Inevitable and Unpredictable Regime Change in Iran

I was in Los Angeles recently to speak at a conference at UCLA on Iran. There was sufficient disagreement about policy issues to keep most of the discussions lively. There was mostly consensus, however, on the prospects for change from the current regime. As Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment characterized the situation, the collapse of the regime is both inevitable and unpredictable. Sadjadpour noted that on each of the dimensions that underlay the ouster of leaders in Egypt and Tunisia—corruption, repression, and economic malaise—Iran is in even worse shape than those two Arab states were. Abbas Milani of Stanford observed that since the mid-nineteenth century, no Iranian head of state has survived the “wrath of the people.” He said that Supreme Leader Khamenei’s legitimacy as a spiritually based leader has been weakened the more that he has weighed in directly on practical affairs of state and become increasingly dependent on the Revolutionary Guard.