Outside the Beltway

On Regime Change

What it is and isn't. Some polisci basics.

Steven L. Taylor · Sunday, March 1, 2026 · 1 comment

As many people are aware, every time there is a State of the Union address, the administration selects a “designated survivor” who does not attend the speech but is kept away from the rest of the members of government in case of a mass casualty event so as to preserve someone who is in the line of presidential succession. The basic logic is that in case of some tragic crisis, there would be some continuity of government because someone would be legally able to step into the role of president.

In case anyone was wondering, this year it was Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins.

So here’s the question: if, like at the end of Tom Clancy’s novel, A Debt of Honor, a plane crashed into the US Capitol during a joint session of Congress, killing everyone in the line of succession to the presidency, would that constitute regime change in the United States?

It would be a massive tragedy and would create a profound crisis of governance in the United States, but it would not be regime change.

Quite clearly, there would be some continuity of government via established rules. Moreover, the basic state apparatus of the US would still be in place (i.e., the bureaucracy, the military, the state governments, etc.).

What, then, is “regime change”? What is a “regime”? Is it different from “government”? or “the state”?

Let’s start from the top and note that there are a number of terms that are interrelated, but not identical, that often get conflated in common usage: regime, government, and state.

Here are some basic definitions. No doubt both experts and laypeople can quibble over how I am going to define them, but I think disaggregating some basic distinctions is important. Not to mention that the below is a substantial compression of several lectures in an intro to comparative politics course.

At any rate, here we go.

The state is the actual institutions and structures through which power is exercised in a given territory by those in the government. It manifests, most fundamentally, as Max Weber pointed out, via the use of force. As he wrote in Politics as a Vocation:

a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.

This means, most fundamentally, the ability to make rules and enforce them. An easy illustration of the power of the state is the fact that almost everyone reading this takes their foot off the gas when they see a police car while driving. That is an acknowledgment that there are rules that you, as a citizen, know you have to comply with (in this case, the speed limit), and that the police officer has the legitimate right to pull you over, give you a ticket (or worse) if you do not comply.

At a very fundamental level, this definition points us to understanding why, as other aspects of a state fail, the military (i.e., the ones whose power is most predicated on force) often end up taking over.

Further, it is important to note that a given state may have significant capacity to engage in policy (and not just violence, but things like utilities and education, to name but two) or may have limited capacity (an inability to pave all the roads, provide clean drinking water, or basic education for its children, etc.). A given state may be well established and sit on a firm foundation, or it may be weak and more easily collapse under the wrong conditions.

The government, in its most simple form, consists of the people who control the state via whatever defined institutional parameters, i.e., rules and structures that govern the usage of the tools of the state (to do whatever might be done, from health care to paving roads, to waging war).

The regime defines what those rules are and how power is deployed. Is the regime democratic with elected leaders? Is it a monarchy with a hereditary ruler? A military dictatorship? A theocracy? And so forth.

Properly understood, therefore, the regime is more than just who the leaders are at a given moment, even if that is often how it is discussed in common discussion. The regime is not just a who, but a how.

The stability of a regime, by the way, is dictated substantially by how deeply institutionalized it is (i.e., how much broad acceptance exists to the continuity of and fealty to the basic rules of the regime). How much does a given regime rely on significant shared acceptance of the rules and, further, how much is power (political, social, and economic) vested in respecting those rules?

In my designated survivor scenario above, it is certainly true that such an event would be a massive crisis. However, because the US state has substantial capacity and because the regime is deeply embedded in our society, a mass casualty event of the type under consideration would be unlikely to result in regime change.

The Pentagon would still control the military, and the social security checks would still flow. The death of the president and his cabinet, and even most of Congress, would not lead to the Governor of Texas and the state’s legislature losing power. The Texas Rangers, the state troopers, and the city governments of Houston, Austin, and Dallas would remain intact, and so forth.

