Why No One Wants Democracy in Iran
A nation of 90 million choosing its own government is the one outcome that serves nobody’s interests – except Iran’s.
Grüezi!
The US and Israel have called for regime change in Iran. The assumption is that a democratic Iran would be a friendly Iran.
In fact, a legitimate, competent Iran would be a far more formidable strategic actor than a corrupt theocracy: harder to sanction, armed with democratic legitimacy, and with the potential to restructure a Gulf security architecture that’s underwritten by Washington.
1. A Democracy No One Wants
Within an hour of the first American and Israeli missiles striking Tehran on Saturday, Donald Trump recorded a video message to the Iranian people:
“Now is the time to seize control of your destiny … This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass.”
Benjamin Netanyahu echoed the sentiment: overthrow the regime.
The fairy tale is familiar. Hated dictator falls. Grateful nation rises. Democracy blossoms.
Reality is less encouraging – not in Iraq, not in Libya, not in Afghanistan, and not in Tehran in 1979 when it produced the very regime now being bombed into replacement.
But does Washington actually want what it says it wants?
If you wanted genuine democratic transition in Iran, you would nurture the things that might have changed Iran from within, like a middle class. By 2019, according to an academic study, sanctions had pushed roughly 9 million Iranians out of the middle class – not just impoverishing them, but dismantling the social base capable of building what comes next.
Destroying Iran’s middle class was about “maximum pressure.” Back in 2019, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told CBS News that things being “much worse” would “lead the Iranian people to rise up and change the behaviour of the regime.”
And rise up they did. Protests erupted in late 2025 over inflation, food prices, and a collapsing currency. But in January 2026, when Iranians took to the streets again, what was waiting for them was not American support but regime bullets.
Demonstrations were viciously crushed – the government admitted to over 3,000 dead, medical sources estimated over 20,000.
A decade of sanctions had already hollowed out the economic base for organised opposition, and left ordinary Iranians too atomised to sustain a months-long mobilisation.
Even Reza Pahlavi, exiled son of another deposed Iranian dictator and a prominent advocate of regime change, acknowledged that empowerment “doesn’t mean making the Iranian people starve more.”
Iran’s regional role is to be a perpetual adversary. This doesn’t require a conspiracy theory. It’s an emergent property of overlapping interests – Israeli security doctrine, Gulf monarchy survival, US defence industry economics, domestic political incentives – all converging on the same outcome.
A set of circumstances in which nobody has the incentive to ask what a successful democratic Iran would actually mean for them, or what it might take to get there.
2. Nuclear Nationalism
The most dangerous misconception about a post-theocratic Iran is that it would abandon its nuclear ambitions.
Iranian nuclear nationalism runs across the entire political spectrum and would almost certainly intensify under democratic government.
A 2024 survey in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists found almost 70 per cent of Iranians support possessing nuclear weapons – a turnaround from earlier polls where majorities rejected it.
That shift in attitude accelerated after Israel’s strikes on Iranian military commanders, suggesting that security-driven nuclear sentiment intensifies under outside threats regardless of who is in charge.
IranPoll and Chicago Council surveys have consistently found that around 90 per cent of Iranians support developing peaceful nuclear energy, and nearly three-quarters would reject any deal that required Iran to permanently surrender enrichment rights, even in exchange for full sanctions relief.
The University of Maryland’s Centre for International and Security Studies found that overwhelming majorities view the nuclear programme as one of Iran’s greatest national achievements.
Obviously these “polls” take place in an authoritarian state – people might overstate or understate hawkish opinions. But the consistency across multiple surveys, carried out by different organisations over several years, makes the broad pattern pretty credible.
Nuclear nationalism is not driven by theocratic ideology. It comes from a mix of national pride, energy security, and the legacy of the Iran-Iraq war, when the international community largely stood aside as Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons.
A democratic government with genuine popular support would face more domestic pressure to pursue nuclear capability, not less.
The current regime’s pariah status has made containment diplomatically straightforward.
Replace it with a government that Iranians actually chose? Different story.
