Outside the Beltway

Iranian Regime Consolidating, Cracking Down

The regime is not a -changin'.

James Joyner · Tuesday, March 17, 2026 · 8 comments

WaPo (“U.S. intelligence says Iran’s regime is consolidating power“):

Despite more than two weeks of relentless airstrikes, U.S. intelligence assessments say, Iran’s regime likely will remain in place for now, weakened but more hard-line, with the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps security forces exerting greater control.

The United States and Israel have significantly degraded Iran’s missile capability and navy, removed the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and wiped out scores of top military and intelligence leaders. But the war’s costs are mounting — at least $12 billion so far and 13 U.S. troops killed. Iran’s viselike grip on the Strait of Hormuz has slowed shipping traffic to a trickle, creating a historic oil disruption.

Western officials and analysts who study Iran said they see little near-term prospect of a “regime change” end to the 47-year-old Islamic republic or the rise of a more democratic government. The latter is a goal cited by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and sometimes by President Donald Trump, who has said he’ll know the war is over “when I feel it in my bones.”

U.S. intelligence assessments issued since the war began predict Iran’s regime will remain intact and possibly even emboldened, believing it stood up to Trump and survived, according to two people familiar with the assessments, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity. U.S. Arab allies in the Persian Gulf, meanwhile, are angered and alarmed at being the targets of retaliatory barrages of Iranian ballistic missiles and drones.

One European official said the likeliest postwar scenario is a “rump IRGC regime” in Tehran that will retain some nuclear and missile capability as well as the support of regional proxies, though the regime will be “degraded enough that we’re in a better place than we were.”

Trump has been receiving “very sobering briefings” on the U.S. intelligence, said one of the two people familiar with the assessments. And he was told of the likelihood of a more entrenched IRGC before he gave the go-ahead to jointly launch the war with Israel, this person said.

“It wasn’t just predictable,” they said. “It was predicted. He was told in advance.”

But at least no harm was done to US interests in the region, right?

U.S. allies in the Gulf say they are furious with the Trump administration as the conflict roars into a third week.

“They started this war for Israel and then left us to face the attacks by ourselves,” said a senior Arab official from the Gulf. In the lead-up to the conflict, he said, Trump administration officials told allies that any military confrontation would be quick, but now it’s clear Iran wants to draw out the conflict to inflict pain on its neighbors.

“We don’t have a plan for a long war. We need to finish it as soon as possible,” the official said. As the conflict has drawn on, the rate of Iranian retaliation has slowed, but Iran has steadily widened targets in the region.

U.S. allies in the Gulf have deployed attack helicopters and warplanes to shoot down Iranian drones targeting their territory but have not taken offensive action against Iranian territory, fearful that such a move would spur Iran to target more Gulf civilian infrastructure.

Trump on Monday expressed surprise at the breadth of Iran’s retaliation. “They hit Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait,” he said. “Nobody expected that. We were shocked. … They fought back.’’

Nobody save, perhaps, for our intelligence services, CENTCOM planners, and anyone who has paid attention to the conduct of the Islamic Republic since its 1979 formation. Regime survival has always been the top priority, with spreading the Revolution a distant second.

The destructive power of Iran and its terrorist proxies have been significantly degraded, which is certainly a good thing. But the plan for that turning into regime change seems to have been hope that the Iranian people themselves, who are unarmed, would use the chaos to take power. Hope, I am reliably informed, is not a strategy.

Iran’s remaining decision-makers are confused, paranoid and having difficulty communicating with one another, said one Western security source, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence assessments.

Nonetheless, officials and analysts say, there are no overt signs of cracks or defections within Iran’s power structure. A classified prewar intelligence assessment by the National Intelligence Council concluded that even a large-scale assault on Iran launched by the U.S. would be unlikely to oust its entrenched military and clerical establishment.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, founded in 1979 by revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to safeguard the new Islamic republic, has steadily gained power in recent decades, including over vast swaths of Iran’s economy.

