Hal Van Hercke, second post to FB 3/4/3036, PM.
After the Islamic Republic: The Road Ahead for Iran.
One of the most common complaints you hear right now is that even if the Islamic Republic collapses, no one really knows what comes next.
That assumption sounds reasonable on the surface, but it ignores the institutions and social structures that actually exist inside Iran. The regime is now under the most sustained pressure it has faced since 1979, and for the first time since the revolution it is possible to start thinking seriously about what a post-Islamic Republic Iran might look like.
The strikes are accomplishing something very specific. Large parts of the regime’s leadership are being eliminated and key elements of its internal security architecture are being disrupted. What they have not done is eliminate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as an institution.
The IRGC is not just a military organization that collapses when its generals die. It is an economic network, a political machine, and a nationwide security apparatus embedded across Iranian society. Removing the regime means untangling that structure piece by piece. I will cover that in more detail tomorrow, because understanding the IRGC’s role in Iranian society is essential to understanding how this transition could succeed or fail.
What the strikes have created is a window. They have not created a solution. Air power can open space for political change, but it cannot fill that space with a functioning government. That work has to come from inside Iran.
We have seen this mistake before. In 2011 NATO destroyed Muammar Qaddafi’s military in weeks. The air campaign worked exactly as planned. Then the intervention ended and the political follow-through never came. Militias filled the vacuum and Libya collapsed into a decade of instability.
The failure was not military. It was removing a regime without having a structure ready to replace it.
Syria produced a different version of the same mistake. External powers backed multiple opposition factions with competing agendas and no unified political framework. Instead of a transition, the result was fragmentation, proxy warfare, and a conflict that dragged on for years.
The lesson in both cases is the same. Military success without political architecture produces chaos.
Iran does not have to follow that path. The country still has functioning national institutions, a professional military outside the ideological guard structure, and a large technocratic class capable of running the state. If those elements hold together during the transition, the outcome could look very different from Libya or Syria.
That brings us to the most important institution in this entire discussion, the Artesh, Iran’s regular national military.
Unlike the IRGC, the Artesh was never designed as a revolutionary ideological force. It is a national army whose institutional identity predates the Islamic Republic. In 1979 the Artesh ultimately chose neutrality rather than fighting to preserve the Shah’s regime. That institutional memory still matters.
If Iran moves into a transition period, the Artesh is the only organization with the command structure, manpower, and national legitimacy to hold the country together while a civilian political structure begins to emerge.
The second stabilizing force is far less visible but just as important. Iran’s technocratic state apparatus.
For decades the Islamic Republic has relied on a large professional bureaucracy to keep the country running. Ministries, economic planners, engineers, and administrators run the day-to-day machinery of the state. Many built their careers inside the system, but they are not the ideological core of the regime.
If the system collapses, these technocrats will be essential. You cannot dismantle the regime by dismantling the state itself.
A third stabilizing force sits outside the government entirely. Iran’s professional networks.
Doctors, professors, lawyers, engineers, and other professional communities still hold enormous credibility inside Iranian society. These networks form an informal civic backbone that could help provide legitimacy to a transitional government while formal political institutions are rebuilt.
Reza Pahlavi may end up playing a role in this transition, but probably not in the way most people assume. At the moment he is the only opposition figure with nationwide name recognition and a degree of symbolic continuity that cuts across factions inside Iran and the diaspora.
Just as important, Pahlavi himself has said the future political system should be decided by referendum by the Iranian people. If that position holds, his most useful role is as a transitional national figure while the real work of stabilizing the country is carried out by institutions inside Iran.
Iran is not a uniform political space. It is a collection of regions with distinct ethnic and regional identities. Persians, Azeris, Kurds, Baloch, Arabs, and others have historically been held together by a strong central state.
In several regions those identities are reinforced by local clan or tribal structures, particularly among Kurdish and Baloch communities. In a moment of regime collapse, those regional dynamics can either be integrated into a national political framework or exploited by outside powers looking to prolong instability.
For that reason, the structure of the next government will matter enormously. Iran has historically remained stable not by suppressing regional identities, but by balancing them within a strong national state. A successful transition will likely require something similar. A constitutional republic that preserves central authority while allowing meaningful provincial autonomy.
There is still a great deal of work ahead. The IRGC and its many instruments of repression have not been fully dismantled, and degrading those structures will take time. But the idea that no one can begin thinking about what comes next simply is not true.
If Iran’s own national institutions move to stabilize the transition, the outlines of a stable future are not mysterious. A professional military that secures the country, a technocratic state that keeps it functioning, and civic institutions that restore political legitimacy could open the path to something Iran has not seen in nearly half a century: a sovereign republic governed by its people rather than by a revolutionary theocracy.
The window is open. What matters now is whether Iran chooses to walk through it.
-HVH