Could Iran Become a Failed State? The War's Darkest Endgame

How will the Iran war end? At this moment, that is the million-dollar question—or, to be more precise, it is the hundred-dollar-per-barrel question, asked at a time when the world urgently needs an answer. A year from now, it is entirely possible that the Iranian regime could still be in place, more radical than it is today and hell-bent on acquiring a nuclear warhead.

Or the regime might be overthrown within twelve months, replaced by a democratically elected government or by the son of Iran’s final shah. By then, Iran could fall under the command of a US-friendly, Israel-friendly autocrat installed through a brazen military coup, or be managed by Donald Trump’s new Board of Peace.

But there is another option lingering in the background, a dark prospect that no leader, in Iran or anywhere else, wants to risk speaking into existence. Spin the clock forward by a year, and there is a real chance that Iran could have devolved into a failed state.

Key Takeaways

A failed Iranian state—divided, chronically unstable, and at war with itself—is widely acknowledged as the worst possible outcome of the current war, yet it may align with the cold strategic incentives of the powers prosecuting it.
The minimum objective the United States and Israel are likely to share is simple: Iran cannot be a threat once the war ends—unable to menace the Strait of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf, Israel, the US, or the wider world.
Iran is not Iraq, Libya, or Syria. It holds the world’s seventeenth-largest population, roughly ninety-two million people, the third-largest oil reserves, the second-largest natural gas reserves, and the longest coastline on the Persian Gulf.
A collapse could trigger an exodus of fourteen to thirty million refugees, flood the region with loose weapons and long-range drones, and create an incubator for some of the darkest forms of radicalism.
If Iran does collapse, the likely map resembles Syria at the height of its civil war or Myanmar today: separatist factions, warlord remnants, pro-Western opposition groups, opportunistic neighbors, and jihadist disruptors, none strong enough to conquer the rest.

Even compared to the rule of the ayatollahs, this is Iran’s catastrophic outcome: a solution where nobody wins, everyone suffers, and the future looks closer to the Syrian or Libyan civil wars than to anything remotely resembling reconstruction. It is an Iran where a dying regime tries to control as much territory as it can, where generals of the Revolutionary Guard and commanders within Iranian intelligence choose to live as warlords. It is an Iran where the Kurds, the Balochs, the Arabs, and the Azeris have carved out autonomous states, and where battle-hardened fighters cling to the cities and towns they manage to liberate—a festering hotbed for terrorism, organized crime, splinter factions, and naked self-interest.

Worst of all, it is an Iran that everyone can agree is the worst-case scenario—yet one that the very people driving this conflict today might regard as a perfectly acceptable outcome. That uncomfortable gap, between universal dread and quiet incentive, is the subject of this analysis.

The Rationale: Why Anyone Would Want This

Start with the obvious question: why would anyone, under any circumstances, want to turn Iran into a failed state? After all, that is plainly the worst possible outcome in a war like this. Nobody wants Iran to become another Syria, or worse yet, another Yemen.

The nation leading the offensive against Iran, the United States, is home to more than three hundred million people who have learned the hard way that nation-building in the Middle East is pointless. A failed state in Iran would not even be nation-building—it is one of the few remaining options that is even worse. Iranian state collapse would introduce tremendous instability across the Middle East and Central Asia, drive refugee crises and humanitarian panic, and leave the territory bordering one of the world’s most important shipping lanes chronically and dangerously unpredictable.

But set aside the global-citizen perspective and adopt a colder, more calculating geo-strategic one. Go fully instrumental: choose a goal, then work out the decisions that would serve that goal before weighing the collateral damage. The two nations leading the charge against Iran are Israel and the United States. What does Israel want out of this conflict?

The destruction of the Iranian regime, a permanent end to the Iranian threat to Israel, and, ideally, a transition into the control of an Israel-friendly civilian government.

What the United States wants is harder to pin down, largely because America’s president and his top brass cannot seem to agree on a straight answer. At a minimum, Washington wants to end Iran’s nuclear program and force complete capitulation from the regime. Fudge the details and look at the priorities in broad strokes, and Washington appears mostly aligned with Israeli objectives: if Iran is completely de-fanged for several decades, then great; if the regime is replaced or co-opted by an alternative friendly to the US and Israel, then even better.

The Minimum Condition: Iran Cannot Be a Threat

That leads to a simpler question. What are the minimum conditions the US and Israel are looking to achieve? Distilled to a single sentence, the mission objective both nations are likely to agree on is this: Iran cannot be a threat once this war ends. Iran cannot threaten the Strait of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf, Israel, the United States, or the rest of the world.

