Former senior IDF official: How the US and Israel can achieve Iranian regime change

An effective campaign against Tehran must combine sustained pressure with plans for an alternative government, argued Col. Doron Hadar.

By World Israel News Staff

A former senior Israeli military official has outlined a strategy through which the United States, with Israel’s support, could seek to bring down the Islamic regime in Iran and usher in a new era in the Middle East.

In an analysis published by the Hebrew-language outlet Ynet, Reserve Col. Doron Hadar, a former commander of the IDF’s Crisis Management and Negotiation Unit and a founding partner of crisis management firm Critical Impact, argued that removing the Iranian regime would require a long-term offensive targeting multiple sources of its power.

“If regime change is the objective, it requires an approach far broader than isolated strikes on nuclear facilities,” Hadar wrote. “It requires a sustained, multidimensional campaign.”

Hadar explained that the regime’s resilience depends on more than its military capabilities. The regime’s survival “rests not only on its military power but also on the ability of numerous components to continue functioning together, maintain discipline, transfer resources, preserve loyalty and project an image of control and stability to the public,” he wrote.

According to Hadar, only sustained and cumulative pressure on these interconnected elements could trigger a crisis severe enough to threaten the regime’s hold on power.

However, he cautioned that toppling the government would not “automatically produce a suitable alternative.”

He argued that “intensive diplomatic work” to establish a viable governing framework “must begin now,” alongside any campaign to weaken the regime, rather than waiting until after its collapse.

Hadar also stressed that the objective should not be to leave Iran obliterated, but to create conditions in which the country could rebuild its institutions and civil society under a new form of government.

“The goal is not to leave behind a devastated Iran,” he wrote. “The goal is to enable a different Iran to emerge.”