This market will resolve to “Yes” if, by December 31, 2027 at 11:59 PM Pacific Time (PT), the Islamic Republic of Iran is no longer the governing regime of Iran.
This includes scenarios in which the regime is overthrown, collapses, or otherwise ceases to govern, and a fundamentally different system replaces it. Qualifying scenarios may include:
Revolution
Civil war
Military coup
Voluntary abdication of power
Establishment of a new constitutional order, provisional government, or revolutionary authority
To qualify, there must be a broad consensus among credible international media (e.g. Reuters, AP, BBC, NYT) that the core institutions of the Islamic Republic—such as the Supreme Leader, Guardian Council, or IRGC under clerical control—have been dissolved, incapacitated, or replaced, and that the regime has lost sovereign authority over the majority of the population within Iran.
1,000NO at 20%. My read converges with market consensus on the binary, but locates the YES path more precisely than “regime is resilient.”
Three observations from working through how the regime’s elements couple:
1. The largest structural mode couples coercive operations to institutional artifacts — ministries, doctrines, the 1979 constitution. There is no Iranian state separable from the security apparatus. Reform talk treats them as separable; structurally they’re one mode.
2. Intelligence and legitimacy claim are coupled. Surveillance reports and self-description don’t move independently — which is why the regime can lose a Supreme Leader, watch the currency collapse 26-fold, see seven million displaced, and still produce identical talking points.
3. There’s exactly one conserved mode — intelligence-driven decisions. The regime cannot decide from anything other than its own surveillance apparatus without breaking the conservation. Toolkit identical across 2009, 2022, 2024-26.
Internal pressure excites these locks but doesn’t break them. Every meaningful change in modern Iran came from outside: 1953 coup, 1979 revolution from Paris exile, 1980-88 (Iraq invasion forced consolidation), 2024-26 (Israeli strikes). Every internal protest cycle — 1999, 2009, 2022, 2025-26 — contained.
This locates the YES path: external action targeting the intelligence apparatus directly (mass MOIS defection, comprehensive cyber penetration) or the IRGC parallel economy (financial isolation breaking lowest-tier enforcer pay). Khamenei’s death wasn’t enough because legitimacy isn’t load-bearing.
Specific falsifiers I’m watching:
• Constitutional changes (Velayat-e-faqih amended, parallel governance body declared) — structural reform, read wrong
• Documented Basij/MOIS pay arrears or mass desertions — conservation breaks
• New paramilitary outside IRGC/Basij/MOIS, formal martial law, AI-driven mass-arrest infrastructure — qualitative shift, read wrong
• Internal-protest-driven regime fall without external trigger — whole structural reading wrong
20% feels too high absent specific external escalation. I’d price ~10–12% on this exact question (Dec 31, 2027 horizon).