No one has a plan for Iran
With protests engulfing Iran, the US considers its next move, China holds back and the population has no clear path forward. Could this unrest quietly reshape the regime? Academic Alessandro Arduino analyses the issue.
As Chinese warships conduct joint naval drills with Iran and Russia off South Africa’s waters, the Islamic Republic is on fire. The exercises, organised under the BRICS Plus banner, bring together combined fleets for anti-piracy operations at a moment of heightened tension over Venezuelan, Russian and Iranian oil tankers under threat by the US.
Among the vessels involved in the naval drills is the guided-missile destroyer Tangshan, part of a People’s Liberation Army Navy task force deployed to the Gulf of Aden. Nevertheless, it is the participation of Iranian warships that carries a sharper symbolism, with Tehran projecting resolve abroad even as its authority is questioned at home.
China caught off guard
For Beijing, the timing is uneasy. China was caught off guard by the collapse of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad and, more recently, by the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by US special forces. Now, signs of strain are unmistakable in another of China’s strategic partners. If Venezuelan oil-for-finance arrangements once anchored China’s ambitions in Latin America and the Caribbean, Iran has a comparable role in the Middle East as a cornerstone of the Belt and Road Initiative.
The deeper question is whether China can anticipate what comes next, and what role it intends to play.
It remains too early to say whether the unrest sweeping Iran, from Tehran to provincial capitals, will culminate in regime change. But the force deployed by the security services to suppress dissent, with reported hundreds of killings, suggests a point of no return. Even if the leadership weathers this moment, as it did after the 2022 upheaval sparked by the death in captivity of Mahsa Amini, a young girl accused of improperly wearing the hijab, Iran is unlikely to emerge unchanged.
The deeper question is whether China can anticipate what comes next, and what role it intends to play. Iran’s ruling elite still looks to Beijing as an indispensable economic lifeline, but among many Iranians, China’s commercial dominance is increasingly viewed not as solidarity, but as opportunism.
It is not the fall of the Rial or the students’ protests alone that threaten the Islamic Republic, but the convergence of different exogenous and endogenous stressors that are reaching the proverbial breaking point. Military spending is rising to shore up missile defences and sustain armed proxies from Lebanon to Yemen, even as sanctions linked to the nuclear programme tighten further. At home, environmental crises, from chronic water shortages to worsening air pollution, have become impossible to ignore. Overhead looms the constant threat of Israeli air superiority and targeted assassinations, compounded by Trump’s pledge to intervene militarily should the regime move to massacre protesters.
What has long restrained Iranians from seeking to overturn the system is the absence of a credible alternative.
US going into Iran without a plan?
The underpinning of a renewed American bombing is that it would shatter the morale and cohesion of Iran’s security forces, triggering defections and refusals to carry out orders against demonstrators. Yet a bombing campaign, rather than cyber operations or additional sanctions, could be the first falling domino in a wider regional conflagration, one in which Iranian proxies, particularly in Iraq, retain the capacity to strike back, dragging Iran and its neighbours into a far broader conflict.
What has long restrained Iranians from seeking to overturn the system is the absence of a credible alternative. Just across the border, Iraq remains a cautionary tale: the chaos that followed the American invasion and dismantling of state institutions, is a lingering reminder of the risks of abrupt change without a plan.
Some protesters in the streets are chanting the name of Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former Shah deposed during the Islamic Revolution, less out of conviction than out of a lack of options. Even Donald Trump, while praising Pahlavi personally, has stopped short of endorsing him, much as he avoided backing Venezuela’s opposition leader outright, wary of repeating Washington’s costly de-Ba’athification missteps in Iraq.
Beijing probably will have no appetite for assuming a proactive role in managing the crisis, especially when Washington is evaluating a military option.
China likely to stay out of Iran’s troubles
In this respect, China has long cultivated a posture of pragmatic balance in the Middle East, maintaining ties with all regional actors while scrupulously avoiding public alignment in their disputes. That calculus was on full display during the 12-day war with Israel, and Beijing's restraint did not always match Iran’s over-expectations at moments of crisis. Following this pattern, Beijing probably will have no appetite for assuming a proactive role in managing the crisis, especially when Washington is evaluating a military option.
Nevertheless, the regime is doubling down, hunting those it brands as saboteurs, not only for propaganda purposes, but out of a genuine conviction that some of the arson attacks on government buildings and against security forces were orchestrated by Israeli and US proxies.
Since last Thursday, the authorities have not only severed internet access but have also launched a broad jamming operation to disrupt GPS signals, aimed not just at thwarting potential drone attacks, but, more pointedly, at preventing any use of the Starlink constellation as an alternative channel for communication inside the country and with the outside world.
Beginning of transformation
Inside Iran, the more plausible scenario may not be a restoration or a revolution, but a reconfiguration. Particularly within the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), some leaders could preside over a new governing arrangement: a system that loosens strict religious controls, seeks economic opening through sanctions relief, and adopts a less confrontational posture toward Israel, while preserving core structures of power. In that sense, the protests may not signal an end to the Islamic Republic, but the beginning of its transformation.
