Tehran Takes Flight

The supreme leader is dead. His funeral is underway in Tehran. And the people who actually live in Tehran are leaving.

Not in protest. Not in demonstration. In vacation. Residents of the capital are fleeing the city to avoid the funeral crowds, posting photos of their getaways on social media — beaches, countryside, anywhere but the streets the regime has filled with bused-in mourners from the provinces. The split is not subtle. The split is being documented in real time, publicly, by Iranians who have stopped pretending.

That image tells you everything about the die that’s been cast.

Forty-Seven Years in a Prison They Didn’t Build

The Islamic Republic is 47 years old. The generation that made the 1979 revolution is elderly or dead. The Iranians in the streets today — the ones who fled, the ones who have been in the streets every few years risking everything — were born into this. They did not choose it. They have been fighting it their entire lives.

The Green Movement in 2009. The 2019 protests, a hundred cities in three days, crushed so hard the regime cut the internet for a week. The Mahsa Amini protests in 2022 — “Woman, Life, Freedom” — months of demonstrations, at least 500 killed, thousands arrested. Every time, the Revolutionary Guard held the line. Every time, the world watched and expressed concern.

The supreme leader who presided over all of it is now dead. Not of old age. Slain — in the middle of a war he chose to fight.

Is This the Rubicon?

Caesar’s crossing was irreversible not because of what he did but because of what it meant. There was no path back to the republic once he brought the army across. The question for Iran is whether this is that kind of moment — the kind where the old equilibrium simply cannot be restored, regardless of who tries.

The Revolutionary Guard will try. They have the guns, the money, the network. They will move quickly to install a successor, claim continuity, suppress the space where something else might grow. They’ve done it before under pressure. They know how.

But this is different from before. The leader didn’t die in a transition of their choosing. He died in a war. The regime is exhausted — the headline said it directly. And the people of the capital are posting beach photos during the state funeral.

The die may already be cast. Not by this moment alone, but by forty-seven years of accumulated pressure that this moment has now made visible in a way that can’t be walked back. The Tehran residents who fled didn’t stay home quietly. They documented it. They shared it. They made the absence legible.

That is not the behavior of a population that fears the regime the way it once did.

The Nation-Building Trap

Here is where it gets dangerous.

Every time a Middle Eastern government has collapsed or been weakened in the past twenty-five years, external actors have decided to help. Iraq: the US took a secular Sunni dictatorship and, through a combination of ideology, incompetence, and magical thinking about democracy installation, handed power to Shia factions with closer ties to Tehran than to Washington. The net result was a more powerful Iran. Libya: NATO helped remove Gaddafi, then left. The country has had two governments and multiple militias ever since. Afghanistan: twenty years, a trillion dollars, the Taliban back in Kabul within weeks of withdrawal.

The track record is not ambiguous. External actors intervening in these transitions do not make them better. They make them worse, usually in ways that serve the interveners’ short-term interests while destroying the population’s long-term prospects.

Iran is not Iraq. The Iranian people are among the most educated, most cosmopolitan, most capable populations in the region. They do not need to be taught democracy. They have been demanding it, at enormous personal cost, for decades. What they have never needed is a foreign power deciding what form their freedom should take.

The temptation will be enormous. There are already factions in Washington and Tel Aviv and Riyadh who have been waiting for this moment for years, who have plans, who have preferred successors, who have ideas about what a post-Khamenei Iran should look like and how to get there. Some of them genuinely believe they’re helping.

They should not help. They should stay out.

What Actually Serves the Iranian People

The Covenant’s argument — the reason we write about governance and accountability and self-determination — is that these things have to be built from inside. You cannot impose accountable governance from outside. You can only create the conditions where the people themselves can build it or prevent them from doing so.

The condition the Iranian people need is not a US-backed transitional government. It is not an Israeli-mediated successor. It is not a Saudi-funded opposition coalition. It is space — the absence of external powers making the choice for them and then calling it liberation.

What the world can do is not make it worse. Lift the sanctions that have impoverished ordinary Iranians while the Revolutionary Guard smuggled its way around them. Stop treating every Iranian as a proxy for the regime. Don’t arm the first faction that promises alignment with Western interests. Let the Iranian people — who have demonstrated repeatedly, at enormous cost, what they want — have the room to get it.

The Question That Remains

The die is cast. The forty-seven-year equilibrium cannot survive the death of the man who held it in place, in the middle of a war, while the capital’s residents flee for the beach.

What comes next is not determined. It depends on whether the Revolutionary Guard can consolidate fast enough. It depends on whether the internal opposition, fractured and exiled and exhausted, can cohere into something. It depends on whether external powers have the discipline to not do what they always do.

The Iranian people have been waiting a long time. They know what they want. The question is whether the world will get out of the way long enough to let them have it.

— J.P. Howlett

Related: You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet — the coming disruption isn’t only technological. Power structures are shifting everywhere at once.

Related: Ungoverned AI Looks Like This — what the absence of accountable governance produces, whether the system is a state or an algorithm.