Regime change as theology : Why neoconservatives remain obsessed with Iran

By PROFESSOR JUNAID AHMAD

This of regime change supporters in London on january 3 project their alliances with little sublety. (Photo Donovan Elmes / Shutterstock)

Neoconservatism’s fixation on Iran is not strategic but ideological. This analysis examines how regime change has become a political theology — and why Tehran remains the ultimate obsession.

‘Anyone can go to Baghdad. Real men go to Tehran.’

It is difficult to imagine a sentence that more perfectly distils the arrested adolescence of American neoconservatism. Equal parts locker-room bravado and imperial hallucination, the phrase belongs to the same intellectual ecosystem as Rambo sequels, Tom Clancy paperbacks and the enduring belief that history naturally submits to men armed with air superiority and television-ready talking points.

The slogan has circulated for decades among Washington’s most aggressively incurious minds. Iraq was merely the appetiser. Tehran was always the entrée — the Everest of regime change, the final boss in a video game played by men who have never once paid the price of defeat.

Iran is not different merely because of its size, population or terrain — though the Zagros Mountains are far less forgiving than the streets of Fallujah. Iran is different because it has refused, stubbornly and at enormous cost, to internalise the post–Cold War catechism: accept American primacy, subcontract your sovereignty and call the arrangement ‘integration into the international order’.

For the ‘Zion-Cons’ — Zionist neoconservatives — this refusal is not simply strategic defiance. It is psychological heresy.

The theology of regime change

Neoconservatism is not a foreign-policy framework. It is a belief system. Like all theologies, it comes equipped with sacred texts, sanctioned demons and end-times fantasies. Iran occupies a unique place in this cosmology: simultaneously an ideological abomination and a geopolitical temptation too intoxicating to abandon.

The Islamic Republic represents everything neocon thought cannot tolerate — an independent regional power immune to Western legitimacy rituals, rooted in a civilisational memory more than a millennium older than Washington itself. That it is also openly hostile to Israel, and persistently aligned with Palestinian resistance, elevates Iran from problem to obsession.

This obsession is always framed as concern: concern for democracy, concern for women’s rights, concern for regional stability. Yet the concern follows a suspiciously selective pattern. It spikes when Iranian women protest. It flattens when women in Gaza are buried beneath concrete and shrapnel. It demands sanctions in the name of ‘helping the Iranian people’ while celebrating the annihilation of Iran’s middle class as a strategic achievement.

This is not hypocrisy. It is architecture.

Sanctions are not a failed alternative to regime change; they are its slow-motion variant. When bombing proves politically inconvenient, starvation becomes policy. When diplomacy threatens stabilisation, diplomacy must be sabotaged. Engagement is dangerous precisely because it works.

The objective is not reform.
The objective is obliteration.

Israel’s strategic mirage

For Israel’s security establishment, Iran is the final unresolved obstacle in a region otherwise disciplined into submission. Egypt neutralised. Syria pulverised. Iraq shattered and held together with duct tape. Lebanon perpetually destabilised. Only Iran remains intact — and intolerably autonomous.

The idea that Israel’s posture towards Iran has ever been defensive borders on parody. The fear is not that Iran will strike tomorrow; it is that Iran will exist coherently ten years from now.

This explains the fixation on Iran’s air defences, its scientists and its infrastructure. The logic is brutally simple: a state that cannot defend itself cannot act independently. A state that cannot act independently can eventually be wrecked, partitioned and remade.

But here the fantasy collides with reality. Iran is not Syria. It is not Libya. It is not Iraq circa 2003 — hollowed out by sanctions and ruled by a dictatorship so despised that collapse felt like relief. Iran, like all societies, contains fractures and rivalries. But fragmented societies do not automatically disintegrate. Quite often — especially under existential threat — they consolidate.

External assault does not reliably dissolve states. Sometimes it forges them.

The opposition mirage

Every regime-change project requires a hero. In Iran’s case, while ritualistic nods are made towards protesters with genuine grievances, the starring role is awkwardly reserved for an exile aristocracy whose social media followings vastly exceed their domestic relevance.

Reza Pahlavi is marketed like a Silicon Valley prototype: sleek, Western-approved and permanently ‘almost ready’. His appeal thrives in think tanks, donor salons and Israeli conference halls. Inside Iran, his name provokes neither mass devotion nor visceral hatred — just indifference at best, uncontrollable laughter at worst.

This is the core contradiction of Washington’s Iran policy: regime change without revolution; installation without legitimacy; democracy without the inconvenience of mass politics.

The resulting strategy is perversely elegant in its cynicism — wait for collapse while ensuring no alternative survives long enough to govern.

The civil war option

What follows regime collapse?

Zion-Con discourse treats the question like a software update users will sort out later. Something, it is assumed, will emerge. Something manageable. Something vaguely liberal.

History offers no such reassurance.

Iran’s disintegration would not yield a liberal republic — nor is it meant to. It would yield precisely what Zion-Cons privately welcome: centrifugal violence, ethnic fragmentation, militia economies and refugee flows that would make Syria look like a rehearsal dinner. Kurdish separatism. Baloch insurgency. Nuclear insecurity. The scenario reads less like a transition plan than a controlled demolition spiralling out of control.

For Washington and Tel Aviv, this is not a deterrent. It is an acceptable — perhaps even desirable — outcome. A broken Iran is preferable to a strong one, even if the shards cut indiscriminately.

The masculinity problem

‘Real men go to Tehran’ is not merely rhetoric. It is theatre. It reflects a masculinity crisis at the heart of American empire — a compulsion to prove relevance through violence because legitimacy has evaporated.

Short wars. Clean optics. Cinematic strikes. The problem with Iran is that it refuses to follow the script. There is no ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner waiting in the Persian Gulf. There is only attrition, retaliation and the dawning realisation that power is not a substitute for strategy.

The endgame nobody admits

 The scarcely concealed truth is that regime change in Iran is not primarily about Iran. It is about preserving Zionist hegemony in the region. An Iran that survives sanctions, absorbs pressure and refuses submission is contagious. It teaches others that defiance is survivable.

That lesson is intolerable.

So the fantasy endures. The slogans recycle. The men who went to Baghdad insist they are wiser now — just before deliberately repeating the same catastrophe, only on a grander scale.

But Tehran is not a sequel.
It is a reckoning.

And this time, the audience will not be so forgiving.

PROFESSOR JUNAID S. AHMAD teaches Law, Religion and Global Politics and is Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID), Islamabad, Pakistan. He is a member of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST), the Movement for Liberation from Nakba (MLN), and Saving Humanity and Planet Earth (SHAPE).