The fall of Bashar Assad’s regime in December 2024 looked sudden. It wasn’t. The Ba’ath Party had been dying for 13 years—from the moment Syrian security forces opened fire on protesters in Deraa in March 2011. What appeared to be a lightning collapse was actually the final settling of a structure whose foundations had been eaten through long before the walls came down.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is now in the same position. The walls are still standing. The foundations are gone.
The parallel between the Ba’ath Party and the IRGC is not superficial. Both institutions fused military force, political control and economic empire into a single self-perpetuating structure. Both maintained loyalty through patronage rather than ideology. Both surveilled and suffocated civil society while convincing the world—and their own members—that they were indispensable.
The Ba’ath fell not because Assad’s enemies were strong, but because his soldiers stopped believing the fight was worth dying for. That same calculation is now spreading through the IRGC’s ranks.
Consider what the IRGC has lost in 18 months. Qassem Soleimani, its strategic genius, was killed in 2020, but the true reckoning came later.
Hezbollah and Hamas have no resemblance to what they used to be a few years ago. Syria, Iran’s only Arab state ally and the land corridor binding its proxy network together, fell to rebels in a matter of days. Then came the 12-day war in June 2025, which exposed Iran’s air defenses as a fiction and left its nuclear infrastructure in ruins.
Ali Khamenei himself was killed in a joint U.S.-Israeli strike on Feb. 28, the first day of this year’s war. His son Mojtaba Khamenei—elevated in haste, under fire, in violation of the Islamic Republic’s own foundational prohibition on hereditary succession—now sits atop a regime that has never been more isolated, more economically broken or more ideologically hollow.
The IRGC is not just a military force. It is a patronage machine. It pays its people through a sprawling economic empire spanning construction, energy, telecommunications and sanctions-busting oil sales routed through front companies and friendly intermediaries. When that machine stops paying, the loyalty stops.
Sanctions have already produced an Iranian currency in freefall, inflation that wage increases cannot touch and protests that have swept all 31 provinces. The regime responded by increasing security spending by nearly 150%, which tells you everything about where its priorities lie and nothing reassuring about its long-term solvency.
So what should Washington, Jerusalem and Brussels do with this moment? The United States holds the sharpest instruments. A genuine naval quarantine of Iranian oil exports—enforced against Chinese buyers through secondary sanctions with real teeth— would drain the IRGC’s ability to pay its own soldiers faster than any military strike.
The IRGC’s patronage structure is its immune system. Starve it. Simultaneously, the United States should be flooding Iran with satellite internet access and secure communications tools. The regime’s first move in every protest cycle is an internet shutdown. Remove that option, and you change the geometry of the street.
Israel’s role is what it has always been: precise, deniable and deeply uncomfortable for polite company to acknowledge.
The systematic decapitation of IRGC command structures—already responsible for killing 11 senior commanders, including its commander-in-chief and intelligence chief since February—should continue. Not because killing individuals collapses institutions, but because it forces the IRGC to promote second- and third-tier leadership under battlefield conditions, accelerating exactly the kind of internal fracturing that preceded the Ba’ath’s final disintegration.
Europe’s contribution is less dramatic but potentially decisive in ways force cannot achieve. The European Union’s designation of the IRGC as a terrorist organization in February 2026 was historic—not because of what it immediately froze, but because of what it closed permanently.
For three decades, European banking and trading networks served as the back door through which Iranian entities evaded American sanctions. That door is now legally shut. The question is enforcement. Brussels must pursue IRGC-linked front companies with the same forensic aggression it has brought to Russian oligarch asset-tracing since 2022. The architecture exists. The political will is the variable.
But Europe’s most singular value lies beyond sanctions. When—not if—this regime fractures, someone will need to provide the diplomatic scaffolding for whatever comes next. The United States is too compromised by its role in the conflict. Israel is obviously impossible. Europe, with its decades of Iranian diplomatic engagement, its credibility as a proponent of international law and its capacity to unlock worldwide reconstruction funding, is the only actor positioned to legitimize a post-IRGC Iranian government in the eyes of the world. That role should be prepared now, not improvised in the aftermath.
The critical lesson of Syria is that the Ba’ath’s fall was simultaneously too slow and too fast—13 years of grinding attrition, followed by a collapse so sudden that no political alternative was ready. The result was a transition that, for all its promise, began in chaos. The IRGC is not 10 feet tall. It is a patronage machine running out of money, an ideology running out of believers and a dynasty that violated its own founding myth the moment it came under real pressure.
Iran is a country of 90 million people sitting on vast energy wealth, with a young, educated population that has shown real courage demanding change for years, but it is not one people. Kurds, Arabs, Azeris and Baluchis each carry distinct histories of marginalization, and any post-regime transition will inherit those fault lines.
The West did not create these conditions. But it can help determine whether what comes next for Iran is Syria in 2024—or something better.
