A colleague told me this morning: “The lessons of the past have become meaningless.”
He is half right. Which makes him dangerously wrong.
History did not collapse overnight. Restraint did.
Mediation channels were reportedly active. Oman announced progress within hours of the strikes. That sequence matters more than the strikes themselves. Escalation was not the exhausted option. It was the preferred one.
Acceleration has become policy.
Regime Change Is Not a Reboot
“Regime change” sounds clinical. Remove the faulty component. Reset the system.
States do not reboot.
External regime change requires three things conspicuously absent here: a credible domestic alternative, a transitional framework, and meaningful defection within the security apparatus. Without these, power does not democratize. It fragments.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is not an accessory to power. It is the architecture of power. Systems built like that do not evaporate under pressure.
Bombs can weaken a regime. They cannot manufacture legitimacy.
Tehran’s Calculus
Crisis strengthens institutions structured for crisis.
The Revolutionary Guard does not fear external pressure. It feeds on it. Every strike narrows space for moderation and expands the authority of the security elite. Reformist voices shrink. Coercive cohesion hardens.
External force may delay nuclear capability. Internally, the immediate effect is securitization, not collapse.
This is not absolution. It is mechanics.
What Is Likely
The regime survives with hardening. Nuclear progress slows but does not vanish. Regional actors calibrate to avoid spillover.
Regime change remains possible. Political systems fracture when legitimacy erodes and coercive unity breaks. But fractures are internal events.
They cannot be air-dropped.
People under bombardment do not become revolutionaries on cue. They become survivors. And survivors align with whoever appears capable of restoring order.
History is not meaningless.
Ignoring it, however, can be.
Christopher Angel writes on diplomatic affairs from an undisclosed location.