"When Liberation Becomes Subjugation: The Moral Paradox of Regime Change in Iran" by Hossein Dabbagh & Patrick Hassan (keywords: Iran; Regime Change; Anti-Imperialism; Islamic Republic; Legitimacy)

If you enjoy reading this, please consider becoming a Patreon member or making a donation. The Philosopher is unfunded and your support is greatly appreciated.

Calls for regime change in Iran have surged once again following the June 2025 aerial bombardments by Israel, encouraged by hawkish factions in Washington and Tel Aviv. These military actions, ostensibly aimed at curbing Iran’s nuclear threat, are accompanied by increasingly explicit rhetoric purportedly advocating for the toppling of the Islamic Republic. Yet beneath this resurgent interventionism lies a more profound philosophical danger — one that transcends mere policy miscalculation or strategic failure. We argue that external efforts to bring about regime change in Iran risk reanimating the very imperialist dynamics that the Islamic Republic has long exploited to justify its rule. The consequence is not merely tactical backlash, but a moral paradox: the reinforcement of an oppressive regime through the very means meant to end it.

The Islamic Republic has, since its inception in 1979, grounded its legitimacy and very essence in the grammar of anti-imperialism. Rooted in the trauma of repeated foreign interference — most notably the 1953 Anglo-American coup d'etat that deposed democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh — this discourse has served as a symbolic resource for the state, allowing it to frame opposition, reform movements, and even internal critique as tools of Western subjugation. Moreover, such discourse has been simultaneously deployed to position the Islamic Republic itself as the solely effective vehicle for protecting national autonomy — a narrative often now repeated by a small but vocal faction in (mostly Western) leftist circles. In times of relative peace, this narrative often appears hollow, especially to younger Iranians disillusioned with authoritarianism, economic mismanagement, ideological hypocrisy and gendered repression. But when foreign bombs fall on Iranian cities, the state’s anti-imperialist posture acquires a renewed credibility.

This is what we term the logic of ‘imperial self-fulfilling prophecy’: the enactment of violence by powerful external actors that confirms and materialises the ideological self-understanding of the regime. In this sense, the threat of imperialism is not merely rhetorical; it is ontologically reactivated by foreign aggression. What was once a dubious narrative becomes a plausible, even compelling, account of Iran’s geopolitical position. In the context of military strikes and overt regime-change discourse, the slogans of ‘resistance’ and ‘independence’ no longer sound like relics of a revolutionary past — they become the interpretive frames through which lived reality is processed.

The threat of imperialism is not merely rhetorical; it is ontologically reactivated by foreign aggression.

The moral psychology of national humiliation, extensively explored by Frantz Fanon and later by Avishai Margalit, can help us understand how external domination often produces internal conformity. Fanon describes the ‘colonial wound’ — the deep affective scar left by repeated experiences of subordination — which can suddenly reopen when an external power projects force. Margalit, for his part, shows that humiliation is not just personal shame but a moral injury to the collective self-respect of a political community. When such an injury is perceived, prior ideological and factional differences are eclipsed by a surge of solidarity against the humiliator.

Under conditions of perceived foreign assault, political fragmentation often gives way to a heightened sense of collective identity. In the case of Iran, this was observable upon the invasion of the country by the then Western-backed Saddam Hussein in 1980, unifying a newly formed and still fragile Iranian regime against foreign aggression. More recently, there is some evidence of this rally-around-the-flag effect among the Iranian population in response to Israel and America’s recent bombing campaigns, particularly when they started to bring civilian casualties in residential neighbourhoods of Tehran. Even staunch critics of the Islamic Republic — both formerly and currently imprisoned for political dissidence in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison, which itself was targeted in the Israeli strikes — have denounced this foreign aggression and attempt at regime change in terms not unfamiliar from the worldview of the state. Where collective identity is triggered in this way, dissent is no longer seen as noble; it becomes suspect, even treasonous. In such contexts, attempts to liberate a people from tyranny by means of external coercion can have the perverse effect of rendering that tyranny more tenable. The dissident — reformists, journalists, and activists — become the puppet of the empire, while the ruling elite autocrat becomes the last defender of the nation and rebrands itself as the last bulwark against subjugation. Efforts to liberate a people through external coercion, therefore, carry a grim paradox: by triggering the politics of humiliation, they can make an already-oppressive regime more credible and resilient. The autocrat styles himself — not without popular resonance — as the indispensable guardian of national dignity.

Where collective identity is triggered in this way, dissent is no longer seen as noble; it becomes suspect, even treasonous

This dynamic complicates standard liberal arguments in favour of humanitarian intervention. While philosophers such as Allen Buchanan have argued that certain interventions can be justified when a regime forfeits its legitimacy through systematic rights violations, such arguments often underplay the interpretive dimension of legitimacy. Legitimacy is not simply a matter of compliance with abstract moral criteria; it is also a function of perceived authority within a particular historical and cultural horizon. If intervention — even well-intentioned — renders a regime more legitimate in the eyes of its subjects, then the intervention fails not only pragmatically but normatively. It contradicts its own telos by undermining the emancipatory aspirations it purports to advance.

