a history professor at California State University, Los Angeles.
The Islamic republic is a dictatorship. For decades, it has brutally repressed cycles of civil society protest by students, labor unions, teachers, lawyers, pensioners, ethnic minorities and women.
This past year, however, the regime appears to have reached an inflection point. Its aging leadership has lost support among most of the country, while people attempting to reform the system have been purged and imprisoned. It faces runaway inflation, currency devaluation, shortages of water and electricity and a restive population angrier than ever. In January, Iran’s leaders ordered the massacre of thousands of protesters, a cowardly act that betrayed their fear and insecurity.
Even before the outbreak of the war, it was clear that the Islamic republic could not continue as before. Given the magnitude of the regime’s accumulated political, social and economic challenges — and its proven inability to address any of them — Iran was poised for some kind of political transition; even if it had not come under attack, it would have eventually been forced to respond to explosive bottom-up pressure for change.
A peaceful transition with Iranians at the helm could come in different ways. In recent years, Mir Hossein Mousavi, a former prime minister currently under house arrest, and several prominent jailed dissident leaders have been calling for a referendum to change the Constitution, a path to structural change that is more likely now that its most powerful opponent, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is gone. There is precedent for such changes: In 2022 and 2023, the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising — after much bloodshed and oppression by the regime — managed to ease enforcement of the compulsory dress codes for women in the country.
Today there is a range of statements and petitions from trade unionists, lawyers, student groups, journalists, writers and artists demanding freedom for political prisoners, free elections and an end to unelected clerical rule. Many also want to see a change of course in foreign policy. Iran’s enormously costly nuclear program, for instance, has produced nothing but the enmity of powerful adversaries now invading the country.
These civil society organizations are active outside of and independent of the formal confines of the Islamic republic. Figures like Mr. Mousavi and the former reformist president Mohammad Khatami, who has been politically sidelined and lives under house arrest in Iran, still command political capital and could serve in a transition council. Widely respected political prisoners, such as Mostafa Tajzadeh, a former deputy interior minister and popular politician, and other outspoken critics of the Islamic republic could also be a part of the process.
The fact is that there is no successor who will be able to fill the power vacuum left by Ayatollah Khamenei. That might persuade elements in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps to support a less repressive caretaker regime. The power broker role of the military and security forces is recognized by the most prominent personality in the Iranian diaspora opposition, former Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, who has called on them to break with the regime.
But Mr. Pahlavi has no visible institutional support in Iran. A transition movement has its best chance of success if the Iranian diaspora amplifies demands for peaceful change from inside the country instead of encouraging President Trump to liberate Iran at gunpoint. For any of this to gain traction, this horrible and pointless war must stop. Iranians must be able to return to tending their battered house and decide their future in full sovereignty and peace — without outside interference.