Why Iran Won’t Change

By Pegah Banihashemi, Project Syndicate | July 23, 2026

Embedded in the Islamic Republic’s foundations is a doctrine that allows for total repression of the population and mobilization of all state resources to preserve the system. This helps to explain why the US and Israel were wrong to expect the regime to change its behavior, let alone be brought down by the Iranian people.

CHICAGO—As the funeral of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, killed in the opening wave of US-Israeli airstrikes in February, drew to a close, thunderous sounds of bombardment rose from Iran’s south. But through the funeral rites and renewed airstrikes alike, one state institution never broke its stride: the gallows. Protesters recently seized in the streets and political prisoners held for years are being executed at a rapid rate.

The United States and Israel’s strategy in Iran seems to have assumed that a war of attrition, together with US President Donald Trump’s dramatic threats, would change how the Islamic Republic treats its people or the world, or drive a critical mass of Iranians into the streets to topple the regime. The months since February have revealed the flaws in this assessment.

The Islamic Republic’s first supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, built the entire system on a simple, brutal, and unassailable doctrine: Any action against the regime or state apparatus must be met with the harshest possible punishment—no leniency allowed. Officials are permitted to do whatever it takes to preserve the system, even if it means trampling the regime’s foundational religious principles.

Khomeini preached clerical guardianship over the state (velayat-e faqih) for years before the 1979 Iranian Revolution. But it was after he became Supreme Leader that the doctrine’s true breadth was revealed. In January 1988, in a letter to then-President Khamenei, he declared that the interests of the Islamic state took precedence over all “secondary” tenets of Islam, including prayer, fasting, and pilgrimage to Mecca. This expanded version of the theory became known as the “absolute guardianship of the jurist” (velayat-e motlaqeh-ye faqih).

In other words, embedded in the Islamic Republic’s foundations is a doctrine that allows for total repression of the population and total mobilization of state resources in the name of preserving the system. Regardless of which ayatollah holds power or who forms his inner circle, the doctrine remains the same.

That is why the newly empowered third generation of leadership does and will behave no differently than its predecessors. This includes using the Revolutionary Courts—originally intended to handle only specific matters, such as espionage charges—as a tribunal issuing death sentences to anyone expressing the slightest objection to the status quo. While defendants face severe charges, they are tried without so much as an independent defense attorney.

Iran was ramping up executions well before the war began. Amnesty International recorded at least 2,159 executions in 2025, more than double the number from the previous year. The war did not deter the Iranian authorities from this campaign. Pausing for neither bombardments nor the Persian New Year, Iran’s apparatus of repression has carried out at least 40 executions on politically motivated charges since February 2026.

Following the March 27 ceasefire, moreover, Iran Human Rights documented a sharp rise in executions from the previous month, with at least 101 executions taking place in June. Despite the war, Iran has carried out at least 413 executions this year—and it has no plans of changing course. As it stands, more than 70 protesters are known to be on death row in a single prison in Isfahan, with at least 26 having already been transferred to solitary confinement ahead of imminent execution. As the director of Iran Human Rights observed, “The true number of death sentences issued nationwide is far higher than previously estimated.”

This brings us to the US-Israeli assumption that Iran’s people will rise up against the regime. While extreme repression discourages dissent, it can also galvanize resistance, especially when combined with prolonged economic hardship and intense social pressure. In Iran, even those who have longed for meaningful change within the regime, rather than its replacement, have been repeatedly disappointed.

Popular frustration appeared to be coming to a head before the US-Israeli strikes began, when tens of thousands of Iranians took to the streets. True to Khomeini’s doctrine, they were met with a massacre. Iran’s government has acknowledged 3,117 protester deaths. HRANA, a press association founded by Iranian human-rights advocates, puts the confirmed death toll above 6,000, though some estimate that it is much higher: 17,000 or even 36,500.

Soon after Iranians endured this brutal crackdown, US and Israeli bombs began to fall. Trump apparently hoped that this would transform protest into revolution, but after all that bloodshed, Iranian society stayed home. The propaganda-enhanced specter of Iran’s territorial fragmentation provoked such alarm that fervor for regime change gave way, practically overnight, to deep societal rifts and disagreements among Iranians, inside and outside the country. The resulting sense of uncertainty and estrangement caused many to grow more attached to the system they had previously wanted gone.

This fear of fragmentation should be understood not as a psychological weakness, but as a rational response to a choice between bad and worse. This dilemma underpins the efficacy of the Islamic Republic’s foundational doctrine. The costs of the status quo are high, but Iranians have concluded that the costs of collapse and fragmentation would be even higher.

It should be clear by now that a war of attrition is not simply insufficient to bring down the Islamic Republic; it is actually bolstering the regime’s prospects for survival. Far from forcing Iran’s leaders to dismantle the cruelest mechanisms of repression, every new round of attacks produces fresh fodder for them: new arrests, new sentences, and new executions.

Pegah Banihashemi is a constitutional law scholar at the University of Chicago Law School and a human rights law instructor whose work focuses on power structures and political change in the Middle East.

Copyright Project Syndicate