Iran cannot be analysed using the same political categories as Pakistan or most modern states. The difference is not whether a regime is monarchical, clerical, or military. It is the age of the civilisation being governed. Pakistan is a young state. Its borders, institutions, and political language were assembled in the twentieth century. In such states, power fills a vacuum directly.
Power in Young States, Authority in Old Ones
A military dictatorship governs by force, hierarchy, and command. Its legitimacy is procedural and immediate: order, security, survival. This form works where political memory is thin and inherited meaning is limited. Pakistan’s army did not overthrow an old order. It stepped into an empty one. Iran is structured differently. It is a civilisational state that has existed in recognisable form for roughly three thousand years. Power there has never been exercised through force alone. Authority has always been tied to ideas that predate any single regime.
Monarchy as Civilisation, Not Administration
When Iran was ruled by kings, monarchy was not merely a system of governance. It was cosmology. Kingship was linked to justice, order, and civilisation itself, from the Achaemenids through the Pahlavis. When monarchy collapsed, it did not collapse as a technical system. It collapsed as a civilisational institution. That distinction matters. Administrative failures can be replaced easily. Civilisational failures leave residue. This is why nostalgia for monarchy in Iran does not translate into simple restoration politics. The memory persists, but the form cannot simply be reinstalled. Iran moved on, but it moved on within its own historical grammar.
Shi‘ism and the Islamic Republic
Shi‘ism explains why the Islamic Republic functions differently from a generic theocracy. Clerics did not invent legitimacy in 1979. They organised an inheritance that already existed. Shi‘ism had been woven into Iranian identity for centuries, shaping law, ritual, memory, and authority. The state did not create religion. It administered a civilisational framework that was already legible to society. This is why Iran cannot be ruled by raw coercion without losing authority. Force alone has never been enough. Power must feel historical to endure.
Why a Military Takeover Would Fail
This is where fantasies about a clean military takeover by the IRGC go wrong. A purely military regime would feel thin and temporary. Force might hold, but legitimacy would not. Iran has never been governed by command alone. Its systems have always required symbolic depth. When that depth disappears, the state destabilises. This is not a moral argument. It is a structural one. Military rule is not a neutral option that can be dropped into any society.
China and the Problem of Self-Rule
China clarifies the same point. The Chinese Communist Party is not democratic in a procedural sense, yet it governs through ideology, bureaucracy, and historical narrative. It claims continuity, national destiny, and collective order. Whether one accepts that claim is secondary. What matters is that it structures authority. Self-rule is not synonymous with elections. Ancient states require legitimacy that is intelligible to history.
India and Civilisational Continuity
India exposes the same analytical error. There is a persistent claim that India did not exist before modern nationalism, as if civilisation begins with a passport. This is untenable. The Indus Valley civilisation is among the oldest on earth, comparable to Egypt and Mesopotamia. India is its inheritor, just as Iran is the inheritor of ancient Persian worlds. This does not make India or Iran virtuous. It makes them continuous.
Why Pakistan Is Different
Continuity is power. It allows societies to absorb autocracy, experiment with democracy, survive collapse, and regenerate authority without disintegrating. There is something old to stitch consensus around. Pakistan does not have this advantage. That is not an insult. It is a structural description. Pakistan is a young nation with a strong ideology and a shallow historical state tradition. Its political struggle has always been to manufacture coherence quickly. The army filled that role. Ideology attempted to compensate for time.
History Is Not Evenly Distributed
Iran will resolve its crisis according to its long memory, not according to modern templates. India does the same. Pakistan is still writing its memory. History is not evenly distributed, and governance reflects that inequality. Recognising this is not elitism. It is realism.