Syria’s Lessons for Regime Change in Iran

Syria’s trajectory—from the outbreak of anti-regime protests in 2011 to the fall of Bashar al-Assad in 2024 and the subsequent leadership transition—provides a better set of lessons for understanding the question of regime change in Iran. For nearly a decade and a half after the beginning of the Syrian uprising, flawed narratives persisted about the Assad regime’s inevitable survival. Many in the West, Israel, and elsewhere even saw the regime’s survival as desirable, largely for fear that anything that followed would be worse for Syria’s own stability and that of the region. Syria’s lesson is not that Iran will follow the same path but that regimes often look strongest just before the political conditions sustaining them begin to break down.

For years, Syria reinforced a familiar set of assumptions about regime survival: Regimes entrenched for half a century cannot collapse; regime change requires a coherent opposition or ready-made successor; external powers must deploy ground forces to shift the balance—and even then, such interventions may fail, as in Iraq. These assumptions matter because Iran is often viewed through the same flawed lens.

As the Assad regime did for many years, the Islamic Republic is pursuing a brutal strategy of survival built on domestic repression, externalization of crisis, and attritional endurance. Yet its choices are ultimately self-defeating. As with Assad, the Iranian regime has long been seen as durable and capable of managing perpetual conflict. Unlike the Assad regime, which was a personalized autocracy, Iran’s is not dependent on specific personalities. The swift appointment of a new supreme leader after the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and replacement of other assassinated figures with an even more hard-line leadership have been cited as evidence of institutional resilience. Yet, as Iran grows more isolated and militarily strained, fractures within its security establishment are likely to widen.

Military degradation alone cannot cause regime collapse, but it can open the path to political rupture. The U.S.-Israeli air campaign is steadily reducing Iran’s military capabilities. The degradation of Tehran’s missile-launching capacity is severe, and its activation of Hezbollah against Israel and U.S. allied assets suggests desperation, not strength. Hezbollah’s attacks have been a minor distraction, not a meaningful shift of the balance of power in Iran’s favor.

Iran’s survival logic mirrors that of Assad in Syria: to increase the costs of U.S. pressure by expanding the risks of confrontation so that the regime’s weakening appears more dangerous than its survival. But Iran’s decision to escalate by disrupting traffic in the Strait of Hormuz also betrays military weakness. Attacks on civilian shipping do not require significant military resources. Iran has now focused on increasing the economic costs of the war for its opponents (and the world) in part because it is unable to sustain its military retaliation at the start of the war.

Iran’s quasi-blockage of Hormuz thus confirmed its military vulnerability. If U.S. forces were to capture Kharg Island and areas on the Iranian coast, the loss of territorial integrity would be a huge material and moral loss for the regime. It would further collapse the narrative of strength that the regime has been projecting to the Iranian people.

As long as the regime retains its domestic coercion capacity, mass public mobilization or a military coup remains unlikely. However, once Iran’s military capabilities are sufficiently weakened, internal disagreements over strategy are likely to intensify—and that, in turn, creates space for political change. As Syria demonstrated, such moments can produce unexpected leaders and unfamiliar power structures. They do not require a visible, organized opposition.

Some may point out that Assad survived for years even after Syria’s military had been hollowed out. But Syria’s true story is different. Assad endured less because of regime strength than because of Western passivity and the failure of outside powers to rethink their assumptions. The shadow of the 2003 Iraq War loomed large over Western policy on Syria, foreclosing the possibility of direct military intervention. Unlike Iran today, Syria never faced a sustained effort by outside powers to oust or otherwise pressure Assad after the uprising began. By contrast, Iran is confronting a United States and Israel that appear to have zero tolerance for its continued role as a destabilizing force in the Middle East.

Assad also survived for more than a decade because he was rescued early. Iran quickly advised the Syrian regime to apply the regime’s tried-and-tested model of merciless suppression of unarmed protesters, and Russia later intervened to prevent Assad’s defeat by an increasingly potent armed opposition. Iran today lacks a comparable lifeline. Reports suggest that Russia offered limited military assistance and intelligence, but neither Russia nor China has meaningfully intervened to shield Iran. They did not veto U.N. Security Council Resolution 2817, which condemned Iran’s attacks on Gulf states, and Moscow did not replenish Iran’s air defense systems. Russia’s conduct in Syria underscored the limits of its support even when it was given: When Assad’s final unraveling began in 2024, Russia offered rhetoric rather than rescue, having concluded that his survival as leader was no longer essential to its interests. Russia is unlikely to jeopardize its larger priorities—especially the conquest of Ukraine—by seriously confronting the United States over Iran.

The mention of “regime change” is also misleading when discussing the endgame for the United States and Israel in Iran. Iraq is frequently cited as a cautionary precedent, where even with foreign troops on the ground, regime decapitation triggered internal chaos and gave rise of violent nonstate actors. But Iran is not Iraq, and the U.S.-Israeli campaign does not follow the model used in Iraq in 2003. The combination of pressure now being applied to Iran—direct military action, economic strangulation, influencing of domestic sentiment, and the erosion of its proxy-based model of deterrence—constitutes a different strategy tailored to Iran’s specific vulnerabilities. These include its overextended use of armed proxies for regional leverage, a domestic environment in which citizens have made their political discontent explicit, a defense posture reliant on asymmetric tools rather than conventional superiority, and a deterrence model that depends as much on perceived capabilities as on actual strength. The U.S.-Israeli strategy is not one of invasion and occupation but one of attrition, targeting the specific instruments by which Iran has projected power.

Nor is Iraq a useful guide to what might follow. The post-invasion insurgency was made possible in large part by the role of external patrons—chiefly Iran, which funded and trained Shiite militias that fought U.S. and British troops on Iraqi soil. Today, there is no equivalent external patron for a post-regime insurgency that might be waiting in the wings; Iran is comparatively isolated in this confrontation. Even if various Iranian regime forces were to form a violent insurgency, the absence of a patron means that their ability to disrupt would be constrained, making a similar regional trajectory far less likely—especially after Iran loses its patron status.

More fundamentally, talk of regime change obscures the real strategic question. The issue is not whether outside powers should pursue the collapse of the regime as an end in itself but how to neutralize the threat Iran poses in a durable way. The emergence of pragmatists in Tehran would not sufficiently remove that threat. Just as in Syria and Lebanon after more pragmatic or otherwise acceptable governments emerged, Israeli military action may continue as long as missile stockpiles remain that could one day be turned against it. Indeed, pragmatic leadership may even make such a strategy easier to sustain, precisely because it is less likely to retaliate.

Iran’s commitment to continuing the war is its Achilles’s heel. While Iran’s strategic environment has shifted—marked by closer alignment between the United States, Israel, and the Gulf monarchies—Iran has shown little evidence of genuine adaptation. Instead, Tehran is clinging to the model it helped sustain in Syria: to repress internal dissent, warn that regime collapse would unleash wider regional chaos, and bet that adversaries will ultimately prefer accommodation to prolonged instability. Assad followed a similar approach, presenting his rule as the only alternative to disorder and extremism, in part by allowing the civil war to be framed around the jihadi threat. Iran’s attacks on the Gulf states and quasi-closure of Hormuz reflect the same logic. In doing so, however, the regime is steadily depleting the military and proxy assets that underpin its regional influence and undermining its domestic resilience.

Reflecting on Syria contests the simplistic binaries that shape much of the debate on Iran: stability versus chaos, regime survival versus collapse, intervention versus passivity. Syria’s lesson is not that Iran will collapse in the same way. Rather, it is that entrenched regimes may be far weaker than they appear—and that apparent stability can mark the final phase before their political foundations begin to give way.