Iran unity foils West plans for regime change: Responsible Statecraft
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Neoconservative think tanks and European officials are promoting the Balkanization of Iran, a strategy reliant on ethnic separatism that risks destabilizing the region and underestimates Iranian nationalism.
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Mourners gather at Tehran's Enghelab Square for the funeral of Iranian generals, nuclear scientists, and their families killed in Israeli strikes, Iran, June 28, 2025. (AP)
Washington is now looking into dividing Iran, with neo-conservative think tanks openly promoting the Balkanization of Iran, a strategy that is bound to destabilize Iran and the region, according to Responsible Statecraft on Tuesday.
United States foreign policy has a troubling tendency to promote the fragmentation of nations it deems adversarial.
Now, neoconservative think tanks like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and their allies in the European Parliament are openly pushing for Iran's disintegration, a reckless strategy that would further destabilize the Middle East, trigger catastrophic humanitarian crises, and provoke fierce resistance not only from Iranians but also from US partners in the region.
Think tanks push for fragmentation based on ethnicity
Amid the war "Israel" waged on Iran in mid-June, FDD analyst Brenda Shaffer posited that Iran's ethnically diverse population structure presented an exploitable strategic weakness.
According to Responsible Statecraft, Shaffer advocated for the disintegration of Iran along ethnic divisions, drawing parallels to the breakup of Yugoslavia, while concentrating significant efforts on fostering separatist movements in Iranian Azerbaijan, home to Iran's largest ethnic minority group, the Azeris. However, she consistently failed to acknowledge her ties to the Azeri state oil company SOCAR.
Her position mirrors a recent Jerusalem Post editorial that, during the initial wave of triumphalism following "Israel's" strikes in this month's war on Iran, urged Trump to publicly endorse the dismemberment of Iran.
The editorial specifically advocated for forming a "Middle East coalition for Iran's partition" while proposing "security guarantees for Sunni, Kurdish and Balochi minority regions seeking independence," in addition to previously endorsing US and Israeli support for the secession of northwestern Iran's Azeri-majority areas referred to as "South Azerbaijan" from Iran.
Popular uprising or scenarios for regime change?
Meanwhile, a foreign affairs spokesperson representing a centrist liberal faction within the European Parliament organized a discussion forum titled "The Future of Iran," which while framed as an examination of potential pathways for what they termed a "successful" uprising against the current Iranian government, appeared to focus primarily on scenarios for regime change.
The panel’s composition featured only two Iranian speakers, both ethnic separatists from Azerbaijan and Ahwaz, revealing the organizer’s true agenda: promoting regime change.
Since unilaterally cutting ties with Iran’s official institutions in 2022, the European Parliament has become a platform for fringe exiled groups. These include monarchists, the controversial MEK (Mujahedin-e Khalq), and ethnic separatists, all of whom now operate with growing visibility in EU political spaces.
Delusions of division
What these think tanks and organizations forget, Responsible Statecraft highlighted, is that Iran is not a fragile country on the brink of collapse; it is a 90-million-strong country with a deep sense of historical and cultural identity.
While the proponents of the Balkanization of Iran focus on the ethnicities in Iran, they underestimate the unifying effect of Iranian nationalism on these diverse groups.
Shervin Malekzadeh, a scholar who recently wrote in the Los Angeles Times, observed that academic research overwhelmingly recognizes Iranian politics as fundamentally rooted in a profound, enduring national identity.
This identity transcends the country's internal ideological divides, which means Iran's political dynamics unfold within this unifying framework of nationalism, which has shaped all major factions, from monarchists to Islamists to leftists.
Foreign pressure only made Iran more united
Moreover, decades of foreign pressure, sanctions, covert ops, and war have only hardened Iran’s unity, making the separatist approach dangerously naive; this approach, pushed heavily by pro-"Israel" neocons, already failed in Iraq and Syria, leaving chaos instead of victory.
This approach further demonstrates its advocates’ glaring disregard for actual conditions, as seen with Shaffer, a leading proponent of Azerbaijani irredentism, who even applauded Israeli strikes on Tabriz, the cultural and economic center of Iranian Azerbaijan.
Beyond being morally reprehensible, this strategy fundamentally misreads Iran's domestic realities, with Shaffer and like-minded advocates operating under the flawed assumption that increased external pressure on Tehran would spark rebellions among Azeris and other minority groups against the central government.
Contrary to separatist expectations, "Israel's" recent attack produced the same rally-around-the-flag effect seen across Iran, demonstrating how deeply Iranian Azerbaijanis are woven into the national fabric, as evidenced by the fact that both the country's highest officials, Iranian Leader Sayyed Ali Khamenei and President Massoud Pezeshkian, are of Azeri heritage.