Moreover, the problem is not merely one of perception, but of political subjectivity. Post-colonial theorists from Edward Said to Achille Mbembe have shown how imperialism does not simply dominate externally but produces subjectivities internally. It operates by scripting the identities of all parties involved and creates both the ‘liberator’ and the ‘liberated’ in its own image. Through a long pedagogy of domination, the imperial centre manufactures two complementary figures: the ‘civilised liberator’ who bestows progress and the ‘backward recipient’ who must be uplifted.

When external powers promise to engineer regime change in Tehran, they inadvertently reactivate this epistemic template. Iranians are tacitly invited to occupy one of two imperial subject positions: the ‘grateful beneficiary’ who welcomes salvation or the ‘recalcitrant native’ who obstructs it. Both positions preclude the space for authentic self-representation. Genuine democracy, however, is not a substance that can be injected from abroad; it is a practice of collective self-authorship. Citizens must recognise themselves as the agents who debate, decide, and defend their political future. There is a strong inductive case for the practical dimension of this claim: a host of historical examples (Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan) suggest that bypassing the autonomy and the particular internal dynamics of a citizenry — e.g. dynamics of class, religion, education, gender in the labour force, and so on — when implementing democracy doom such a project to failure. But there is, again, a normative failure at play here too: regime change via external force fails to respect citizens qua persons with a robust, historically situated conception of themselves and their political aspirations.

If emancipation arrives in the form of foreign dictates, it never escapes the shadow of subordination. Its legal structures may look liberal, yet its experiential form is paternalistic.

If emancipation arrives in the form of foreign dictates, it never escapes the shadow of subordination. Its legal structures may look liberal, yet its experiential form is paternalistic. Such an order is brittle because its legitimacy is parasitic: it depends on the continuing presence — or at least the remembered threat — of the external patron. Worse still, the imposed script furnishes authoritarian elites with a powerful counter-narrative: democracy itself — and often adjacent components such as secularism — becomes stigmatised as an imperial artefact. Thus, externally driven regime change risks aborting the very possibility of an indigenous democratic imaginary long before it can take root institutionally. The danger of externally induced regime change is not only that it may empower reactionary forces; it is that it may inhibit the possibility of genuine democratic authorship. People must see themselves as the authors of their own emancipation. If liberation is experienced as imposition, then its legitimacy is always already compromised.

The Iranian case is paradigmatic. Despite the repressive apparatus of the Islamic Republic, a vibrant civil society continues to struggle for reform and, in many cases, transformation. The latest in the long list of historical examples is the widespread ‘Woman Life Freedom’ movement of 2022, prompted by the death of the 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman Mahsa Jina Amini in Tehran at the hands of the Islamic Republic's ‘morality police’. A poignant chant among participants in this movement was directed at the Islamic Republic and its state apparatus: ‘Betarseed — ma hame ba ham hasteem [Be afraid — we are all together]’. Women’s rights activists, student groups, labour movements, environmental movements, and digital dissidents constitute the fragile but persistent hope of a post-theocratic Iran. These movements are not merely tactical actors; they are bearers of a moral horizon distinct from both the current regime and the imperial powers that seek to undo it. Ignoring such movements in strategising for externally forced regime change not only disrespects their agency but also demonstrates the disconnect between liberal interventionist narratives and the lived realities of internal Iranian resistance. To superimpose external military force onto this terrain is to risk obliterating the space of autonomous agency — it collapses the distinction between opposition and occupation.

If liberation is experienced as imposition, then its legitimacy is always already compromised.

Another troubling outcome of a foreign intervention for regime change is the likelihood of emboldening the regime to intensify its repression; evidence of which we are now seeing in Iran. Authoritarian states often respond to external threats by cracking down more harshly on internal dissent, portraying civil society actors as traitors and foreign agents. The very social movements that have taken years to build — through fragile trust networks, cautious reformism, and courageous resistance — may be delegitimised overnight. Once labelled as Western puppets, these groups lose their internal credibility and become targets of renewed surveillance, imprisonment, and erasure. In this sense, imperialist intervention does not merely risk failing to achieve democratic change; it actively and structurally undermines the conditions under which such change becomes possible. This is a form of moral harm done to the civic body itself.

None of this is to deny the ethical imperative to oppose tyranny. But it is to insist that opposition must itself be governed by ethical constraints. Among these is the requirement to avoid reinscribing the very logic of domination one seeks to resist. Regime change through external force — especially when pursued by actors such as Israel and the US, implicated in atrocities like the ongoing genocide in Gaza and bearing long-standing histories of imperial entanglement in the region — does not simply fail to meet this constraint; it violates it in its very form. The act of liberation becomes practically indistinguishable from that of subjugation.

