When might meaningful change come to Iran, and how? Nearly 50 years after the country’s last major political transformation – the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s radical Islamist revolt against the monarchy of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi – that question continues to bedevil policymakers, both in Washington and far beyond the Capital Beltway.
There are no definitive answers. History has shown all too clearly that revolutions are notoriously hard to predict. Almost without exception, the significant political upheavals of the 20th century were not reliably anticipated, either by informed observers or by much better-resourced (and presumably more competent) intelligence agencies. Even Iran’s own Islamic Revolution caught the US government by near-total surprise when it erupted in February 1979. There is therefore significant hazard in trying to predict when, how, and in what way political change might come to Iran.
Even so, it is apparent that Iran is fast approaching an inflection point of some sort. Nearly a half century after the Islamic Revolution fundamentally altered the complexion of the country, virtually every objective measure suggests that it is once again ripe for change.
Demographically, the Islamic Republic is experiencing a generational shift that will profoundly influence both its internal politics and its place in the world. Although it ranks among the older countries of the Middle East, Iran’s population structure is unique – and deeply significant in political terms. During the 1980s and 1990s, the country witnessed a pronounced “youth bulge” as a result of high fertility rates that prevailed during the Pahlavi era. The impact of this demographic surge has proven long-lasting; as of 2010, over 60 percent of Iran’s population was estimated to be under age 30. Today, almost 40 percent of Iran’s roughly 86 million citizens are 24 years old or younger.
These figures are deeply significant, because they serve as the basis for a widening rift between the Iranian regime and the country’s captive population. Put simply, a majority of Iranians either were not yet alive or were not old enough to be politically aware when Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution occurred 45 years ago. As a result, Iran’s younger generations lack any formative experience with the Revolution and its underlying tenets – or the ideological bonds that might tether them firmly to the current regime in Tehran. Iran’s population, in other words, cannot be counted on to stay committed to the Revolution in the absence of favorable internal conditions. And on that score, the news is decidedly not good for the country’s ruling clerical regime.
Economics, Social Policy & Religion
Economic conditions provide a case in point. Despite its enormous resource wealth (Iran boasts the world’s second-largest proven natural gas reserves and nearly half of OPEC’s oil reserves), the financial fortunes of ordinary Iranians have steadily declined under clerical rule. When tallied by the World Bank back in 2018, Iranians were found in real terms to be 30 percent poorer than immediately prior to the 1979 Revolution.
Nor is all this attributable to Western sanctions, as Iranian officials have tried to argue. Rather, ruinous domestic practices – from widespread resource mismanagement to uncompetitive Islamic banking to pervasive graft – are cumulatively responsible for Iran’s pronounced “failure to thrive.” Ordinary Iranians understand all this very well, which helps to explain the precipitous decline in their support for the regime in recent years.
Socially, meanwhile, the Iranian regime has become steadily more repressive in order to maintain its hold on power. Over the past two-plus years, the Islamic Republic has been buffeted anew by widespread discontent. The immediate cause was the September 2022 death of a young Kurdish-Iranian activist at the hands of regime security forces for improperly wearing her Islamic headscarf.
Quickly, however, what began as grassroots unrest over regime brutality transformed into a fundamental rejection of the Islamic Republic itself. In response, the regime launched a heavy-handed campaign that has included mass killings and an unprecedented severing of Internet access nationwide. The extent of this effort reflects a fundamental reality: Iran’s leadership recognizes it has irrevocably lost the “hearts and minds” of a vast swath of its citizenry and is now willing to employ any means necessary to cling to power.
That, however, will prove to be increasingly difficult, because Iranians are increasingly looking beyond the clerical state.
Forty-five years on, religious identification is experiencing a precipitous decline within the country. A September 2020 survey by Netherlands-based polling institute GAMAAN found 31 percent of respondents self-identified as atheists or stated they did not have a defined faith, while over half (51.8 percent) of those aged 20-29 and 46 percent of those aged 30-49 reported having transitioned away from religion altogether. In all, 46.8 percent of participants in the survey disclosed having abandoned their religious beliefs in recent years. This distance has real-world effects; by official estimates, some two-thirds of Iran’s 75,000 mosques have been closed in recent years because of significant declines in attendance, prompting increasingly frantic official attempts to lure Iranians back to places of worship.
All of these factors have combined into a political cocktail that is potentially lethal to the country’s current clerical regime.
