From the Cauldron to the Fire

By Mo Fakhro

Periods of upheaval invite simple narratives. When people suffer, the instinctive conclusion is that any change must be better than the current state of affairs. History, however, is far less forgiving of such assumptions. Iran today sits in a cauldron of economic pressure, social repression, and political rigidity. Protest is an understandable response. Unfortunately, though, the path out of the cauldron matters as much as the desire to escape it. In many cases, the exit leads not to relief but to fire.

What is often missing from the discussion is that every likely outcome of an Iranian rupture carries consequences that may disappoint its supporters and destabilize its neighbors. If protests evolve into a full-scale revolution, the most immediate result is unlikely to be democracy or prosperity. It is more likely to be a prolonged period of instability.

Revolutions dismantle institutions faster than they replace them. Bureaucracies stall, currencies collapse, security fractures, and economic life contracts. In such conditions, people do what rational people always do: They leave. For a country of Iran’s size and sophistication, this would not be a trickle; it would be a mass migration.

The Gulf states would be the most natural destination. Proximity, economic opportunity, and existing Iranian communities make them an obvious refuge. This, unfortunately, is where the first unintended consequence emerges: instability in Iran does not remain inside Iran.

Large, rapid inflows of people strain housing, infrastructure, healthcare, education, and labor markets. More importantly, they import unresolved political divisions and social trauma. Gulf states, already managing delicate demographic and social balances, would inherit problems they did not create and cannot easily neutralize. Paradoxically, a revolutionary Iran could then harm the very countries most opposed to its current regime.

For some Iranians, nostalgia has filled the void left by despair. The idea of restoring the Shah, or a monarchical system, is framed as a return to order, modernity, and global respectability. Nostalgia, though, is selective. A return to the Shah risks taking Iran from the cauldron to the fire. The grievances that fueled the 1979 revolution did not emerge from nowhere. Authoritarianism, inequality, repression, and elite concentration of power were not accidents but structural.

Restoring a monarchy, even symbolically, may recreate the very dynamics that once made revolution inevitable. It may offer short-term stability, but at the cost of long-term legitimacy. A society that has revolted once can revolt again, especially if it feels that history is being imposed rather than chosen. For Iranians seeking dignity and agency, a backward leap may prove as suffocating as the present.

Another imagined outcome is a post-revolution Iran that aligns closely with the West and Israel: Economically open, diplomatically rehabilitated, and ideologically reoriented. On paper, this appears attractive to external observers. In practice, it introduces a different regional complication. The Arab Gulf states maintain carefully balanced relationships with the West. These partnerships are rooted in security, energy, and pragmatism, but perhaps not ideological alignment. A newly rebranded Iran, positioned as a strategic Western darling and ideological equal, as it was during the time of the last “last Shah”, could disrupt that balance.

It would reconfigure alliances, shift attention, and potentially dilute the Gulf’s strategic weight. More importantly, it could force Gulf states into uncomfortable recalibrations by having to navigate public opinion, regional legitimacy, and geopolitical competition simultaneously. In such a scenario, Iran’s return to the global system does not necessarily strengthen the region but rather reshuffles it unpredictably.

A less discussed but increasingly plausible scenario is an Iran that abandons sectarian hostility and repositions itself as a non-threatening regional actor toward Arab and Sunni states. At first glance, this appears to be the most benign outcome of all. Yet here too, unintended consequences lurk. Today, much of the Gulf’s internal cohesion in political, security, and even ideological terms is reinforced by the presence of a common adversary. Rivalries among Arab states, differences in governance models, and divergent national priorities have been partially muted by the overriding Iranian threat.

If that threat disappears, then the unifying logic fractures, and what resurfaces are the underlying differences they had forgotten 47 years ago. What comes to the surface are competing visions of regional leadership and divergent relationships with global powers. Latent political and ideological disagreements long subordinated to the larger rivalry would also come to the fore. History shows that alliances formed in opposition often struggle in peace. When the external pressure is removed, internal contradictions come to the surface. Cooperation gives way to recalibration, and unity gives way to competition. In this sense, an Iran at peace with its Arab neighbors could paradoxically weaken the very cohesion that hostility once enforced.

The common miscalculation across all scenarios is the belief that removing the current regime automatically improves outcomes. In reality, civil unrest exports instability, restoration risks repeating history, realignment reshapes alliances in ways that may harm neighbours, and reconciliation dissolves unifying threats and exposes fault lines. None of these paths is clean, none guarantees prosperity, and none ensures regional calm. The protesters need to look no further than their parents and grandparents to understand how an ideological revolution in 1979 led to consequences that appear to have worsened rather than improved their lives. This does not excuse repression, nor does it deny the legitimacy of popular frustration. It does, however, challenge the assumption that collapse equals progress.

Iran’s crisis is real, and so is the suffering of its people. History warns us, though, that escaping a cauldron without understanding what lies beyond often leads straight into fire. For Iranians, the danger is replacing one form of domination with another. For the Gulf, the danger is discovering that an adversary’s collapse creates more problems than its containment. The hardest truth, and the one policymakers least like to confront, is that stability, even flawed stability, often imposes fewer costs than disorder dressed up as liberation. For once a system breaks, the consequences rarely stop at its borders.