Iran: Violence without vision

The Iranian regime is not merely authoritarian: it is structurally violent, ideologically totalitarian, and deeply hostile to any form of freedom. For more than forty years, the mullahs have ruled through fear, executions, humiliation, and religious manipulation. They repress their own people, oppress women, assassinate opponents, and export instability far beyond their borders. This assessment is no longer ideological; it is factual.

Yes, the regime of the mullahs is one of the worst in the world. But this conclusion, however damning, does not justify strategic blindness.

The idea—regularly put forward, notably by Donald Trump and advocates of brute force—of bombing Iran is more a reflex than a strategy. Destroying a regime does not mean liberating a people. Those who claim otherwise have learned nothing from the disasters of the early twenty-first century. Bombing is easy. Governing the aftermath never is.

The central question, carefully avoided, is nevertheless obvious: who will govern Iran after the bombs?

Certainly not a democracy rising from the ruins. Far more likely is prolonged chaos, the total militarization of power, or an even more radical takeover by the Revolutionary Guards. In other words, the replacement of a brutal regime with a system that could be even more violent and uncontrollable.

Recent history is unforgiving. In Iraq, Libya, and Syria, regime change imposed by force produced failed states, civil wars, and enduring breeding grounds for radicalization. Repeating this scenario in Iran—a regional power of nearly 90 million people—would be a major strategic mistake, with incalculable regional and international consequences.

Bombing Iran means risking a generalized regional conflagration, an uncontrollable military escalation involving Israel, the Gulf, Lebanon, Iraq, and beyond. It would also hand the regime its strongest argument: national survival, used to justify total repression and the definitive crushing of any internal democratic opposition, immediately branded as treason.

Faced with this dead end, solutions do exist—but they require lucidity and political courage. The only credible path lies in a long-term, cold, and deliberate strategy. It begins with clear, structured political support for Iranian democratic forces, including those in the diaspora, without naïveté but without ambiguity. It then requires targeted international pressure—not blind, but focused on the real centers of power: regime leaders, the Revolutionary Guards, and the economic and financial networks that fuel repression. This must be accompanied by active protection of Iranian civil society—journalists, artists, women, students—because this is where the post-regime future will be decided. Finally, it is imperative to prepare now a transition architecture, designed with legitimate Iranian actors, to avoid the political vacuum that extremism always exploits. Strategic lucidity means weakening the regime without destroying the country.

The regime of the mullahs will fall. It is corroded from within, rejected by a young, educated population exhausted by corruption, repression, and ideological lies. But it will fall either through a prepared and controlled transition, or through a brutal collapse that opens the door to something even worse.

The responsibility of the international community is not to play at being apprentice arsonists, but to prevent a criminal regime from leaving behind a political wasteland. In geopolitics, violence without vision never produces freedom. It merely changes the name of the oppressor.