The drumbeat of escalation against Iran has grown louder in Western capitals, from fresh sanctions rhetoric to renewed strike speculation. Beyond the headlines, a dangerous shift is occurring in the strategic thinking of policymakers. The old Neoconservative framework of “regime change”, which assumed one could swap a government while keeping the nation intact, is being shadowed by a far more perilous drift toward policies that risk state collapse.
Whether driven by the momentum of broad sanctions or a lack of viable alternatives, the current trajectory suggests that Western powers are risking a repetition of the “Libya Model” in Iran. A sober analysis of data, geography, and demographics indicates that this path would not lead to democracy, but to a geopolitical catastrophe that creates a security vacuum from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf.
The Libya Mirage vs. The Iranian Reality
The allure of this strategy rests on a kind of amnesia about the outcome of the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya. Sold as a humanitarian necessity, the removal of central authority did not produce a liberal democracy. Instead, it shattered the state’s monopoly on violence. Over a decade later, Libya remains a fractured territory where rival militias compete for control and human trafficking networks operate with relative impunity.
Attempting to replicate this outcome in Iran involves a profound misreading of scale. Iran is not Libya. It is a nation of nearly 90 million people, roughly thirteen times the population of Libya in 2011. Geographically, it sits atop the Strait of Hormuz, a critical artery through which a major share of globally traded oil passes each day.
In contrast to the isolated Gaddafi regime, a destabilized Iran would not implode neatly. It would likely erupt across borders. The collapse of central authority in Tehran could plausibly trigger large refugee flows toward Europe and create conditions conducive to extremism and narcotics trafficking. From a purely Realist perspective, the cost of coexisting with a difficult Iranian state is significantly lower than the cost of managing a major zone of ungoverned instability in the heart of Eurasia.
Sanctions and the Fragility Trap
Some advocates of “maximum pressure” argue that economic strangulation creates leverage for democratization. The economic data suggests a different outcome. While sanctions have undeniably devastated the Iranian economy, driving high and persistent inflation and eroding the national currency, they have failed to produce political liberalization.
In practice, these policies create what economists call a “fragility trap”. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned that geoeconomic fragmentation and the weaponization of trade are fracturing the global economy. In Iran, this dynamic systematically hollows out the middle class. By destroying the economic foundation of independent civil society, Western policy eliminates the very social stratum historically required for stable democratic transitions.
As citizens are pushed into a struggle for biological survival, facing documented obstacles to accessing some critical medicines and shrinking purchasing power, their capacity for organized political activism diminishes. They rarely become builders of stable institutions; survival takes over. Thus, the current policy does not weaken the grip of the state; it weakens the resilience of the society.
Hellbound and Down 