Israel’s goal in Iran is not just regime change, but complete collapse

For Israel, a failed Iranian state fractured by civil war is preferable to any other outcome. They don’t want to just change the regime in Iran, they want to collapse the state itself.

By Kate McMahon  March 9, 2026 

https://mondoweiss.net/2026/03/israels-objective-in-iran-is-not-merely-regime-change-but-total-societal-collapse/

After decades of disastrous wars in the Middle East, the U.S. may have finally learned one lesson: regime change is exceedingly difficult. Removing a head of state is the easy part; what comes after is not. If the underlying goal is regime change, it’s expected the US will cultivate an alternative leadership overseeing a somewhat functioning state. This is when things go awry – and why few are meaningfully working towards a regime change in Iran.

The examples of such failed endeavors are numerous. The U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003; they killed Saddam Hussein in 2006. Twenty years later, the U.S. is still in Iraq. Preemptive declarations of “mission accomplished” contradicted the long complications of nation-building that were yet to come. Today, Iraq is deeply divided with a convoluted political system fractured along ethnic lines – still, it is a functioning state, but it took two and a half decades, billions of dollars, around a million dead, and a wave of terror across the region. Whatever stability Iraq has achieved also owes more to Iraqi political adaptation than to American design.

Meanwhile in Afghanistan, the U.S. spent two decades attempting to replace the Taliban – only to get the Taliban, once again. And in Syria, Washington armed rival factions seeking to topple Bashar al-Assad, stoking ethnic tensions and plunging the country into civil war. At one point, militias armed by the Pentagon were fighting those armed by the CIA.

But Libya provides a different kind of cautionary tale. In 2011, U.S. strikes aided in the killing of Muammar Gaddafi. Yet officials in the Obama administration weren’t particularly concerned with installing a replacement or wanted to become enmeshed in the messy business of nation building, leaving Libyans to deal with the aftermath and subsequent power vacuum alone. In 2010, Libya was one of the wealthiest countries in Africa and enjoyed a high standard of living. Today, it’s a failed state primarily run by violent militias and slave traders, marred by years of civil war.

Presently, the U.S. has assassinated Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei under the pretext of bringing democracy to Iran, or because they will soon have nuclear weapons, a false assertion. What comes next?

Though Washington officials may feign efforts to reinstall the Shah, this attempt is perfunctory at best. The exiled son of Iran’s brutal dictator, overthrown in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, is not poised to ride into Tehran on a white horse and set the country right with a monarch’s flair. While he retains a loyal following among the Iranian diaspora in the United States – particularly those from wealthy families who flourished under the violent monarchy – he is deeply unpopular within Iran. Few are seriously entertaining such fantasies that reinstalling a king who has lived in America for four decades will be smooth-sailing.

With the monarchist restoration largely dismissed, attention shifted to the Islamic Republic’s internal line of succession. When discussing a potential successor to Khamanei last week, Trump told a reporter: “The attack was so successful, it knocked out most of the candidates. It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.” In light of Khamanei’s second son being appointed Supreme Leader, Israeli officials have pledged to assassinate him and every subsequent successor. 

American and Israeli strikes on Iran have eliminated viable opposition leaders, including jailed critics of the Islamic Republic. Reportedly, the U.S. is also intentionally targeting leftist activists.

Because ultimately, replacing the Islamic Republic is not the main objective, or even a desirable one. Rather, the goal in Iran is ethnic balkanization and a failed state. They don’t want to change the regime in Iran, they want to collapse the state itself. The purpose of military strikes is to disintegrate the state’s institutions, fueling ethnic tensions and secessionist movements, leaving Iran deeply divided and marred by civil war and sectarian violence — a parallel to 2015 Syria.

Political collapse could intensify separatist pressures among Kurds in the northwest, Baluchis in the southeast, and Azeris in the north, particularly if outside powers sought to weaponize ethnic grievances. Already, the Trump administration has discussedarming separatist groups within Iran, which would mirror the horrific strategy used in Syria and Afghanistan: empowering brutal militias fighting amongst one another. But in this instance without American boots on the ground.

The “Department of War” is thus not concerned with Iraq and Afghanistan syndrome, because they seemingly have no intent on getting entangled in another round of nation-building and forever war. Rather, they intend to destabilize Iran, leave it to the wolves, and withdraw.

