The strength of ideological-authoritarian regimes is usually measured against their tangible capabilities: military arsenals, missile and nuclear programs, security agencies and regional proxies. Yet their collapse does not always stem from the weakening of these foundations. Rather, regimes often succumb to a silent erosion of chains of command, networks of vested interests, and the loyalties that maintain their cohesion.
Many believe that an external military strike against a regime nearing collapse is enough to topple or permanently cripple it. Yet ideological-authoritarian regimes have not always fallen due to direct military defeat. Even with their arsenals and security institutions intact, they may find themselves unable to wield their power at the critical moment. There is a vast difference between possessing tools of power and having the capacity to deploy them effectively at the right time.
Arms and armies alone cannot guarantee the survival of a regime, especially if the internal chain of command fractures, the mechanism for translating political decisions into action on the ground collapses, and the bodies tasked with protecting the leadership reach the conclusion that the cost of doing so exceeds the cost of abandoning it. This variable cannot be gauged by counting troops or missiles. Rather, it is reflected in the security establishment’s confidence in the leadership, willingness to execute orders and assessment of the cost of continuing to defend the regime.
History abounds with examples. In the Soviet Union, the “Emergency Committee” attempted to halt President Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms in 1991 by deploying military forces and seizing control of the media. Yet the coup attempt collapsed within three days, amid popular resistance and the rise of a rival authority led by Boris Yeltsin, as parts of the army refused to obey orders. This reflected not a lack of weaponry, but an inability to translate military power into political action, ultimately prompting both the collapse of the regime and the disintegration of the federal state.
When revolution broke out in Romania in 1989, the army sided with the uprising and stopped protecting General Secretary Nicolae Ceaușescu, even as “Special Protection” units continued to fight for several days. This demonstrated that a security establishment is not a monolithic entity; when a regime fails to manage inter-agency conflicts, a pluralistic security structure transforms from a source of protection into a catalyst for disintegration. This led to regime collapse and the execution of Ceaușescu and his wife.
The 1979 revolution in Iran faced the massive military arsenal of the Shah’s regime. Yet on February 11, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces declared the army’s neutrality and ordered troops back to their barracks, hoping to halt the bloodshed and avert a civil war, as internal splits and defections fragmented the military establishment. This exemplified a cost-benefit calculation: When defending the regime threatens the survival of the military establishment itself, that establishment may declare neutrality. This spelled the end of the monarchy and the eventual establishment of a new regime.
In Syria, the rapid collapse of the Assad regime in late 2024 revealed that its long-standing resilience had masked a deep structural erosion, driven by plummeting salaries, rampant corruption, supply shortages, and waning external support. Many officials chose to flee or withdraw rather than fight, leading to the collapse of the regime and the disintegration of its military establishment. Here, as in Romania and Iran, the structure of the state survived.
Yet other cases reveal that such erosion does not necessarily lead to regime collapse. During Iran’s 2009 Green Movement and the 2022 protests, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Basij paramilitary force launched sweeping crackdowns without hesitation. What mattered was not the scale of the protests, but the continued flow of resources and material incentives to the regime’s “coercive nucleus.” While eroding popular legitimacy matters, it is not enough on its own to topple a regime. The turning point only arrives when a regime hit by political erosion lacks the resources to buy the loyalty of power networks and maintain their cohesion.
The new Iranian regime internalized the lessons of 1979 by establishing a parallel power structure around the IRGC and integrating it into political and economic decision-making, to the point where its own fate became organically linked to that of the Islamic Republic.
Therefore, when applying historical models to today’s Iran, we must distinguish between structural-ideological cohesion and the limits of structural adaptation. Today’s IRGC is no mere conscript army; it is a financial, ideological, and institutional network embedded within the state structure, constituting the coercive nucleus responsible for redistributing resources and containing internal pressures before cracks spread to the leadership and impact events on the ground. This is a litmus test of the limits of structural adaptation. The key factor here is not the neutrality of the regular army, but the potential for erosion to spread to the coercive core itself, should financial pressures exceed its capacity to adapt, redistribute resources, and ensure continued loyalty.
The “Economic Outcast” and the Missing Alternative
These examples help place the U.S. Treasury Department’s “Operation Economic Outcast” against Iran in context. The strategy targets Iran’s parallel economy—including digital assets, gold, maritime shipping, aviation, and technology, as well as financial intermediaries—rather than relying on a general policy of financial blockade alone.
However, the transition of this financial strangulation from economic pressure to institutional fragmentation is neither automatic nor inevitable. It could push the core to “monopolize the last gasp,” whereby as public resources shrink, the IRGC tightens its grip over the informal economy and whatever financial flows remain. This would place the heaviest burden on the public and Iran’s civilian institutions, as the security establishment captures a greater relative share of resources in order to ensure its survival and viability.
Importantly, any strategy of bleeding the regime dry can only be effective within the limits of the geoeconomic flexibility Tehran is afforded by certain international actors. Independent Chinese oil refineries, alternative payment systems, and gray-market trade networks have long helped Iran stave off financial collapse. Furthermore, sanctions achieve their political objectives not only by impoverishing society or weakening the economy, but also by rendering the political regime unable to protect the security apparatus that protects it, and by forcing loyalists to reassess their positions based on costs, self-interest, and survival.
Moreover, a lack of funding alone is insufficient to prompt the security establishment and its units on the ground to withdraw their support for the regime. This requires the emergence of a political alternative or secure institutional arrangements to guarantee their immunity from retribution should the regime fall. In the absence of such an alternative, the security core may prefer to fight to the bitter end, defending not just the regime as a political concept, but the survival of individuals, their class and their accumulated interests.
It is here that a forced rupture occurs: not necessarily as the result of a swift military defeat, but due to the tools of coercion becoming decoupled from the will to deploy them; when orders are issued, yet those tasked with executing them hesitate. This is the moment at which the institutions charged with protecting the leadership realize that the cost of continuing to do so has exceeded the cost of withdrawing their support or abandoning it entirely.
At that juncture, the regime loses not only its arsenal, but also the ability to compel its military and security institutions to use that arsenal to defend its survival.
