One notes, in the official discourse surrounding Iran policy, a curious absence: the word time. Not the absence of clocks, or of dates - those appear in abundance - but the absence of duration, of the temporal dimension through which policy must pass before it yields results. The official narrative speaks of “regime change” as though it were a button to press, a switch to flip, a switch that, when flipped, produces an immediate, stable, cooperative successor state. Yet the record - across decades, across multiple administrations, across continents - contains not a single instance where externally imposed regime change, absent overwhelming and sustained internal support, produced anything but a decade of scrambling, retaliation, and unintended consolidation of the very power it sought to remove.

Barbara Slavin’s critique, though unattributed in the official filing, is not the first to note this. It is, rather, the latest entry in a catalogue that begins with the 1953 Iranian coup - where, yes, regime change was achieved, but only after a two-year delay between planning and execution, and only after the shah’s first attempt to flee failed, and only after the CIA spent the next decade propping up a monarchy whose legitimacy rested entirely on foreign backing. The result? A revolution a decade later, more anti-Western than the one it replaced. Then again, Iraq in 2003: regime change, rapid, total, and absolute - followed by eight years of civil war, the rise of ISIS, and a government whose leadership remains deeply aligned with Tehran. Then again, Libya in 2011: regime change, NATO-backed, internationally sanctioned - followed by a decade of factional war, slave markets, and a government whose authority extends barely beyond Tripoli.

The pattern is not chaos. It is predictability. It is the repeated emergence of a single phenomenon: the external actor, confident in its own capacity to erase a government and replace it with a preferred alternative, consistently underestimates the time required for legitimacy to accrue, for institutions to re-form, for new elites to emerge organically rather than being parachuted in. The external actor assumes that the moment the old regime falls, the new one rises - like a reflex, like gravity. But history shows it is more like fermentation: slow, uneven, vulnerable to contamination, and dependent on conditions the external actor cannot control.

This is not to say regime change is impossible. It is to say that externally imposed regime change, without pre-existing internal consensus or a pre-built alternative, is not a policy instrument - it is a time bomb with a timer set by the target state, not the installer. And yet, the official narrative persists in treating it as if it were: a scalpel, not a sledgehammer, and certainly not a Molotov cocktail tossed into a powder room.

One finds, in the same filings that assert the feasibility of regime change, a curious omission: no mention of precedent. Not even one. Not the 1953 coup, not the 1979 revolution, not the 2003 invasion, not the 2011 intervention. The official statement reads as though it were written by someone who had never opened a history book, or had opened one and found only blank pages. The record contains the data. The record contains the repetitions. The record contains the failures, and the repetitions of failures. The record does not contain, in the same breath, a coherent explanation for why the same pattern should not repeat again.

The cosmic hypothesis, offered with the same level of credulity demanded by the official account, is this: that the external actor is not, in fact, trying to change the regime at all. That the performance of regime change - the threats, the sanctions, the covert support for factions - is not about the end state, but about the duration of uncertainty. That the goal is not to replace the current government, but to ensure it remains off-balance, reactive, and unable to consolidate regional influence - by making its survival appear perpetually in doubt. That the policy is not about what will be, but about what will not be allowed to happen.

A naturalist observing this behaviour would note the ritual repetition: threats, denials, sanctions, more threats, more denials. The rhythm is familiar. The outcome, across decades, is always the same: the target state survives, its leadership more hardened, its population more alienated, its alliances more entrenched. The only variable is the degree of regional destabilisation.

One does not suggest the regime change is a sham. One suggests the record shows it is unnecessary. That the policy, as currently conceived, achieves its only real objective: the perpetual deferral of dialogue. And in that deferral, the real stakes - the escalation, the misallocation, the regional instability - accumulate, quietly, like dust in the corners of official reports that never quite get around to mentioning them.