Is Iran’s Regime About to Go the Way of Syria’s?

Foreign Policy-March25th2025

By Saeid Golkar, a senior fellow at the Tony Blair Institute and an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and Kasra Aarabi, the director of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps research at United Against Nuclear Iran.

In 1979, when the Islamic Republic was established in Iran, the new clerical regime enjoyed broad popular support across Iranian society. It would gradually lose that base across the ensuing four decades. Now, as the Islamic revolution turns 46, new evidence indicates that even its last core supporters—an ultra-ideological constituency loyal to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)—are beginning to turn their backs on the system.

For the first time in the history of the Islamic Republic, questions are now arising as to whether members of the “hard base”—which make up the foot soldiers of the suppressive apparatus—will continue to defend the regime unquestioningly if unrest once again erupts. Such questions have already invoked panic across the senior oligarchy of the Islamic Republic, who know all too well that it was the demoralization and, ultimately, the abandonment of dictator Bashar al-Assad’s suppressive forces that resulted in the collapse of the Baathist regime in Syria.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has relied on overlapping social constituencies for over four decades to maintain power. From broad-based support in 1979 to today’s dwindling hard base, Iran’s ruling clerical establishment has steadily lost the backing of nearly every class it once claimed to represent. Throughout the first decade of the revolution, the Islamic Republic slowly started to lose the modern social class in Iran because of the enforcement of its hard-line Islamist policies, spearheaded by then-Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini’s “Cultural Revolution” that sought to eradicate all modern, Western, and pre-Islamic influences from Iranian society. The outbreak of the eight-year Iran-Iraq War would also provide Khomeini with unprecedented wartime powers to eliminate the secular forces that helped topple the former Pahlavi monarchy.

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https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/03/25/iran-islamic-republic-syria-hard-base/