This dystopian trajectory clears the way for Israel to eliminate all meaningful military opposition in the region. In Syria, Israel has spent the last year bombing the country’s military infrastructure and obliterating its capacities – despite the new government being a western ally and issuing no threats against Israel. It’s clear Israel will tolerate no one in the region even having the potential to challenge it.

Israel’s security doctrine has long centered on maintaining a “qualitative military edge” – ensuring overwhelming technological and operational superiority over any regional rival. Codified in U.S. law, the principle is clear: no neighboring state should be allowed to develop the capacity to challenge Israeli military dominance. Within that framework, a fragmented state would pose far less of a long-term threat than an independent regional power capable of rebuilding its forces.

It’s evident Netanyahu desires the eradication of any and all regional powers. He has been warning since 1990 that Iran was on the brink of nuclear capability, spending three decades searching for an excuse for the US to intercede on Israel’s behalf and strike Iran. Though weakened, the Axis of Resistance still proves a stubborn obstacle to Israel expanding its borders in pursuit of “Greater Israel” – not just seizing the remaining Palestinian territories, but stretching into Syria and Lebanon. Therefore, the resistance must be eliminated, and the path goes through Iran.

As Danny Citrinowicz, senior researcher at Tel Aviv’s Institute for National Security Studies, told the Financial Times this week, summarizing his government’s position on Iran: “If we can have a coup, great. If we can have people on the streets, great. If we can have a civil war, great. Israel couldn’t care less about the future [or] the stability of Iran.”

From an Israeli perspective, a splintered Iran trapped in civil war is preferable to a new government, however beholden to western interests it may be (See: Syria). Meanwhile, Trump may nominally prefer a regime change to state collapse, but he is unwilling to put forth the resources to achieve it and will eventually disengage when the costs begin to mount.

If the Iranian regime falls, not just figureheads but the state apparatus itself, the inevitable result will be massive destabilization and Libya 2.0, if not worse. This is by design. The U.S. most certainly has no illusions of bringing democracy to Iran, which could potentially be achieved via support for the opposition or reformists organizing within the country, instead of bombing them. But Israel doesn’t want Iran to have a sovereign democracy, it wants incapacitation – clearing the way for its own firepower in the region to go unchecked.

Iran’s security apparatus is deeply entrenched and unlikely to unravel quickly. But if sustained strikes succeed in breaking the state rather than merely weakening its leadership, the consequences would be catastrophic. A country of nearly ninety million people does not fracture quietly. Hundreds of thousands will die, and millions more will be displaced. Because bombs never liberate – they fragment: bodies, countries, societies.

Yes, Iran Is Playing Chess – But Only After Rewriting the Rules of the Game

by Ramzy Baroud | Apr 1, 2026

https://original.antiwar.com/ramzy-baroud/2026/03/31/yes-iran-is-playing-chess-but-only-after-rewriting-the-rules-of-the-game/

The origins of chess are contested, but few dispute that while the game began in India, it was the Sassanian Persian Empire that refined it into a recognizable strategic system. It was Persia that codified its language, symbolism and intellectual framework: the shah (king), the rokh (rook), and shatranj, the modern chess game.

This is not a trivial historical detail. It is, in many ways, a metaphor that has returned with force.

Since the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran on February 28, 2026, political discourse – across Western, Israeli and alternative media – has repeatedly invoked the analogy of chess to describe Iran’s conduct.

The comparison is seductive. But it is also incomplete.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu articulated this framing as early as May 2012. Speaking of Iran’s negotiating posture, he said that “it looks as though they see the talks as another opportunity to delay and deceive and buy time… Iran is very good in playing this kind of chess game, and you know sometimes you have to sacrifice a pawn to save the king.”

That statement was not merely rhetorical; it revealed a long-standing Israeli interpretation of Iran as a strategic actor operating within a calculated, long-term framework.

More than a decade later, that framing has resurfaced with renewed urgency. Analysts, policymakers and commentators now routinely describe Iran’s actions as deliberate, layered and patient – defined not by immediate gains, but by positional advantage accumulated over time.

Some observers contrast this with what they perceive as a fundamentally different approach in Washington: one driven by immediacy, spectacle and the politics of rapid outcomes.

