Despite the confrontation between Iran, the United States, Israel, and the Arabs, there is a line of political analysis arguing that it is in no one's interest to overthrow the Iranian regime.
اضافة اعلان
Proponents of this view believe that reproducing or reshaping the Iranian regime is far better than its collapse and the downfall of the Iranian state. The collapse of the state would trigger threats that are impossible to contain—whether internally within Iran, across the Arab region, or at the level of regional and international security.
In this analysis, there are assertions that the fall of the regime would first spark a conflict between the Iranian Army and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which could devolve into a power struggle with massive security costs. Furthermore, its fall would create a vacuum where determining a political successor would be impossible amid conflicting factions and existing separatist tendencies among Arabs, Baloch, and Azeris. This effectively means an internal war scenario leading to the balkanization of Iran and the spread of chaos to its surrounding neighbors.
This scenario is inevitably linked to the consequences of a civil war that would drive millions of refugees from Iran into Iraq and Iran’s Arab and Islamic neighbors, with profound security, economic, and political ramifications.
Another critical issue is that the fall of the regime would open a far more dangerous door regarding Iran’s military arsenal. Where would these weapons go? Would they remain inside Iran, be partitioned internally, reach ethnic, sectarian, separatist, or religiously extremist groups, or be smuggled and sold across Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and from Iraq into Syria and other Arab nations—effectively arming militant groups across various political, military, and ideological spectrums?
Whether Washington fights the current regime or negotiates with it, it deals with an entity that has a clear address. This makes pursuing war or peace easier, as established positions of authority exist—from the Supreme Leader to the President, through Parliament and other officials. Overthrowing the Iranian state, however, would plunge the region into a space where no single party is capable of making decisions, incurring immense costs.
Among the reasons Washington delays a decision on war—and tries to avoid it—is its desire to perpetuate conflict in the region, extract concessions from its states, and exhaust regional players. Yet another reason emerges here: fear of the costs of a war that might lead to the regime's collapse, given the fallout such an overthrow would have on Iran, its neighbors, regional security, navigation, and the reactions of pro-Iranian Arab groups in Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen. This potential backlash cannot be left out of strategic calculations.
This implies that Iran has become a dilemma for the Americans. Washington is neither capable of waging an open-ended war nor prepared to absorb the costs of a regime-change scenario. Consequently, it temporarily retreats into a state of "no war, no peace," hoping for a breakthrough regarding the Strait of Hormuz and the nuclear file.
What must be said candidly here is that tampering with the Iranian file has yielded dire consequences for regional security. Even if Washington achieves some of its objectives, it has dragged the region into a precarious state with no timeline defining its outcome or final shape. Perhaps most alarming is the possibility that Washington might, at a given moment, get dragged into what it believes is the climax of this confrontation, only to discover later that it was not the end, but the beginning of widespread, uncontainable chaos across the entire region—a scenario where everyone pays a painful price.
The question remains: Which is more costly for the Arabs—overthrowing the Iranian regime, launching a major war against it whose end cannot be guaranteed, or having everyone remain suspended in this current state of limbo?
