Iran after the mullahs’ system

Ideological systems have never been long-lived; quite simply, when they harden, they lose the ability to renew themselves, stagnating until they perish.

The system of “Wilayat al-Faqih” in Iran, established in 1979, has entered in recent years what political scientists call the “structural exhaustion phase.” Its economy is exhausted by sanctions, its young society has become resentful, its religious legitimacy is eroding, and power struggles are mounting within the power circles themselves.

Here, the question is no longer: Will the system in Iran change?
Rather: What will Iran look like after it? Who will inherit the political and geopolitical sphere that the Persian Mullahs created and gripped for four decades? Furthermore, is the fall of the Mullahs’ system possible?

According to political transition theories, ideological systems fall when three elements converge:

1. Erosion of Legitimacy: The new Iranian generation no longer sees the clerics as representatives of religion or the revolution. Compulsory hijab, strict social restrictions, and economic corruption have turned the political, military, and religious authority into an added burden.
2. Chronic Economic Failure: Iran possesses vast resources, yet it is besieged by sanctions, mismanagement, and a parallel Revolutionary Guard economy. This creates what is known in political science as an “ideological rentier economy,” which is inherently fragile and crumbling.
3. Division within Power Institutions: The traditional army, factions of the Revolutionary Guard, various security apparatuses, and the aging religious establishment all signal that transition has become inevitable, even an urgent necessity.

For all these reasons, the probability of structural change is high in the medium and short term. But how will this change occur? Will it be a sudden collapse, a negotiated transition, a soft coup from within the system itself, or a swift, surgical military intervention?

Finally, who could be the successor? Or what are the potential currents that might emerge?

1. The National Republican Current (Post-Revolution): These are technocratic elites, reformers, the business class, and the university generation. They seek a civil state, normal relations with the West, and an open economy. This scenario resembles Iran before 1979 but in a modern and contemporary form.
2. The Symbolic Monarchist Current: Represented by supporters of the Pahlavi family, especially Reza Pahlavi Jr. This is not an absolute monarchy, but rather a symbolic constitutional monarchy, similar to Spain or Britain. Its function would be to unify the national identity after the era of political Islam.
3. The Military-Security Current: This emerges in the event of chaos, where the Revolutionary Guard fills the vacuum temporarily. However, this is an internationally costly option and will not last long without civil legitimacy.
4. The National Federal Current: These are Kurdish, Balochi, and Arab movements within Iran. This is the most dangerous scenario because it threatens the unity of the Iranian state.

For the international community, any scenario “other than the current status quo” remains viable, provided it guarantees a transition without the disintegration of the state. The state whose rebels and protesters raise the pre-1979 Iranian flag (featuring the lion, sword, and sun) symbolizes, through its imagery, the restoration of the Persian national identity, the separation of religion and state, the rejection of “Wilayat al-Faqih,” and a return to Iran as a state, not Iran as a sheikhdom.

Thus, raising this flag today is a political, not a religious, message, indicating that Iran wants to be a normal state, not a sectarian empire.

And here you may wonder, as we do: What exactly do Damascus and Baghdad gain from the fall of the Mullahs’ system?

Undoubtedly, Syria will enter a phase of dismantling unofficial Iranian influence. The Iranian pockets attempting to tamper with its stability and unity today can be classified into four networks:

1. Residual Militia Networks: Local elements previously linked to the Revolutionary Guard, including groups in the Damascus countryside, certain cells in the Badia (desert), and connections near the Lebanese border. Their goal: to create limited security disturbances to suggest that the “new state is incapable.”
2. Channels with Extremist Alawite Remnants: Not with the Alawite community as a whole, but with former security officers and families who lost their privileges. Iran is attempting to turn them into a “pressure card” or a low-intensity insurgency project. However, they lack a popular base and international cover; thus, their danger is annoying but not existential.
3. Attempts to Communicate with Certain Separatist Kurdish Factions: The Iranian goal is to create a balance against Turkey and open a gap on the Iraqi border. However, the Kurds today are more closely tied to Washington and are not ready to burn their relationship with America for Tehran—especially since U.S. President Donald Trump’s warnings to them regarding selling oil to Iran or establishing channels with it are clear. This path remains an Iranian experiment with weak feasibility.
4. Training Networks for Former Regime Officers in Lebanon: Iran and Hezbollah are trying to maintain a former security cadre to use in intelligence operations or as sleeper cells. But Lebanon itself is under international pressure, and these networks are exposed with very limited movement.

Conversely, the administration of President Ahmed Al-Sharaa now possesses internal revolutionary legitimacy, regional Arab acceptance, direct Turkish cover, implicit Western green lights, and high-level intelligence and security coordination. These are elements no Syrian system has possessed since 1970. This will make the file of Iranian influence in Syria one of “cleansing and dredging” rather than war. At most, it will involve limited security disturbances to improve future negotiation terms—a tactic known in literature as the “Spoiler Strategy” (but a spoiler without significant executive power). “New Era” Syria has entered the stage of ending the entire legacy of Iranian influence; a stage that requires time and institutional patience, but its direction is decisive.

As for Iraq: It is undoubtedly the greatest beneficiary of the fall of the Mullahs’ system. The end of the hegemony of pro-Iranian armed factions and the restoration of national sovereign decision-making will create a new balance between Arabs and Kurds, and between Sunnis and national Shias. Iraq will transform from a conflict arena into an economic transit state—a transformation that can only occur with the fall of “Shia-Persian” Iran and the heavy, bloody, and destructive legacy it carries.

After all this, some wonder: Has the “Sunni” moon begun to rise following the eclipse of the Shia star?
First, we must differentiate between the sect as a religion and the sectarian political project. What is retreating today is not the “Shias,” but rather the armed, pro-Iran Mullah political Islam. Conversely, there is no unified ideological Sunni project; rather, there is a return to the Arab national state.

Thus, we can say: We are not entering a “Sunni era” through the fall of the Mullahs’ system on one hand and the “legitimization” (in terms of the current approach of Ahmed Al-Sharaa) of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham on the other. Rather, we are entering the era of post-political sectarianism…