How the Iran War Could End in the Toppling of the Regime

Analysts outline how the Iran war could play out and how Iranian protesters could use the opportunity to change the regime.

A plume of smoke rises over Tehran after an explosion on Feb. 28, 2026. Mahsa/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images

News Analysis

In a Feb. 28 address announcing the strike on Iran, U.S. President Donald Trump told the Iranian people that they may have their “only chance for generations” to topple the ruling regime once the joint U.S.–Israel operation is done.

Exiled Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, whose name has been increasingly chanted in Iranian protests, similarly urged Iranians in the early hours of Feb. 28 to shelter during the strikes, then emerge into the streets to overthrow the Islamic Republic.

With a regime apparatus well entrenched and enriched by oil money after 47 years in power, that would seem to be a formidable feat for unarmed Iranians.

But New York-based Iran analyst Arya Kangarlu, who predicted the imminence of the U.S.–Israel strike, says that by the end of the war, and given previous U.S.–Israeli operations, Iran’s nuclear, missile, and regional proxy capabilities will be obliterated. That, combined with the targeted killing of the Islamic Republic’s leadership by the United States and Israel, will effectively cripple the regime, paving the way for people to topple it, he said.

“Once it lacks these capabilities, then it’s no longer the Islamic Republic as we know it,” he said in an interview with the Persian edition of The Epoch Times.

Hours into the strikes, U.S. and Israeli officials announced that Iranian leader Ali Khamenei had been killed and multiple strategic sites for the regime had been hit.

Iranian protesters gather around burning cars while blocking a street during a protest in Tehran, Iran, on Jan. 8, 2026. Aghasht/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images

Shahram Kholdi, a Canada-based international relations university lecturer, said that there are very few precedents for this latest conflict to draw on, adding that there are a number of factors that could influence the outcome and duration of the war.

Among them are regional pressures, sources of funds for the regime, how well high-ranking officials can dodge the targeted attacks, and broader geopolitical factors, including the resolve Trump wants to show to adversaries such as China and Russia, he said.

Trump said on Feb. 28 after confirming Khamenei’s death that the strikes will continue “uninterrupted throughout the week or as long as necessary” to achieve the objective of having peace in the region and globally. He also said many in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and other military and security forces are looking to defect and that they would get immunity if they were to do so. They could face death if they don’t, he said.

Operation Epic Fury

The U.S. Central Command has said that targets of the joint strike, dubbed Operation Epic Fury, include the IRGC command centers, Iran’s air defense capabilities, military airfields, and missile and drone launch sites.

Ahead of the strike, which was carried out after talks about Iran’s nuclear program failed, the United States had brought in a large fleet of fighter jets and more than 10,000 troops to the region. Washington had also dispatched the USS Abraham Lincoln and three guided-missile destroyers to the region in January and moved the USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, and four accompanying destroyers from the Caribbean closer to Iran.

The United States has a number of military bases in Gulf states surrounding Iran, including in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan.

The U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford departs Souda Bay on the island of Crete on Feb. 26, 2026. Metaxakis/AFP via Getty Images

Tehran responded to the strike by firing drones and missiles at Israel and at neighbors hosting U.S. bases. Most were intercepted, but a U.S. base in Bahrain was hit, and one person died in the United Arab Emirates after Iran’s missile strike. The attacks drew strong condemnation from the Gulf nations and the League of Arab States. Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry said the country will take “all necessary measures to defend its security,” and other states made similar comments.

The strike against Iran comes after the Twelve-Day War in June 2025, in which Israel bombed military and nuclear facilities and high-ranking officials in Iran. The United States provided assistance and bombed three key Iranian nuclear sites. Iran responded by targeting Israel and a U.S. base in Qatar with missiles and drones.

It also follows a recent wave of protests by Iranians starting in December 2025 and extending into January, ending with a deadly clampdown by the regime resulting in the deaths of 32,000 people, according to Trump.

Toppling the Regime

Kangarlu said Washington’s plan is to keep hitting the Islamic Republic to the point that “there would be no one left to command” the security forces to crack down on people, making it safe for Iranians to come out and take over governmental buildings.

He says that’s similar to how Israel targeted terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack, eliminating multiple layers of the leadership to incapacitate the organization.

“What [the Islamic Republic’s] security forces will face in the coming days will be terrifying,“ he said. ”They will witness the deaths of all the regime’s leaders.”

This, he said, will sap the forces’ will and ability to continue and, combined with the collapse of the chain of command, render them incapable of suppressing the people.