“The IRGC has got economic power,” said Richard Nephew, a senior adviser on Iran in the Biden and Obama administrations who is now a scholar at Columbia University. “They’ve got political power. They’ve got the domestic repression apparatus. They are essentially now the centerpiece of the power system inside the country.’’

Far from cowing the IRGC, the war likely has only steeled its resolve, he said. That’s not to say that some months from now the water and energy shortages and economic crisis in Iran don’t renew the popular protests, but the regime’s crackdown in January “has demonstrated it’s not going to let that happen the same way it did before,” Nephew said.

Not shockingly, the IRGC does not want to go from a position of great power to being hunted in the streets by an angry mob. Given that they are armed and trained and the potential mob is not, they have something of an advantage.

WSJ (“Iran Unleashes New Crackdown on Its People to Head Off Uprising“):

Iran’s rulers have unleashed a new crackdown against domestic dissent, arresting people suspected of collaborating with foreign entities and threatening would-be protesters with death to hold back the risk of an uprising.

Iranian security forces have been battered by U.S. and Israeli attacks. Bombing raids have shattered the headquarters and command posts of Iran’s police, the paramilitary Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the plainclothes Basij militia.

But Iranians say security forces are using fear to keep a tight grip on the streets. Armed men ride around on motorcycles brandishing their weapons to intimidate people, residents say, particularly at night, when city dwellers rarely leave their homes.

The men, usually in plainclothes and with their faces covered, also have set up a network of security checkpoints around cities such as Tehran where they routinely stop and search cars.

At least 500 people have been arrested since the start of the war, facing accusations that include sharing information with international media or with enemy forces with the purpose of helping them identify targets, Ahmad-Reza Radan, the commander of Iran’s police force, said Sunday on state television.

Many were detained for taking photos or videos of sites hit by airstrikes. Others were accused of being monarchists, a reference to supporters of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last shah, the most prominent opposition leader abroad. State-run media said 11 suspected monarchists resisted police and were killed.

Among those detained were a mother and her teenage son who are accused of celebrating the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to Human Rights Activists in Iran, a U.S.-based group that monitors the country. An Israeli strike on Khamenei’s compound killed him in the opening salvo of the war.

Several civil society activists were also detained. Among them is Leila Mir Ghaffari, who had been detained several times before, including during the women’s rights protests of 2022, according to two activists familiar with her situation.

“The system is messaging very clearly that any kind of dissent or mobilization at a popular level will not be tolerated,” said Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House. “Iran is facing an existential crisis, and I think it’s very clear that they will use whatever means to suppress the internal dimension of the threat.”

Now, there’s certainly a bright side to this.

“I believe the regime still has the capacity to use force, but the scale and intensity of repression also reflect deep insecurity and a shrinking base of legitimacy,” said Omid Memarian, an Iran expert at DAWN, a Washington-based research and advocacy group. “Maintaining constant control becomes harder in wartime, because economic disruption, physical destruction and public anger accumulate simultaneously, and at some point, they might explode.”

But that’s hardly enough to overcome the massive collective action problem of organizing unarmed civilians to take on a massive secret police force fighting for their survival.

A near-total internet blackout, introduced when the war started, is still in place, making it difficult for people to stay informed and communicate, let alone mobilize. Internet connectivity has been further restricted since Sunday, according to NetBlocks, an independent organization that tracks internet flows.

Iranian authorities are hunting down users and suppliers of illegal Starlink terminals, which are used by Iranians to bypass the official restrictions. Police last week arrested a 37-year-old man accused of running an illegal Starlink sales network, according to the semiofficial Mehr News Agency.

That’s quite daunting.

Writing at AlJazeera, Muhanad Seloom, an international relations profesor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, takes the contrary view: “The US-Israeli strategy against Iran is working. Here is why.“

Two weeks into Operation Epic Fury, the dominant narrative has settled into a comfortable groove: The United States and Israel stumbled into a war without a plan. Iran is retaliating across the region. Oil prices are surging, and the world is facing another Middle Eastern quagmire. US senators have called it a blunder. Cable news has tallied the crises. Commentators have warned of a long war.

