PHILADELPHIA – October 28, 2026 – Since February, American and Israeli strikes have killed Iran’s senior commanders, damaged its nuclear and missile programs, and degraded much of a regional deterrence network four decades in the making. Yet the Islamic Republic remains in power, keeps fighting, and can still hold Gulf shipping at risk.
For two decades, millions of Iranians have marched, struck, and organized against the regime. Every movement hit the same wall: a cohesive security apparatus facing a fragmented opposition with no governing alternative.
In “Fracturing the Iranian Regime” (click here), Seth D. Kaplan, a professorial lecturer at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, explains why and lays out what Washington and Jerusalem should do next. The regime’s survival, he argues, rests less on its remaining missiles than on the cohesion of the governing coalition that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) organizes and protects. The Guard bankrolls itself through vast commercial holdings, runs domestic repression, and binds provincial officials, religious foundations, and business networks into a single enterprise. While that structure holds, Tehran can absorb punishment and keep fighting.
For two decades, millions of Iranians have marched, struck, and organized against the regime. Every movement hit the same wall: a cohesive security apparatus facing a fragmented opposition with no governing alternative. “Legitimacy alone does not produce regime change,” Kaplan writes. “Organization does.”
Dictatorships rarely fall because their people grow angry. In Kaplan’s words, “authoritarian breakdown depends less on mass persuasion than on elite uncertainty.” Therefore, “the central implication is that regime fracture is a process rather than an event.”
Kaplan proposes four mutually reinforcing lines of effort:
- Unite the opposition. Build one political vehicle, joining activists at home and in the diaspora, that can coordinate strikes, conduct diplomacy, and, when the moment comes, govern.
- Split the regime’s coalition. Promise accountability to those who ordered repression and a future to the technocrats, civil servants, business leaders, and conscripts who did not.
- Win the information war. Fund censorship-resistant communications, document abuses, expose corruption, and show Iranians what comes next.
- Compete economically. Support striking workers, aim sanctions at the IRGC rather than ordinary families, and offer a credible plan for recovery.
The paper’s boldest proposal calls for protected opposition enclaves inside Iran. In Syria, outside deterrence kept opposition-held Idlib alive long enough for its institutions to join the country’s eventual transition. Iranian enclaves would likely emerge first in Kurdistan and Baluchistan, but Kaplan warns that they must spread into the Persian-majority heartland or risk feeding the regime’s separatism narrative. The ground itself matters less than the signal it sends: once Tehran loses uncontested control of its own map, its officials start hedging.
Without political organization to match the military pressure, “the regime may once again adapt, consolidate its remaining strengths, and survive.”
Kaplan assigns Washington and Jerusalem complementary roles. The United States should lead the political, economic, informational, and transition-planning effort, from Persian-language media to contingency plans that keep ministries and essential services running the day after the regime falls. Israel should keep up military and intelligence pressure on IRGC commanders, missile forces, drone infrastructure, and proxies from Hezbollah to the Houthis. Both should work quietly. Visible foreign sponsorship, Kaplan cautions, would hand the regime its favorite propaganda line. The transition must remain “unmistakably Iranian-led.”
The goal, in short, shifts from degrading the regime to building its successor. “Strategic opportunities of this magnitude are uncommon,” Kaplan concludes. Without political organization to match the military pressure, “the regime may once again adapt, consolidate its remaining strengths, and survive.”
Mehrdad Marty Youssefiani, director of MEF’s Iran Freedom Project, said “Seth Kaplan accurately identifies the real center of gravity as the IRGC-centered coalition with regime oligarchs, not missiles or centrifuges. Pairing strategic pressure with a credible political alternative, differentiated elite engagement, and a clear recovery path prioritizes Iranian agency and institutional continuity. That is how military gains become lasting transition.”
“Seth Kaplan understands that regime change in Iran can be effected only through a multifaceted approach that weakens the IRGC-led government both militarily and from within even as it creates opportunities for the reconstruction of civil society and a functioning economy,” said MEF executive director Gregg Roman. “His arguments are perceptive, original, and compelling.”
The full paper is available here.
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