Washington, Jerusalem, and their allies can argue endlessly about the best way to make that happen. But any outcome where the threat of Iran has been permanently neutralized is fundamentally more acceptable than any outcome where it has not. Hold that thought, and then remember what we are actually talking about: the prospect of an Iranian failed state.

No matter how confident Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, and their closest advisors might be, military campaigns on this scale present a profound quandary. There is no controlling what comes after regime change, especially if the countries involved are unwilling to dedicate immense resources—including the lives of their own citizens deployed abroad—to force a particular result. When the United States envisioned regime change in 2003, it was not picturing modern-day Iraq.

When the US ousted Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, the plan was not for Libya to look the way it does now. The same goes for Yemen, Syria, and Afghanistan, among others.

Why Iran Is Not Iraq

In Iran, the stakes are much higher than they were in any of those countries. Iran is home to the world’s seventeenth-largest population—bigger than Germany, France, South Korea, or South Africa. Its economy is far more powerful than Iraq’s, even under Western sanctions, and many times the size of the economies of Yemen, Libya, or Syria. Iran possesses the world’s third-largest reserves of oil, the second-largest reserves of natural gas, and the longest coastline on the critical Persian Gulf.

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Iran shares land borders with seven other countries and maritime borders with six more. For nearly half a century, it has been led by a regime focused on indoctrinating its people in a fundamentalist, overtly anti-Western ideology. Iran has immense potential and incredible latent economic and geopolitical power—and if those assets fall into the wrong hands, Iran could become a far greater threat to Israel or the US than it is today.

So, leaning fully into that cold, calculating persona: what do you do when there is a genuinely potent weapon, and you are not sure you can get your hands on it before your enemies do? Do you roll the dice and accept major risk for major reward? Or do you destroy that weapon, to make sure that if you cannot have it, nobody can?

That is the rationale that would, hypothetically, drive the US or Israel to push Iran into failed statehood. Maybe Iran does not become a better place—a free, wealthy, or even safe place—but it also loses the ability to unite, under any leader or government, and pursue goals in any direction. If Iran is divided, rendered chronically unstable and directionless, or even made to go to war with itself, that would constitute one of the greatest human tragedies of the twenty-first century. But it would also turn Iran into an afterthought: a thoroughly manageable threat whose misery is mostly self-contained, and whose fighting factions are too consumed with each other to pose an existential threat to anybody else.

The Human Cost: Migration, Weapons, and Extremism

Pause the thought experiment for a moment and let in some light, to appreciate the gravity of what is being described. If Iran were to devolve into a failed state, catastrophe would almost certainly follow.

Consider migration first. During the Syrian Civil War, roughly one-third of the pre-war population fled the country, and a similar proportion fled Libya during its two civil wars. Even in Ukraine, roughly fifteen percent of people have left since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.

In raw numbers, that meant about six to eight million people leaving Ukraine, a similar number leaving Syria, and about two million making their way out of Libya. Iran is a nation of roughly ninety-two million. If one-third of that population departed, more than thirty million people would stream across Iranian borders into Turkey, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond.

Even if the proportion is closer to Ukraine’s, that is an exodus of around fourteen million people, pouring into unstable nations like Iraq or Syria, or into Gulf states that simply lack the infrastructure to receive them.

Then there is the weaponry in circulation. Iran is not only a place where, under the right circumstances, a bad actor could get their hands on enriched uranium—it is a land occupied by many hundreds of thousands of soldiers and paramilitaries. Those fighting forces are already organized in a way that lets them fragment easily into smaller, self-contained units outside Tehran’s authority.

That is before considering the risk that Iran’s weapons could be stolen or bought by other groups. Those weapons could be turned against Iranians, but many could also be used in attacks across the region—especially the long-range drones already scattered across Iranian soil. Even granting that any remaining government could not mount a coordinated threat to adversaries abroad, there is a vast distance between that worst case and true peace.

The Gulf states cannot accommodate drones intermittently smashing into oil refineries, or striking ships as they pass through the Strait of Hormuz.

There are countless other risks—the specter of food and water shortages, the breakdown of the Iranian economy if the fuel and natural gas trade collapses—but one last problem makes the point clearly: extremism. This is already a nation led by a militant theocracy, one that has turned “Death to Israel” and “Death to America” into basic realities of everyday life. Hardliners within that ideology are often the same people with the greatest access to weapons, resources, capital, and vulnerable civilian communities. The Islamic Republic’s ideology, dominant as it may be inside Iran, is encircled by a region teeming with Islamic State franchises and other jihadist insurgent groups in practically every direction.