We noted earlier that the Islamic Republic's projected core identity as a vehicle of resistance against imperialism (and ‘Western-liberal ideology’ more broadly) is sometimes lauded and repeated by a faction of Western leftists who, simply for this reason, are supporters of that regime. Of course, one might reasonably find this belief in the sincerity of the Islamic Republic’s rhetoric and self-conception to be rather naive. But most pertinent to the context of the present discussion is that this phenomenon, too, can be understood as a collateral effect of imperialistic regime-change discourse. Reacting to preoccupation with interventionist strategies, and cautious of colonial and imperialist history in the region, these leftist allies conflate state-sponsored anti-Westernism with authentic resistance that prioritises national sovereignty. Perhaps inadvertently, they replicate the same geopolitical oversimplification hitherto identified — a false dichotomy of choosing to support a ‘homogeneous and autonomous Iran under the Islamic Republic’ or the ‘imperialist aggressor’. 

This binary obscures the internal political diversity of Iranian society and risks facilitating a fusion of ideological elements within the regime’s evolving self-conception. In particular, imperialist interventionism appears to be accelerating a convergence between Iranian nationalism and Shi’i fundamentalism, cultivating what increasingly resembles a project of Shi’i nationalism. This emerging synthesis draws symbolic and affective power from both sacred and secular registers. A telling instance occurred during Ayatollah Khamenei’s first public appearance following the Iran–Israel war: at a religious ceremony on the eve of Ashura, he requested the recitation of ‘Ey Iran’, a patriotic anthem imbued with nationalist sentiment. The juxtaposition of Shi’i mourning ritual and nationalist imagery was no coincidence — it gestures toward a deliberate attempt to consolidate a unified identity under perceived existential threat. This consolidation further narrows the space for alternative political imaginaries, and reinforces the regime’s self-presentation as the guardian of civilisational integrity, making critique increasingly vulnerable to accusations of disloyalty and casting dissent in a morally suspect light.

Forceful regime change is a strategic and moral dead end because it undercuts the autonomy of the citizenry in delivering their political aspirations via collective grassroots resistance movements.

The result of the false dichotomy endorsed by both the Islamic Republic and its allies from a portion of the Western left is a mere addition of further clutter to an existing normative haze — a global moral confusion where solidarity is extended to oppressive and unpopular governments instead of their victims. This posture also, rather ironically, shares a fundamental mistake with liberal interventionism: it speaks over and obscures the domestic voices of resistance within civil society, silencing socially and culturally cultivated grassroot-activist networks. It does this either by ignoring them completely or by outright denying their significance (e.g. downplaying their popular support; dismissal as foreign assets or victims of Western cultural-brainwashing). In essence, this specific brand of leftist thought endorses the right conclusion (i.e. rejecting foreign intervention) but for the wrong reasons. Forceful regime change is a strategic and moral dead end because it undercuts the autonomy of the citizenry in delivering their political aspirations via collective grassroots resistance movements, not because it would simply deplete the stock of anti-Westernism.

A better alternative to both (a) regime change via foreign intervention, as well as (b) blanket endorsement of oppressive regimes and their rhetoric in the interests of resisting imperialism, lies in what might be called solidaristic non-imperialism: support for grassroots civil society, protection of dissidents in exile, expansion of informational and technological access, and an ethic of listening rather than prescribing. The importance of such access became clear during the recent war, when internet blackouts disrupted coordination and suppressed Iranian voices globally, undermining not only the flow of information but the very conditions for democratic expression. This model resists the fantasy of swift redemption and instead wagers on the slow, uncertain, but morally superior process of endogenous transformation. While this option comes at the cost of patience, the significant payoff lies in how it affirms the agency of the Iranian people not as passive recipients of freedom but as active participants in its realisation.

In conclusion, the philosophical lesson of the current moment is this: oppressive regimes built on the rhetoric of anti-imperialism can be paradoxically strengthened by the very forms of imperialism they denounce, especially when those forms are enacted through force. To break this cycle, moral critique must disentangle itself from the logic of geopolitical domination. Only then can the hope for a free and democratic Iran emerge — not as the gift of empire, but as the achievement of a people who reclaim their future on their own terms.

Hossein Dabbagh is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University London and an affiliated member of Oxford’s Department for Continuing Education. His work spans practical ethics, political philosophy, and Middle Eastern affairs, with a particular focus on Islamic political theology. He regularly contributes to public philosophy, writing on secularism and theocratic rule in Iran for Aeon, The Conversation, and other platforms, and has appeared on the BBC, combining philosophical analysis with regional expertise. 

Patrick Hassan is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Cardiff University. He is the author of Nietzsche’s Struggle Against Pessimism (Cambridge University Press, 2023), and the editor of Schopenhauer’s Moral Philosophy (Routledge, 2021), as well as a range of peer-reviewed articles in ethics, aesthetics, and environmental and political philosophy.

Dabbagh and Hassan are the co-authors of ‘Secularism in Iran’ (Aeon, 2023).

---

If you enjoyed reading this, please consider becoming a Patreon member or making a donation. The Philosopher is unfunded and your support is greatly appreciated