TOKYO - The U.S.-Israeli strike on Iran apparently sought to topple the regime and bring the campaign to a swift end through a "decapitation operation" targeting Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. However, Iran is not a one-person regime but rather an institution, and the system is still in place.
Contrary to the wishful thinking from the United States, the choice of Khamenei's second son as his successor shows the increasing influence of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
In the United States, the idea of regime change in Iran by military operation has been debated from time to time since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, but outside intervention has long been seen as unrealistic given Iran's vast territory, large population, and the resilience of its state institutions, especially from the lessons learned from the 2003 Iraq War.
This time, the United States was likely pulled along by Israel, which sees crippling Iran as essential for their operations in Palestine and Lebanon, believing Tehran backs anti-Israel forces such as the Islamic group Hamas and the Hezbollah militia.
Washington does not appear to have had a clear post-regime-change blueprint, and it is seen as having neither coordinated with exiled opposition forces nor envisioned a ground war. And the tactic of briefly urging an uprising by Iran's Kurdish minority ignores a history of repeatedly using the Kurds and then abandoning them.
The situation resembles the 1991 Gulf War: Iraq's economy and military facilities suffered heavy damage, yet Saddam Hussein's regime survived while battered, then intensified its domestic repression, leaving an exhausted public with little capacity to overthrow it.
In the latest attacks on Iran, facilities tied to nuclear and missile programs might have been heavily damaged. However, given the limited impact on the Revolutionary Guard's domestic security capacity, the government could become even more repressive and hard-line.
The survival of a battered authoritarian government is a threat to neighboring countries. Iran attacked U.S. bases as well as oil and infrastructure facilities in most of the Gulf Arab states, fueling simmering Gulf frustration that the U.S. military has failed to meet its defense obligations despite its presence.
Over the past several years, the Gulf states have pursued their coexistence with Iran, such as Saudi Arabia's restoration of diplomatic ties with it in 2023. But the U.S.-Israel attacks not only wiped out those gains, they also brushed aside the U.S.-Iran nuclear talks that Oman had been helping to advance, shutting off even a diplomatic solution.
Facing an increase in Iranian resentment toward the Gulf states, they have little choice but to pursue new regional security measures, judging that their dependence on the United States cannot be an asset but a liability. The entire Middle East is increasingly being engulfed by a politics of fear.
Unlike the United States, Japan has maintained good diplomatic relations both with Iran and Gulf Arab states, and its economic and cultural ties with them are an important asset for Japanese diplomacy. In order not to squander the gains Japan has built up through its Middle East diplomacy, it should make efforts to mediate between them and prevent Iran from being isolated in the region.
(Keiko Sakai, born in 1959, is a professor at Chiba University specializing in Middle Eastern politics. She served as a researcher in the Institute of Developing Economies, a research attache at the Japanese Embassy in Iraq and as a professor at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, among other posts.)