A process by which power can be transferred to new leadership, whether by regular processes (such as elections or royal successions) or due to a crisis (like swearing in LBJ after JFK was assassinated), are ways that stable regimes maintain continuity.

If the Assembly of Experts picks a new leader in Iran, then we will be witnessing regime continuity, not regime change.

When the US removed Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela in January, that did not cause regime change. Indeed, one of the oddities of the operation was leaving the rest of the government of Venezuela intact, simply ceding control of the state to the country’s Vice President. The basics of the regime remain in place.

When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, it engaged in full regime change. It removed the government, destroyed state capacity in both its violence-making capabilities as well as its governing abilities (which was one of the massive mistakes made, but that is another discussion). In the process, the entirety of the old rules of the regime were erased, and a new regime and government had to be created and installed, which was then tasked with rebuilding the Iraqi state.

Sometimes taking out a leader, as was the case in Libya, can lead to regime change. This is true when the regime is organized around a person and the state is institutionally weak and therefore has no real mechanism to replace the personalistic leader.* This, however, is not usually the case. Usually, the state and regime are more than just who is in charge.

All of this is to say that just decapitating the Iranian regime by killing Ayatollah Khamenei, and even killing a significant number of high-level officials, is not “regime change” by itself. It is definitely leadership change, i.e., changing who is in the Iranian government. But it may not be regime change.

It is important to understand that the Iranian regime is highly institutionalized despite the important role Khamenei played. Moreover, Iran, for all its deficiencies, is a modern state that will not collapse because a leader is removed. If there is a collapse of governance, it will be because the security apparatus loses control.

It is also worth stressing that there is often an over-focus on leaders in the public imagination, without much thought as to what else exists in the governance of other countries.

While it is possible, maybe even probable, that the nature of the regime will change, this will not be simply because a leader was removed (one who was, I would note, 86 and would have turned 87 in April, and was therefore going to be replaced relatively soon in any event). It may, for example, shift from a theocratic system governed primarily by clerics (the Ayatollah, the Guardian Council, and so forth) into a military dictatorship.

I will hasten to underscore that the notion that the mob, or some currently unknown opposition group, will simply rise up and take over the state is almost certainly a fantasy.

I will note that the ongoing military operation is severely degrading the Iranian state, both in terms of its ability to deploy force and presumably to its infrastructure as well. What this may mean is that the state itself could erode or collapse.

An erosion of basic governance will simply mean whoever has guns will be in the best position to try to govern (hence, some kind of military regime seems quite possible).

If, however, the state is degraded to the point that no one can assert full control of the territory (i.e., hold a monopoly on the legitimate use of force), then you end up with some version of civil war.

For anyone who thinks this is a recipe for the spontaneous emergence of a new and peaceful non-clerical, non-military, non-authoritarian, pro-Western, pro-Israeli government, well, I have a bridge in Tehran I would like to sell them.

And lest I be misunderstood, let me note that the Iranian regime and its leaders have fomented terrorism and other political violence in the region. I would like there to be pro-democratic regime change in Iran. But it is all but impossible to see how what is currently happening in Iran will lead to that kind of change. It may not even lead to regime change at all, and if it does, there is every reason to assume that it will be another unpalatable regime.

I will say that the Iranian state’s capacity to project certain kinds of power will almost certainly be diminished. But I hasten to add that terrorism, which is fundamentally a tool of the weak against the strong, does not require substantial state capacity. It often just requires a mass of very angry people with little to lose.

*There is an entire side discussion about personalism and how that differs from simply focusing on leadership. Just having a very important dictatorial leader, e.g., Maduro (like Chávez before him), does not mean that mere removal (or death) triggers regime change. Much depends on how institutionalized the regime is, as well as whether the military and other coercive institutions will support the regime, even with the leader gone.

It is also worth noting that in places where the state itself is heavily intertwined with the leader, revolutionary change is easier. This was true in the Cuban Revolution with Bautista, the Nicaraguan Revolution with Somoza, and the Iranian Revolution with the Shah.