Iran’s military might break with the regime

THE HILL-Jan9th2026

by Dan Perry, opinion contributor

Iran today is probably closer to a breaking point than at any time since its 1979 revolution. You can see it in grocery stores, pharmacies and currency exchanges, where the rial has fallen by 40 percent since the June war with Israel. You can see it in the water shortages and rolling blackouts, and in the aging “supreme leader” blocking any meaningful reforms.

The regime’s security goons services still beat, arrest, and occasionally kill, but perhaps not forever. Authoritarian regimes that rule by force fall when the people with guns decide they should. The public provides courage, legitimacy, and images for history, but the decisive lever tends to sit inside the security establishment. The fate of Iran will ultimately turn on how many officers conclude that the status quo has become more dangerous — for the state and for themselves — than abandoning it.

That is why international signaling, however crude or cynical, matters more than it appears. Even President Trump’s otherwise reckless-sounding assertion that the U.S. is “locked and loaded” to protect the Iranian people is best understood less as rhetoric aimed at demonstrators and more as a message to officers. The same is true of Washington’s legally dubious weekend overthrow of Nicolas Maduro’s in Venezuela. These gestures belong to a long and checkered tradition of American regime-change adventurism, but they may be very useful in influencing risk calculations within Iran’s military.

Iran is not held together by one coercive institution but by two. One is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the ideological core of the regime, deeply intertwined with the economy and charged with defending the revolution as a project. The other is the national army, older than the Islamic Republic and rooted less in clerical ideology than in a traditional ethos of state defense.

For decades the arrangement has been that the Artesh stays politically quiescent, and the guard corps handles internal repression. So long as that bargain holds, protest movements crash into a wall.

But if elements of the Artesh stop honoring that bargain, everything could change quickly. Up to now, the security forces have faced unarmed civilians. Were parts of the national army to signal unwillingness to suppress dissent — let alone side with the dissenters — the regime would face a rival armed institution rather than mere crowds and face an existential dilemma.

This could lead to a junta dominated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It could also lead to a negotiated transition, enforced in part by the Artesh — untidy, fragile, but opening space for political change. A third path would be a multi-sided civil war that risks drawing in regional actors. If the regular army leans toward the street early enough, before militias splinter and foreign intervention accelerates, it could tilt events toward negotiation rather than prolonged chaos.

History bears out this pattern. Romania in 1989 is remembered as a popular rising, frozen in the images of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu fleeing by helicopter and crowds surging through Bucharest. But what actually ended the dictatorship was the army’s refusal to keep shooting. Senior commanders concluded that the Soviet Union would no longer rescue hardliners, that protests had crossed a point beyond which repression would be catastrophic, and that their own survival depended on abandoning the leader they had served.

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https://thehill.com/opinion/international/5678784-irans-military-might-break-with-the-regime/