A Resourceful Regime
Yet the United States needs to approach this revolutionary potential with caution. Over the years, the Islamic Republic has proven itself both resourceful and adaptable, managing to successfully weather multiple internal crises and extensive foreign pressure. Meanwhile, supporting Iran’s assorted opposition forces comes with its own set of significant challenges.
One is that diaspora groups have historically had a mixed record of influencing their country’s future course after the collapse of the old regime. In instances where they were assisted in assuming power (as was the expatriate leadership of France and Germany during and after World War II), these groups played a decisive role in shaping the direction of the future state. However, in instances where there was no occupation or precipitating function that eased their rise to power – such as in Poland and Hungary after the Soviet collapse – diaspora groups, no matter how organized, only ended up playing a marginal role.
Another is the degree of connectivity between the different wings of the Iranian opposition. Today, Iranian opposition forces are effectively bifurcated, divided between an external opposition made up of activists and organizations in the Iranian diaspora and internal protest groups within the Islamic Republic itself. To be sure, diaspora groups persistently claim to have extensive access to, and interaction with, Iran’s internal forces. But this level of connection has proven hard to quantify with any degree of confidence, and that lack of clarity has helped deter Western governments from committing decisively to supporting Iranian agents of change.
Finally, there is America’s own mixed track record of involvement in promoting change abroad. More often than not, American political interventions over the past century have failed to follow Washington’s plans for smooth, pro-Western transition – with post-Saddam Iraq the most recent and painful case in point. Given this difficult history, the United States needs to remain judicious in its involvement with Iranian opposition forces and temper its expectations of playing a decisive role in setting the country’s future course.
A Role for Washington
Nevertheless, Washington has an important role to play in shaping Iran’s political trajectory, by helping to identify – and then support – those opposition elements that can best steer the country in a direction compatible with American interests. To do that, however, the United States first needs to articulate what principles should ideally be represented in the next Iranian polity.
Here, six priorities stand out.
The first is national integrity. While it has become fashionable for Western scholars to encourage a fragmentation of the Islamic Republic, such a “Balkanization” is deeply ill-advised. That’s because, due to the country’s long imperial history, Iranians themselves are firmly opposed to a territorial breakup, and can’t be counted on to support any group or opposition force that advocates such a course. It’s also due to the increasingly mature state of the Iranian nuclear program, which makes maintaining control over multiple active facilities and stockpiles of fissile material an overriding priority in international security terms.
The second is civil society. Iran’s clerical regime has been at war with its captive population for nearly a half century, ruling via religious diktat in a manner that has disenfranchised assorted minorities and systematically undermined the country’s rich pre-Islamic heritage. To be more inclusive, a new political order will need to reverse this practice and emphasize meaningful engagement across Iran’s political spectrum, as well as the nurturing of civic organizations.
The third is secular governance. Today, religion is in profound retreat within the Islamic Republic. It would therefore be a mistake to allow future legislative frameworks or constitutions to tether Iran’s new order to any particular faith or ideology, the way such constructs have in recent decades been imposed in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.
The fourth is nuclear development. In their search for Western support, assorted opposition groups have pledged not to pursue an atomic program. Yet the idea remains popular among ordinary Iranians and is therefore a logical priority for a future Iranian government regardless of its political outlook. The establishment of a transparent, verifiable process for any new nuclear work is therefore a paramount priority.
Fifth, Western support should prioritize those groups that promote greater pluralism within Iran. That’s because, though Iranian opposition elements have tended to pay lip service to the idea of Iranian democracy, a far more important metric for success (as well as moderation) is whether the country’s next political system will properly safeguard religious, gender, and ethnic minority rights.
Finally, Iran’s future political leaders will need to build a system for accountability and rehabilitation. In the current Iranian system, factions such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) represent key stakeholders and power brokers – elements that, by dint of their economic and political power, will need to be reintegrated if the new system is to succeed.
Ultimately, Iran’s future remains for Iranians themselves to decide. Nevertheless, the US would do well to articulate what would most securely put a post-theocratic Iran on a trajectory of security and prosperity. And it would do even better, to the extent that it is able, to empower those elements of the Iranian opposition that can best steer the country in that direction.
Ilan Berman is Senior Vice President of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, DC. This article is drawn from his recent study entitled Navigating The Iranian Opposition, which is available in its entirety from the AFPC website (www.afpc.org).