And as radicalizing as this war is already likely to be—pushing bitter hardliners into even more extreme stances—the risk grows further if the war ends in state collapse rather than a clear victory or defeat for the ruling regime. The recent civil wars across the Middle East have shown the pattern: many people take to the streets as freedom fighters in the early days, but ideological extremism and battlefield ruthlessness consistently produce brutally effective units that those freedom fighters eventually join. A long, multi-sided internal conflict, in a place like Iran where extreme ideologies are the starting point, has the potential to become an incubator for some exceptionally dark forms of radicalism.

The Benefits: Cold Incentives for Washington and Jerusalem

Nations in the United States or Israel’s position do not only have to consider the risks of allowing Iran to descend into failed statehood. They also have to weigh the benefits, to their own interests, that a failed Iranian state could bring. It must be emphasized that neither Washington nor Jerusalem is publicly pursuing an Iranian failed state as a wartime objective—and no American or Israeli leader with any political sense would ever admit to such a thing.

This is not an allegation that a failed Iranian state is some hidden goal for either country. The focus here is purely on incentives: are Trump and Netanyahu meaningfully incentivized to pursue state collapse in Tehran, and if so, what do those incentives look like?

Many of the potential benefits are geopolitical. For the United States, an Iranian collapse would be a major blow to both China—America’s arch-rival across the coming decades—and Russia. Remove the Iranian regime, and Washington strips both Moscow and Beijing of a partner.

Turn Iran into a perpetually unstable shadow of a proper country, and the US can force Russia and China to expend resources there, while denying them the chance to work with whatever Iranian state might come after. Given the way the conflict is going, and the Gulf states’ interest in ensuring a war like this cannot happen again, the US could even parlay the conflict into a bid to seize control of Iran’s energy industry. Washington clearly wants dominion over as much oil as it can grab—just look at America’s recent conduct in Venezuela.

Israel, meanwhile, can cut the head off the snake once and for all. Iranian proxy forces across the Middle East are weakened but not gone, and any Iranian successor state would probably wield influence with Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, and other non-state partners of the Islamic Republic. Leave Iran’s future up for debate, and Israel takes the risk that whatever government comes next could use the Axis of Resistance to advance its own goals—or even carry on the Islamic Republic’s mission. But if nobody leads Iran, then nobody can speak for Iran in dealings with the Axis of Resistance, and nobody can direct Iranian resources to prop those proxies up.

A failed Iran would pose problems for the rest of the world, but those are problems that could deliver additional benefit to Israel and the US. Israel is well-insulated from any version of Iran that lacks control of its old proxy forces and has no access to ballistic missiles or other long-range warfighting equipment. The US has even less to worry about.

While Iranian groups could cause chaos across the Middle East, and especially the Persian Gulf, that chaos could be an opportunity. The Gulf states have just received the wake-up call of a lifetime; they are going to build up their militaries, boost their air defenses, and treat any future version of Iran as a threat. That means Israel has a chance to increase its influence as Iran’s arch-rival, the United States has an opportunity to deepen its role as a security guarantor, and both get to sell weapons—lots, and lots, and lots of weapons.

Meanwhile, the suffering within Iran stays mostly contained, as the suffering in Syria or Yemen did.

The Signals: Reading Between the Lines

Again, a failed Iranian state is not a known objective for either the US or Israel. But there are subtle signals that both nations might ultimately come around to the idea.

For one thing, US and Israeli intelligence are actively coordinating with non-state Iranian groups—the Kurdish population in the northwest and, allegedly, the Baloch population in the southeast. Those are allies that could meaningfully challenge Iranian forces on the ground in some areas, stretching Iran thin and pushing it closer to capitulation. But armed cooperation with Kurdish or Baloch fighting factions would be unthinkable if the US and Israel were genuinely trying to avoid anything that could lead to a failed state.

Then there is the notable lack of an endgame. It is not clear what would cause the United States to declare victory and withdraw, and Israel appears focused on continuing the conflict for as long as Washington will tolerate. Mission creep, in operations like these, is a tale as old as the War on Terror.

With so little clarity on what a finished mission looks like, there are two ways to reach a failed Iranian state unintentionally. Option one: you bungle your way there, prosecuting an offensive without clear objectives or end conditions, and realize you have destroyed anything resembling a country only once it is too late. Option two: the US and Israel deliberately choose to keep fighting until there is no resistance left—but never get around to planning for the day after.

The Leaders: Trump, Netanyahu, and the Theories of Power

Both Trump and Netanyahu govern through theories of power that would, in principle, suggest they could find a failed state acceptable. Netanyahu’s goal is the obliteration of any force that could threaten Israel—and being the prime minister to preside over the destruction of Israel’s greatest enemy would be the ultimate accomplishment. Syria, Libya, and other Middle Eastern nations were opponents of Israel before they became failed states, and for Jerusalem, failed statehood in those places has proven quite useful at times.

