March 7, 2026
PUBLISHED BY
THE BERGGRUEN INSTITUTE
Not Yet ‘Game Over’ In Iran
Foreign intervention to foment regime change may have sealed the fate of reformists who would take power.
NATHAN GARDELS
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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Noema staff for Noema Magazine
There has been much speculation about what comes after the sustained air and missile assault by the United States and Israel to foment regime change in Iran and the widespread collateral damage of Iran’s counterstrikes across the region.
Successful regime change has two sequential aspects. First, pushing a teetering regime that has lost legitimacy from power, and second, replacing it with a new legitimate authority or a transition process that establishes the legitimacy of the new governing authority.
Despite how we might marvel at the awesome capacity of the U.S. and Israel to locate in real-time and kill dozens of top leaders in one fell swoop — this time including the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei himself — enduring success rests on the latter aspect.
Much depends now on whether the nascent political class of reformists that has emerged in fragmented form over the years can cohere enough to take on the decapitated remains of the Revolutionary Guards and the Leninist-like theocratic order organized around the principle of “velayat-e-faghih,” or rule by a Supreme Islamic jurist.
Even as that residual custodians of that order appear to be naming a new Supreme leader, some hold out the hope that the alternative to protracted chaos and bloody internal repression could be a more gradual “regime alteration” or an “Iran 2.0” in which reformists such as former president Hassan Rouhani or former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi and the coalitions they can assemble come to power.
Rouhani has long argued for a greater space for civil society to govern its own affairs, but he has also remained in “loyal opposition” within the concept of clerical rule.
Mousavi, unlike Rouhani, is not a cleric and has gone much further. He argues that the regime’s legitimacy has drained away irretrievably since the crackdown on the Green Movement in 2019. In a statement smuggled out from his house arrest during the unconscionable January massacre of thousands of protestors, he declared that “enough is enough, the game is over” for the Islamic Republic. He challenged Ayatollah Khamenei directly, calling for a “constitutional referendum” to end the regime.
The problem is, the traction these reformers gained as a legitimate alternative to the ruling clerics in the wake of the horrific repression of recent protests will lose its grip if they come to power under the sponsorship of “U.S. imperialists and Israeli Zionists.” Staunch patriots, as any aspiring leader anywhere must be, both figures have vociferously opposed foreign intervention.
If the fractured cohesion of this political class is removed from the scene, the powers-that-be will hold all the cards as the only armed and concerted force against the impotent diaspora of a discontented but unorganized public.
For every Iranian in that nation of 90 million celebrating their liberation from the tyranny of Ayatollah Khamenei, there is another for whom national sovereignty and not living under the imperial mandate of others is sacred. And surely there are others, perhaps most, who hold both views.
As Abolhassan Banisadr, the sidelined first president of the Islamic Republic back in the early 1980s, explained to me often from exile, the 1979 revolution was nationalist in nature but hijacked by the better-organized and more ruthless clerics. For him, national independence would remain the driving force of Iranian history even if the religious regime was overthrown.
Then there is the reality of the actual experience of war on the ground. An Iranian friend who has been involved in reformist politics for decades told me this week: “My reading of Iran’s internal situation is that Trump miscalculated badly. He thought that when he attacks, Iranians who hate the regime will act as his foot soldiers. That not only has not happened, but it is not going to happen. The more Iranian cities are attacked and the more civilians are getting killed, the more the opposition against the regime will be forced to either stay silent or go back to support for the regime.“
In history, lasting change only takes hold if made by those who own it. The game may be over for the legitimacy of the present regime. But even as the bombs fall, they will nonetheless continue to hold on in the absence of an alternative that arises organically from among Iranians themselves.
Global Fallout
On the global stage, it has become clear that the putative alliances with China and Russia offer little to Iran, just like in the cases of Venezuela and, soon, Cuba, when push comes to shove against the U.S. projection of power. Unless the threat is directly on their shores, squawking at the United Nations Security Council is the limit of their capacity to thwart America’s unilateral adventures.
Nonetheless, the Iran war benefits them both. Let’s not forget that China’s greatest strides toward becoming the manufacturing, military and technological superpower it is today took place in the decades when the U.S. was distracted by the “forever” wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. For the U.S. to become bogged down in the Middle East again will only weaken its already fading resolve to defend Ukraine against Russia’s determined onslaught and relax its vigilance over Taiwan.
The lesson a breakout nuclear power like North Korea takes from the Iran intervention is that it has been right all along: Only nuclear weapons will deter America from doing unto them what it is doing to Iran.
Finally, U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s declaration about the Iran war that “this is not Iraq” will surely go down in the history books alongside the assertion by leading advocates from the Bush administration at the time of the Iraq war that it would be a “cakewalk” and the president’s own premature claim of “mission accomplished.”
A game that is over can go on for a long time.