The rapidly deteriorating situation inside Iran — marked by mounting public unrest, deepening economic crises, and increasing acts of defiance — and the dramatic developments sweeping across the Middle East have pierced a once-durable perception: that the Islamic Republic is immovable and destined to endure.
For the first time in decades, a palpable sense of possibility has emerged — that the regime might fall. This shift in sentiment has inspired a flurry of proposals on both sides of the Atlantic aimed at accelerating the regime's imminent collapse.
Among them is the Maximum Support Act, a bill introduced by Reps. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., and Jimmy Panetta, D-Calif. Though likely well-intentioned, it rests on a precarious foundation: the idea that encouraging defections and funding nonviolent dissidents will trigger regime change.
This belief that meaningful transformation in Iran can be engineered through the defection of officials, security forces, or Revolutionary Guard commanders is a recurring illusion.
For over four decades, it has failed to materialize. The notion is rooted in hope, but persistently undone by the hard realities of Iran's power structure.
This vision presumes that Iranian officials and members of the security apparatus — particularly those embedded in the Revolutionary Guard — might be enticed by foreign promises to abandon a regime they helped build and brutally sustain. But this is not a regime susceptible to pressure in the manner of Cold War-era Eastern European states or Latin American dictatorships of the last century.
The individuals the bill seeks to sway are either too powerless to make a difference or too deeply implicated in the regime's crimes to ever serve as agents of democratic transformation.
Even if such figures were to defect, their role in a post-regime Iran would be dubious at best. Imagining they could assist in building a democratic future is as misguided as proposing that Gestapo or SS officers could have joined German patriots in overthrowing the Third Reich.
For decades, the Islamic Republic's cunning leadership has infiltrated exiled opposition groups with false promises of imminent collapse, deceiving and dividing dissidents, only to return to Tehran and proclaim the absence of a credible opposition. Those within the regime who are targeted for "defection" are not merely functionaries — they are shareholders in a system of vast corruption and violence.
The Revolutionary Guard, in particular, is not a neutral force. It is a mafia-like institution entrenched in Iran's economy and political power, unlikely to relinquish its privileges for the vague promise of a U.S.-sponsored transition.
At best, such defections would occur only when the regime is already in freefall — just as Adolf Hitler's inner circle attempted to flee once Berlin was surrounded. Far from initiating change, they would simply try to escape its consequences.
Contemporary proposals — whether for a "strikers' fund" or support for "vetted nonviolent dissidents" — appear principled on paper but, in practice, risk aligning with the very tactics the Iranian regime has perfected.
Tehran has long suppressed or co-opted dissent by framing it as foreign-driven subversion. Western funding of nonviolent resistance, no matter how well-intentioned, risks tarring genuine Iranian movements as pawns of hostile powers — granting the regime a propaganda boon.
The Iranian people must be free to chart their own course. That path will inevitably require the means to confront not just the regime's ideology, but its armed enforcers: the Revolutionary Guard and its sprawling security apparatus.
It is telling that the son of the former shah was the earliest proponent of this "maximum support" strategy.
For decades, he has peddled dreams to unsuspecting exiles, raising vast sums without accountability. If he truly cared for Iran's workers and dissidents, he could draw on the billions his father reportedly looted from the Iranian nation — funds that allegedly continue to bankroll his family's opulent lifestyle in the U.S. and Europe, from luxury resorts to Las Vegas casinos.
This is not leadership. It is opportunism masquerading as concern.
The Iranian people's struggle is theirs alone to lead. It belongs to those who risk their lives inside Iran and to an organized opposition grounded in sacrifice and legitimacy.
The current proposals bear the unmistakable fingerprints of neoconservative agendas — those who cloak their ambitions in the language of democracy while displaying little interest in Iran's future beyond their own strategic gains. Propping up the Pahlavi name as a manufactured figurehead only reveals their intent: not to empower Iranians, but to entangle America in yet another costly quagmire.
The dream of remaking Iran in the image of Washington think tanks is a delusion — one that history has repeatedly punished.
Iran's assets — whether frozen abroad or held within — belong to its people and must be reclaimed after the regime's collapse. Initiatives aimed at encouraging defections or funding civil society through foreign channels are not only ineffective, but they also echo the same tragic miscalculations that led to Iraq and Libya's ruin.
These are the ghosts of 1990s interventionism, which culminated in the 2003 invasion of Iraq — a disaster that cost American taxpayers $3 trillion, took more than 5,000 U.S. lives, and left tens of thousands wounded, only to destabilize the region and empower Tehran's theocracy.
History is not a punching bag for recycled fantasies. It is a teacher — if only we choose to learn.
Today's efforts regrettably repeat the arrogance that birthed the Iraq Liberation Act: a promise of freedom that delivered only chaos.
Ivan Sascha Sheehan is a professor of Public and International affairs and the associate dean of the College of Public Affairs at the University of Baltimore. Opinions expressed are his own. Follow him on X @ProfSheehan. Read more here.