He said that immediately after the Twelve-Day War, when the regime was weakened, there were no wide-scale protests. And during the latest mass protests, which ended in January, there was no strike by the United States and Israel in support.

Demonstrators demanding regime change in Iran, holding pre-1979 revolution Iranian national flags and pictures of the exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, protest in Toronto on Feb. 14, 2026. The Epoch Times

What’s different this time, he said, is that the factors of both outside military force and readiness for protest inside Iran are present, and people won’t let this chance pass.

“They weren’t synchronized before, but now they are,” he said.

Another important factor, he said, is that the people’s opposition movement is organized by the leadership of the crown prince. Pahlavi, who is based in Washington, said in his Feb. 28 address that he’ll remain in contact with people in Iran via radio waves if the internet and satellite broadcasts are cut off—a step the regime took shortly after the strikes began. On Jan. 8, massive crowds of Iranians took to the streets following Pahlavi’s call for protests.

Kangarlu said the duration of the war will depend on the extent of Iran’s response. If it continues to barrage civilian areas in neighboring countries hosting U.S. bases, then the United States will escalate its strike, but if Iran shows more restraint, the war could take longer, he said.

“But whether it takes four or five days or several weeks, the United States will stop only when it’s certain that the Islamic Republic not only has no missiles to launch and no launchers to fire them, but also no factories to build them and no personnel capable of operating the facilities,” he said.

Key Factors

Kholdi said the Islamic Republic has made a strategic mistake in agitating its neighbors hosting U.S. military bases by hitting targets within their territories rather than U.S. aircraft carriers.

A man in Atlanta holds a U.S. flag and a sign with a portrait of the Iranian leader Ali Khamenei, who was killed during U.S.–Israel military operations against Iran, on Feb. 28, 2026. Elijah Nouvelage/AFP via Getty Images

“Why didn’t they try to swarm with all the missiles that they have at the U.S. aircraft carriers in the region? They have enough stuff to be able to swarm the U.S. aircraft carriers,” he said, attributing the decision to incompetence.

“The president of the United States, in fact, has effectively goaded the Islamic Republic into committing this big mistake of attacking the Arab states in the region, because now they can prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this regime presents an existential threat to the whole region’s stability and peace.”

Kholdi said that seeing whether senior officials of the regime defect as the military operation continues is another factor to watch. He said regime officials use different leverage to prevent defection.

“We sometimes forget that members of the armed forces have families and extended families too, and repressive forces of any regime have on file where all these people live,” he said.

“The first thing that anybody, and any member of the armed forces who wants to defect, would like to ensure is the safety of their own family or extended family.”

Another factor, Kholdi said, is that many among the top brass of the regime have amassed great wealth over the years, while the IRGC has morphed into a business mafia with immense resources, and this helps fund the operations of the repressive forces.

Kholdi said that survival will be top of mind for the regime’s leadership.

“They have, I would say, mastered the art of hide-and-seek,” he said. “So the job of eliminating them may require more intelligence-gathering on the ground, and, of course, the involvement of special forces such as the Navy SEALs, for instance, if we come to that point.”

He said that many people in the tribal areas of Central Iran, which regime figures likely hope to use as a refuge, actually despise the Islamic Republic, and this would be another factor against the regime.

Another factor, Kholdi added, is the Trump administration’s resolve to see the operation through.

U.S. President Donald Trump announces that the United States and Israel have begun “major combat operations” in Iran with the goal of eliminating threats from the country’s regime in a video released on Feb. 28, 2026. @realDonaldTrump via Truth Social

“In the back of his mind, [Trump] has both Obama and Biden, who behaved in a manner that by historical standards are now judged as historically inept when it came to the civil war in Syria and the usage of chemical weapons, or President Biden withdrawing from Afghanistan,” he said

Trump has taken other military actions in recent times with broader geopolitical aims, including the removal of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in early January. His administration said Maduro was enabling drug cartels and that Washington needs to ensure that adversarial states such as China and Russia don’t control the country’s oil industry.

In the case of Iran, Arab states that are being targeted by the Islamic Republic’s missiles are looking to Trump to finish the job, Kholdi said.

And then there is China, which has “effectively put the South China Sea under siege,” and Russia, which has been “extremely intransigent with respect to making peace with Ukraine,” adding to Trump’s motivation to not let the Islamic Republic off, Kholdi said, lest he lose credibility.

“So Trump has to finish off this job,” he said.

Shahrzad Ghanei, Reuters, and The Associated Press contributed to this report.