As I read the news about the ongoing war, I find myself struck less by what I see than by what I don’t.
Almost all the reporting focuses on the attacks and counterattacks between the United States and the IRGC. Missile launches. Drone strikes. Revolutionary Guard commanders issuing threats.
What is missing from the story is Iran’s national army.
The Artesh - the military that, in theory, exists to defend the country - is almost entirely absent from the conflict.
That absence reveals something important about how power actually works in Iran.
Debates about Iran’s future often revolve around personalities.
Who will lead the opposition? Will Reza Pahlavi emerge as the central figure? Will the US support one faction over another?
These questions dominate political conversations, particularly in the diaspora. But they miss the central problem that any post-Islamic regime transition will face.
The problem is not primarily about leadership.
It is about structure.
No matter who leads a transition - whether it is Pahlavi or someone else entirely - the same question will immediately arise:
What happens to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps?
And once that question is asked seriously, another one follows naturally:
Why has the Trump administration not endorsed Reza Pahlavi?
Iran’s Parallel State
Iran today operates through two overlapping systems of power.
The first is the formal state: civilian ministries, bureaucracies, technocrats, and the conventional national military - the Artesh. These institutions resemble those found in most modern states.
The second is the revolutionary state: the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the security architecture constructed after the 1979 revolution to defend it.
Over the past four decades, the second system has steadily expanded its influence. The IRGC is no longer merely a military organization. It is a political class, an intelligence network, and one of the most powerful economic actors in the country. Its reach extends into construction, energy, telecommunications, finance, and major industrial sectors.
In practice, the Islamic regime survives because the IRGC controls the regime’s coercive infrastructure.
The ministries administer the state.
The IRGC protects the system.
The War Lifts the Curtain
The current war has made this dual structure unusually visible.
Almost all meaningful confrontation with the United States and Israel has taken place through IRGC-linked forces - missile units, drone programs, the Quds Force network, and affiliated militias across the region.
Iran’s conventional national army, the Artesh, has been largely absent from these confrontations.
This distinction matters.
The Artesh exists primarily to defend Iran as a country. The IRGC exists to defend the revolution as a system.
When external confrontation escalates, it is the revolutionary military - not the national one - that acts.
The war therefore exposes a reality that has existed beneath the surface for decades: the Islamic regime rests not primarily on the conventional state, but on a revolutionary security structure built parallel to it.
The Transition Dilemma
If the Islamic regime were to collapse, the most immediate challenge would not be writing a constitution or organizing elections.
It would be determining the fate of the institution that has enforced the regime’s power for forty-seven years.
The IRGC is not a marginal organization that can simply disappear. It is a vast structure with hundreds of thousands of personnel, extensive economic interests, and deep influence throughout the political system.
Many Iranians understandably want it dismantled. The IRGC is associated with domestic repression, corruption, and regional conflict.
But dismantling such an institution carries risks of its own.
The same organization that has enforced the regime’s authority is also one of the few entities capable of exercising large-scale coercive power inside the country.
Removing it too quickly could leave a dangerous vacuum.
The Lesson of Iraq
History offers a cautionary example.
After the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the United States pursued a policy known as de-Ba’athification. The goal was to remove the institutions that had sustained the dictatorship.
In practice, the policy hollowed out the Iraqi state.
Large numbers of military officers, administrators, and bureaucrats were dismissed from their posts. The institutions technically remained, but the people who knew how to operate them were gone.
The result was not a stable democratic transition.
It was institutional collapse.
Out of that collapse emerged insurgency, sectarian conflict, and eventually the rise of ISIS.
The lesson was clear: dismantling an entrenched power structure without replacing its governing capacity can destroy the state itself.
Recognizing this problem now may help prevent Iran from becoming another Iraq - a scenario that worries many observers. But the question remains whether it is even possible to avoid it.
Are we set up to fail?
This Is Not About Pahlavi
This dilemma does not depend on who leads a future transition.
Reza Pahlavi may currently be the most visible opposition figure outside Iran. But the structural problem he would face is the same problem any leader would face.
A government that attempts to completely purge the IRGC risks dismantling the coercive backbone of the state and the economy - structures that would take years, perhaps decades, to rebuild.
A government that leaves the organization intact risks allowing the core power structure of the Islamic regime to survive.
Neither option offers an easy solution.
Iran’s Hardest Question
For decades, discussions about Iran’s political future have focused on ideology and leadership.
But the more urgent question is institutional.
Before debates about constitutions, elections, or forms of government begin, a more difficult problem must be addressed:
What should happen to the IRGC after the Islamic regime ends?
Should it be dismantled entirely? Reformed from within? Gradually integrated into the national military? Or transformed into a different institution altogether?
What level of accountability should IRGC members face - and who, if anyone, should be allowed to remain within the future state?
The Institutional Reality of Regime Change
Political transitions are rarely determined by symbols or personalities.
They are determined by institutions - by which structures survive, which ones disappear, and how power is reorganized when an old system falls.
In Iran, no institution will shape that outcome more than the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
This reality also places limits on how outside powers may approach a post-Islamic regime transition.
Iranians may rally around certain opposition figures, and it is entirely possible that a large minority - perhaps even a majority - could coalesce around someone like Reza Pahlavi. But popular support does not necessarily determine who external actors choose to work with.
Foreign governments tend to prioritize structural stability over political symbolism. The experience of Iraq, where dismantling the existing security apparatus contributed to state collapse, continues to shape that thinking.
I am under no illusion that Iranians themselves may not get a decisive say in these calculations.
The people of Iran were not part of the nuclear negotiations. What was offered and rejected happened behind closed doors, far from those most affected by the outcome. Today, while US and Israeli aircraft strike IRGC infrastructure, the people of Iran are again largely absent from the conversation about who should lead the transition if the regime collapses.
The paradox is therefore uncomfortable but real.
The leader who commands the most enthusiasm among the public may not be the leader that external powers see as capable of managing the institutional transition they believe is necessary to keep the Iranian state intact.
Iran’s future will not ultimately be decided by which opposition figure rises to the top.
It will be decided by how the most powerful institution of the Islamic regime - the IRGC - is dismantled, transformed, or absorbed when the system that created it finally comes to an end.