Trump, meanwhile, clearly favors optics over outcomes, a rule he has proven again and again in both foreign affairs and domestic policy. Destruction through American military might equates, in that framework, to strength, security, and a victory for Trump and the MAGA movement. If Iran were reduced to a failed state on par with Yemen or even Somalia, his past behavior suggests he would try to let that failed state disappear into the background. Trump delivers victory, his victory satisfies what he perceives to be the wishes of Americans, and the public’s attention shifts elsewhere.

Finally, for the career military officers, the defense-intelligence pencil pushers, and everyone else who will have to deal with Iran for decades as administrations come and go, a chronically weakened Iran has its appeal. Failed states have a certain equilibrium to them: they are easy to infiltrate, surveil, and keep tabs on; there are always factions to manipulate or partner with; and when things spiral, the chaos typically shows itself inside that country’s own borders first, before it spreads across the globe. If Iran is taken over by ambitious, powerful new leaders, the nation has the economic and military power to become a serious global player, whatever its ambitions. But if Iran in 2029 is the same sort of nation that Syria was in 2019, then more powerful governments can simply monitor the situation and concentrate their attention elsewhere.

A Necessary Caveat

Before turning to what a collapse would actually look like, one point bears repeating. WarFronts genuinely does not want this to happen. An Iranian failed state would be nothing short of complete catastrophe, inflicting endless misery on nearly one hundred million Iranians, and on anyone else close enough, and unlucky enough, to feel its impact. Nor is the suggestion that Trump, Netanyahu, or their inner circles are hell-bent on bringing it about.

But the war in Iran is a Middle East intervention by the US and its allies, and if this intervention goes the way the United States is hoping, it will be the first to do so. These kinds of interventions are the place to expect the unexpected, and modern history in the Middle East has shown that instability is, unfortunately, a more likely outcome than an enduring victory by either side.

The Factions: What a Collapse Would Look Like

So a final question: if Iran really did collapse at the end of this conflict, what would that look like? It cannot be answered precisely; it is an outcome defined by instability and unpredictability. But it is possible to describe the factions that would stand a chance at seizing power in their own strongholds. Picture a map of control at the height of the Syrian Civil War, or a map of the situation in Myanmar today: many landholding fighting factions, all with a basic ability to defend themselves, and none with the force to conquer all the others.

First come the many Iranian separatist factions that would likely try to secure control in certain areas. Two have already been mentioned: Iran’s Kurdish population and its Baloch population. The Kurds are a highly organized, well-motivated faction, with the apparent support of both the United States and Israel, the backing of an entire regional diaspora, and paramilitaries that boast hundreds of thousands of fighters in total.

The Balochs, in Iran’s southeastern Sistan-Baluchistan region, have fought an insurgency for years on both sides of the Iran-Pakistan border. While Baloch separatists have mostly focused on Pakistan in recent years, they have all the local support and firepower they need to seize control of their homeland while the Iranian state breaks down.

Back in the northwest, just south of Iranian Kurdistan, lies the region of Khuzestan, home to a local Arab-majority population that has advocated separatism for over one hundred years. Finally, Iran is home to a large minority of ethnic Azeris, concentrated in the north near the Caspian Sea and in some of Iran’s biggest cities. Although they are a minority, Azeris have wielded power and influence in Iranian society for a very long time, and Azeri factions could certainly remain loyal to the regime or some post-collapse remnant. But if the regime falls apart, Azeris have all the firepower and coordination they need to secure a perimeter in the north and lock down their communities.

Then there is the high likelihood that even if the Islamic Republic collapsed, its collapse would be incomplete. In the early days of the current conflict, reports suggested Iranian leaders were considering contingency plans to retreat to a rump state—a relatively small portion of the country where they could concentrate enough firepower and soldiers to keep control. That rump state might settle on Azeri-majority territory, around key cities like Tehran, or around critical economic assets the Iranian state could not function without.

There is also the risk of warlord factions claiming territory of their own: factions from the Revolutionary Guard or Iranian intelligence that break off into splinter groups. Iranian forces have been preparing to decentralize command and carry out self-contained mini-offensives for decades. Now that those orders have been given, soldiers could very well choose to swear loyalty to their direct commanders in the event of regime collapse. With heavy armor, artillery, thousands of troops and paramilitaries, and entire geographic regions already under their command, it is not hard to see how those warlords could keep control.

