Certain Israeli officials have increasingly been dropping anonymous threats to Iran in the global and Israeli media to try to deter it from its ongoing push to rebuild its nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles programs. One of the latest threats was that Israel should strive with the US for regime change before US President Donald Trump exits office in 2029.
While Israel should look for a variety of ways to prevent the Islamic Republic from obtaining nuclear weapons as well as to prevent it from building a ballistic missile arsenal that could overcome the IDF’s missile defense shield, it is still important that Jerusalem’s strategies be realistic.
To put it bluntly, the chances that Israel and the US can cause or control regime change in Iran by 2029 are extremely hazy. There could be internal opportunities to accomplish this. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is 86 and has been ill many times over the last several years.
If and when he dies, if there is an extended standoff between competing factions over who will control Tehran next, Israel, the US, and the West might be able to – with significant skill, subtlety, and luck – use such an opportunity to help effectuate regime change.
Israel, the US, and the West have a limited ability to influence change
However, on their own, Israel, the US, and even the entire West have a limited ability to influence such change.
There are multiple reasons. The first is that after the fall of the USSR in 1991, Iran’s leaders learned that they could not count on their professional army to crack down on local Iranian protesters.
Professional military soldiers tend to want to only fire on foreign enemy invaders, not their own people. They would need a special and separate force that would be willing to kill or maim their own people – so they created a two-million-strong militia of hoodlums called the Basij.
Next, the regime watched some more recent revolutions in the East, which used the internet and social media to organize, and learned how to control and shut down the internet. Relying on the Basij and its internet control, the regime has managed to crush massive protests in 2009, 2016, 2019, September 2022-Spring 2023, and some in 2025.
This is despite the fact that some of these protests included not only Iran’s many minorities, who instinctively hate the regime, but also members of the country’s majority Shi’ite population.
Third, the regime is far more than just a group of clerics held in power by a secret police, as it was decades ago. Over the decades, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps alumni have taken over more than one-third of the economy and many of the country’s political posts.
Removing Khamenei alone won't bring an end to the regime
Killing, arresting, or otherwise removing Khamenei or his successor would not, by itself, come even close to toppling the regime. It might even make it harder since Iranians might rally around their own flag, whereas if Khamenei dies of natural causes, natural chaos and competition between rival groups may follow on their own.
For example, Israel bombed some of the IRGC and Basij's main headquarters during the June war with Iran at a time when over 30 of its top military and intelligence officials were also assassinated, and Khamenei was in hiding. This left the regime at its weakest physically in decades. Yet, there was not even close to being a chance of a domestic movement to oust the regime from power because of the rally around the flag effect.
Likewise, The Jerusalem Post has learned that IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir and the IDF high command were clearly opposed to killing Khamenei and did not even seriously consider the option, as they wanted to end the war even before the 12-day point when it ended.
In light of the Basij, the control of the internet, and the deep penetration of the IRGC into every area of Iran’s political and economic levers of power, this regime will be very difficult to topple absent a mix of both a wide protest movement and at least one high-ranking Iranian army general who can swing his troops behind the protesters and against the Basij.
Does that mean that Israel and the US should remain idle? Not at all.
Under former prime minister Naftali Bennett, the government, the IDF, and the Mossad undertake an operation involving dozens of areas of life known informally as “Death By a Thousand Cuts” to use some of the same long-term techniques to weaken Iran that the US used to weaken the USSR over time.
But Bennett’s plan had a long-term vision to work on a wide variety of issues, not just military, over decades. Not just Khamenei, but the IRGC, in all of its elements, must be weakened and replaced by other local natural Iranian powers before toppling the regime in the sense of removing all of the pieces that are virulently anti-Israel and anti-West will be possible.
This will very likely take far longer than 2029. Many thought that when Hafez al-Assad passed on his rule in 2000 to his weak, squeamish, inexperienced eye-doctor son, Bashar, the regime would fall overnight. Yet, for a variety of reasons, Bashar held on until 2024.
On the other hand, when he fell in 2024, his regime had received “Death by a Thousand Cuts” and barely put up a defense.
So Israel can keep its eye on both the short-term dangers of preventing nuclear and ballistic missile weapons threats, and also on the much longer-term goal of returning its relationship with Iran to the strong pre-1979 cooperation era, or at least to an era where the constant threat is removed.