Israel did not have a realistic plan for regime change when it attacked Iran, multiple Israeli security sources have said, with expectations that airstrikes could lead to a popular uprising having been driven by “wishful thinking” rather than hard intelligence.
Iran has survived nearly two weeks of bombing raids and the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and Trump is publicly contemplating ending the increasingly costly war.
If Iran’s new leadership keeps its grip on power, the long-term measure of the success of the conflict may hang on the fate of 440kg of enriched uranium which was buried under a mountain by US strikes last June, former and serving Israeli defence and intelligence sources said. Enough for more than 10 nuclear warheads, Iran could use it to hasten the construction of a weapon if the material remains in the country.
The leaders of Israel and the US both operate under the principles of personal rule, where the individual personal relation to the person in charge is what defines the political structure.
Iran, as many modern states (including, for the most part, the US) seems to mostly operate as an institutionalist government, where it’s the institutional role a given person takes that defines their relation to other roles within that system, independently of the persons occupying them (for better or for worse).
If you kill the leader, another person will assume that role, and whoever deferred to the previous leader will (usually) defer to the new leader as well.
Of course there is always a personal element to it and these options aren’t a strict binary (just like , but part of the reason even Trump’s most insane orders are obeyed is because the people obeying them obey the president rather than just a given person. That obedience is, in this case, both critical to the system functioning at all and a major issue if the president is a maniac.
The personal factor here comes in when the other offices supposed to check the president refuse to for personal reasons, which is why Trump can hold a de facto personalist regime, but it’s also why he attempts to undermine all institutional elements to cement that personalist character.