The Opposition, the Interventionists, and the Disruptors

Then come the pro-democracy, pro-Western, pro-Shah, and other generally US- or Israel-friendly groups that could become meaningful players in a collapsed Iran. There is precedent for relatively democratic proto-states to take shape in situations like these—just take the Kurdish-led Rojava government in Syria, or Somalia’s separatist enclave, Somaliland. But there is also precedent for democracy-oriented groups to fracture, radicalize, and even turn on their own comrades-in-arms, as happened to the Free Syrian Army in the 2010s.

In Iran, there appear to be millions of people ready to take up arms against the ayatollahs—just look at Iran’s massive protests this January. But those forces are already at a firepower deficit, vastly outgunned by the regime, and prone to major internal strife. Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s last shah, seems to draw considerable support within the country.

There is also the MEK, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, an exiled group with a long history of assassinations and bombing attacks across Iran. They lack public support inside the country, but as past Middle Eastern civil wars have shown, they have the tactics and the ruthlessness to produce results faster. And that is to say nothing of the many other ways opposition manifests across Iran, outside any support for either Reza Pahlavi or the MEK.

Lastly, there are two more categories to consider: the interventionists and the disruptors. The interventionists are the countries surrounding Iran, whose leaders might be interested in carving out buffer zones, acting on long-dormant territorial claims, or simply slicing off a piece of Iran for themselves. Turkey, for example, seized a buffer zone in northern Syria under not-too-distant circumstances in 2019.

Azerbaijan’s leadership has recently signaled an interest in parts of northern Iran, including a major city. Pakistan, under certain conditions, could welcome the chance to act against Baloch insurgents on the Iranian side of the border. Even the United Arab Emirates lays claim to scattered islands in the Persian Gulf, currently recognized as Iranian territory.

Finally, there are the disruptors: jihadist groups like the Islamic State–Khorasan franchise, narcotrafficking syndicates recently pushed out of Syria and other nearby countries, and arms smugglers who would love to get their hands on loose Iranian weaponry.

As for how all those groups might interact in a post-regime Iran—it simply cannot be known, and that is the point. If it is allowed to happen, state collapse in Iran would quickly give way to complete chaos, with so many factions looking to carve something out for themselves that unifying the country in any direction would be impossible. There is still time to avoid a failed state in Iran.

But if the US and Israel insist on the destruction of the Islamic Republic, then it is on them to figure out what comes after. Nobody wants to see decades of nation-building in Iran, nobody wants a forever war or a US occupation, and for very good reason. But Washington, Jerusalem, and the entire world would be wise to remember: this situation could get a hell of a lot worse than that.

Presented by

Simon Whistler

Simon Whistler is one of YouTube's most prolific educational creators. WarFronts is his deep dive into military history and conflict analysis.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the shared minimum condition the US and Israel are likely to demand?

That Iran cannot be a threat once the war ends—unable to menace the Strait of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf, Israel, the United States, or the rest of the world. The two governments can argue over the best method, but any outcome where Iran’s threat is permanently neutralized is considered fundamentally more acceptable than any outcome where it is not.

Why would a failed Iranian state appeal to the powers prosecuting the war?

The appeal is strictly about incentives, not stated goals. A divided, directionless Iran loses the ability to unite under any leader and pursue goals in any direction. It becomes a manageable afterthought whose misery is largely self-contained, denies Russia and China a partner, opens the door to Western influence over Iran’s energy industry, and creates a lucrative arms market among newly alarmed Gulf states.

How large could the refugee crisis be if Iran collapsed?

Iran has roughly ninety-two million people. If one-third fled, as happened during the Syrian Civil War, more than thirty million would cross into Turkey, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond. Even at the lower rate seen in Ukraine—about fifteen percent—that is an exodus of around fourteen million people, flowing into already-unstable nations and Gulf states without the infrastructure to receive them.

Which factions would be positioned to seize power in a collapsed Iran?

Separatist groups—Kurds, Balochs, Khuzestan’s Arab-majority population, and ethnic Azeris—could secure regional strongholds. A regime remnant could retreat to a rump state. Warlord factions from the Revolutionary Guard or Iranian intelligence could claim territory. Pro-Western and pro-Shah opposition groups, figures like Reza Pahlavi, and the exiled MEK could vie for influence. Neighboring states and jihadist or criminal disruptors round out the picture.

What signals suggest the US and Israel might ultimately tolerate a collapse?

US and Israeli intelligence are reportedly coordinating with non-state Iranian groups, including the Kurds and, allegedly, the Baloch—cooperation that would be unthinkable if a failed state were being carefully avoided. There is also no clear endgame: it is unclear what would prompt a US withdrawal, and Israel appears intent on continuing the conflict for as long as Washington allows.