But such a contrast, while tempting, risks oversimplification.

Iran’s approach is rooted in historical continuity. It understands the current war not as an isolated confrontation, but as the latest phase in a decade-long process of pressure, containment and confrontation.

In this sense, the battlefield is not defined by days or weeks, but by political cycles measured in years – if not generations.

The objective of its adversaries, however, has remained consistent: Shāh Māt – checkmate – the dismantling of the Iranian state as a coherent political entity.

Yet this is precisely where the central miscalculation emerges.

When the Iranian Revolution overthrew the US-backed Shah in 1979, the collapse of the system was swift and decisive. But it was not the result of external pressure. It was the inevitable outcome of a structurally brittle system.

That system was vertical – organized as a rigid hierarchy with power concentrated at the apex and legitimacy flowing downward. When the apex collapsed, the entire structure disintegrated.

If the people are the piyādeh – the pawns – then in that moment, they did not merely encircle the king; they overturned the entire board.

This experience helped shape a strategic doctrine that would later define US and Israeli military thinking: the belief that removing leadership – what is often termed “decapitation” – can trigger systemic collapse.

This doctrine appeared to succeed in Iraq following the 2003 invasion and the eventual execution of Saddam Hussein. It appeared to succeed in Libya after the killing of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

In Latin America, the same doctrine has shaped US intervention across decades – from the 1954 CIA-backed overthrow of Guatemala’s Jacobo Árbenz to the 1973 coup against Chile’s Salvador Allende and, most recently, the US kidnapping of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro in Caracas in January 2026. In each case, the assumption was the same: remove the leadership, and the system would collapse with it.

But this model has repeatedly failed when applied to movements and societies rooted in popular mobilization rather than elite control.

In Gaza, Lebanon and, crucially, Iran, the assumption that political systems function as fragile pyramids has proven fundamentally flawed.

These are not systems sustained solely by leadership. They are sustained by social depth. In other words, they are not pyramids – they are networks.

Their resilience lies in their ability to regenerate from within society itself. Leadership can be removed, but the political energy that sustains it cannot be easily extinguished.

Israel has long recognized, at least implicitly, that assassinating Palestinian leaders does not end Palestinian resistance. Yet it has persisted in such tactics, while simultaneously expanding its strategy.

Increasingly, the focus has shifted toward the population itself – raising the cost of resistance by targeting the social fabric that sustains it.

In Gaza, this strategy has reached its most extreme form: the systematic destruction of civilian life and the open pursuit of mass extermination and mass displacement.

In southern Lebanon, a similar logic is evident. Entire communities have been uprooted, towns devastated, and infrastructure erased – not merely as ‘collateral damage’, but as part of a deliberate strategy.

The aim is unmistakable: decapitate the leadership, then erode the people. Yet in Iran, this logic has encountered its most profound limitation.

Both Washington and Tel Aviv appear to have assumed that internal dissatisfaction could be weaponized – that social grievances would override national cohesion in the face of external pressure.

This assumption reflects a deeper misreading – not only of Iranian society, but of how legitimacy itself functions within it.

Iran is not a monolithic system in the way it is often portrayed. Its political life is dynamic, contested and deeply embedded in society. Legitimacy is not imposed from above; it is continuously negotiated within the public sphere – through electoral participation, protests, and other forms of political engagement.

This dynamism produces a system that is far more resilient than it appears from the outside. The removal of a leader, or even multiple leaders, does not signify collapse. Nor does the symbolic destruction of state power.

The system persists because it is not reducible to individuals. It is reproduced through collective political experience.

This is where the chess analogy becomes truly revealing.

Iran’s strategic strength does not lie in protecting a single “king,” but in its ability to reconfigure the board itself.

In this game, continuity is not tied to any one piece. It is embedded in the relationships between them. The rallies, marches and sustained public mobilization that have continued throughout the war are not incidental. They are central.

They represent, in effect, a collective “Shah” – a form of political sovereignty that cannot be eliminated through assassination or decapitation.

Some may argue that Iran is not merely playing chess, but rewriting its rules. That, perhaps, is the most unsettling realization of all.

For if the rules themselves have changed, then the strategy designed to defeat Iran may alr