn orders into action. But survival is not permanence.
Authoritarian power often looks far stronger than it really is, until obedience begins to shift.
History shows how quickly systems that appear immovable can become vulnerable once loyalty and enforcement begin to fracture.
Hope does not require pretending Iran regime collapse is imminent.
It lies in recognizing that authoritarian power still depends on human choices:
who obeys,
who looks away,
who refuses,
who stands beside someone else,
and eventually,
who decides that an order is no longer worth carrying out.