The chorus is loud and, in some respects, understandable. War is ugly, and this one has imposed real costs on millions of people across the Middle East, including the city I live in.

But this narrative is wrong. Not because the costs are imaginary, but because the critics are measuring the wrong things. They are cataloguing the price of the campaign while ignoring the strategic ledger.

While I don’t think I’m doing that—and, indeed, would very much like to replace the Islamic Republic with a regime we could work with—I’m curious to know what it is I’m missing.

When you look at what has actually happened to Iran’s principal instruments of power – its ballistic missile arsenal, its nuclear infrastructure, its air defences, its navy and its proxy command architecture – the picture is not one of US failure. It is one of systematic, phased degradation of a threat that previous administrations allowed to grow for four decades.

I’m definitely not discounting that. And, indeed, I very much applaud it. But, unless it results in a better state of the peace, I count that as mere tactical success. In the paragraphs that follow, he catalogs but the very real costs of the war and the destruction it has wreaked on regime capability and capacity.

And I think he’s right here:

The campaign has moved through two distinct phases. The first suppressed Iran’s air defences, decapitated its command and control, and degraded its missile and drone launch infrastructure. By March 2, US Central Command announced local air superiority over western Iran and Tehran, achieved without the confirmed loss of a single American or Israeli combat aircraft.

The second phase, now under way, targets Iran’s defence industrial base: missile production facilities, dual-use research centres and the underground complexes where remaining stockpiles are stored. This is not aimless bombing. It is a methodical campaign to ensure that what has been destroyed cannot be rebuilt.

I don’t at all think that US and Israeli military planners are simply blowing shit up with no plan. This is a blueprint that we have followed with great tactical success going back at least to OPERATION DESERT STORM. We are the best in the world at executing it, and it’s not even close.

The rub, alas, is the question: And then what?

After several paragraphs arguing that the war has substantially degraded both Iran’s nuclear program and its proxy network (I think it’s too soon to tell, but assume that this is the case), he gets to the payoff:

The most politically potent criticism is that the administration has no endgame. Trump’s own rhetoric has not helped: the oscillation between “unconditional surrender” and hints at negotiation, between regime change and denial of regime change, feeds the impression of strategic incoherence. Only 33 percent of American respondents in a recent Reuters-Ipsos poll said the president had clearly explained the mission’s purpose.

But the endgame is visible in the operational phasing, even if the rhetoric obscures it. The objective is the permanent degradation of Iran’s ability to project power beyond its borders through missiles, nuclear latency and proxy networks.

Call it strategic disarmament. This is closer to the approach of the Allies to Germany’s industrial war-making capacity in 1944-1945 than to the US war on Iraq in 2003. The analogy is imperfect: Strategic disarmament without occupation requires a verification and enforcement architecture that no one has yet proposed, but the operational logic is the same.

The WWII analogy is far less than perfect; it’s apples and footballs. Yes, we severely set back the capacity of the Nazi regime to wage war. More importantly, though, we replaced the Nazi regime with one to our liking, soon turning West Germany into a Cold War ally.

Winning a war without changing the government often means a sequel down the road. See: WWI and WWII or Gulf War I and Gulf War II.

No one is proposing to occupy Tehran. The question is what happens when the bombing stops, and here the critics raise a legitimate concern, which Murphy articulated concisely after a classified briefing: What prevents Iran from restarting production?

The answer requires a post-conflict framework that does not yet exist in public: a verification regime, a diplomatic settlement or a sustained enforcement posture. The administration owes the American public and its regional partners a clear account of what that framework would look like.

Oh, probably JCPOA. Oops.

But, of course, this is Seloom projecting his preferences onto the war. There is zero indication that either President Trump or Prime Minister Netanyahu would find such an outcome acceptable.