Iran is once again dominating international headlines. Some of the proposed strategies for weakening its rulers, however, seem to have been drawn from a map rather than from an understanding of the country. One scenario calls for supporting armed Kurdish, Baluchi or Azeri groups while Israel and the United States provide air power and intelligence. The hope is that pressure on Iran’s borders will loosen the Islamic Republic’s grip on power. It could have the opposite effect.

Iran’s rulers have lost a great deal of public support. A 2026 survey found that 47% of respondents favored regime change as a precondition for reform, while another 23% favored a structural transition away from the Islamic Republic. Just 9% identified with the principles of the 1979 revolution and the supreme leader. Those figures point to a substantial appetite for political change, though they do not imply agreement about who should govern next or how change should come about.

Opposition to the Islamic Republic should not be mistaken for opposition to Iran itself.

That distinction often disappears in discussions of fragmentation. Iran is a multilingual, multiethnic society. Kurds, Azeris, Baluchis, Arabs, Turkmen, Lurs and Persians have distinct languages, identities and political grievances. Minority regions have endured discrimination, economic neglect and harsh security policies. Any democratic future would have to confront those injustices through equal citizenship, cultural rights and meaningful decentralization. Dismissing them in the name of national unity would merely preserve the conditions that produced them.

But Iran is not a state created by the Sykes–Picot Agreement. That agreement concerned the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, and even its influence on today’s Middle Eastern borders is frequently overstated. Iran’s history of statehood runs much deeper. A sense of national belonging has survived foreign occupations, revolutions, dynastic upheavals and the eight-year war with Iraq. Grievances against the government can coexist with a fierce attachment to the country.

Nor does Iran resemble the neatly separated blocks of color on some ethnic maps. Its communities overlap, especially in large cities and mixed provinces. Migration, bilingualism, shared institutions and intermarriage have bound people together across generations. That does not erase local demands for autonomy or recognition. It does complicate the idea that Iran could be divided cleanly along ethnic lines.

Armed separatist organizations exist, particularly in Kurdish and Baluchi areas. Kurdish militias based in Iraq could challenge a weakened government along the frontier. In March, Reuters reported that Israel had bombed western Iran in support of Iranian Kurdish factions contemplating the seizure of border towns; it estimated their combined strength at 5,000 to 8,000 fighters. Seizing territory at the edge of Iran, though, is different from governing a large, urbanized and deeply interconnected country.

These organizations also cannot be assumed to speak for everyone in the communities they invoke. There is little reliable evidence that armed groups enjoy a broad mandate among Iran’s Kurds, let alone among its other minorities. Opposition movements differ in their aims, and demands for language rights, local control or an end to repression should not automatically be recast as demands for secession. Foreign backing can supply visibility and weapons. It cannot supply consent.

The Jewish–Kurdish conference held in London on September 6 and 7 shows why precision matters. It brought together scholars, activists and civil society figures to discuss historical ties and future cooperation. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar addressed it by video, praised Jewish–Kurdish relations and observed that the Kurds had not achieved political independence.

None of that proves an Israeli plan to create a “Greater Kurdistan.” Cultural and political cooperation between Jewish and Kurdish communities is not, in itself, evidence of a scheme to redraw borders. Yet the foreign minister’s remarks landed amid reports of Israeli contacts with Iranian Kurdish militants. In Iran and Turkey, where leaders are already alert to Kurdish mobilization, even a carefully framed expression of solidarity can acquire a sharper political meaning.

That perception matters because many Iranians are acutely sensitive to foreign attempts to splinter the country. Israel has addressed Persian, Arabic, Kurdish and Turkish audiences, presenting itself as an adversary of repressive governments and a friend of the region’s peoples. Some secular Iranian opponents of the Islamic Republic have responded favorably. The impression that Israel wants to dismember Iran could squander that goodwill and turn tentative sympathy into enduring suspicion.

It would also hand Tehran a familiar argument. The Islamic Republic has long portrayed democratic activists, journalists and minority rights campaigners as agents of foreign powers. An actual or perceived threat to Iran’s borders would let officials shift the discussion from political freedom to national survival. Even Iranians who despise the government might resist a foreign campaign they believe threatens their country.

The repercussions could reach far beyond Iran. Kurdish armed mobilization could draw in Turkey and factions in Iraqi Kurdistan. An effort to stir Iranian Azeris could entangle Azerbaijan and Turkey. A Baluchi conflict could spill across the Pakistani border. Instead of a decisive break with the Islamic Republic, the region could face competing armed authorities and a conflict whose participants have incompatible goals. Airstrikes can open a political vacuum; they cannot decide who fills it.

There is a nuclear danger, too. If Iran’s leaders conclude that foreign powers seek the destruction of the state, nuclear weapons could appear to them less like an ideological ambition than a last guarantee of survival. Such a calculation is neither inevitable nor defensible, but threatening the country’s territorial integrity could strengthen the voices making it. A strategy meant to contain Tehran might help drive precisely the outcome Israel and the United States most fear.

Israel and the United States have reasons to confront the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program, missiles, repression and regional armed networks. Encouraging ethnic conflict inside Iran carries a different set of consequences. It risks treating communities with legitimate grievances as instruments of somebody else’s war, while giving their rulers another pretext to discredit them. It could also alienate Iranians who want both a different government and an intact country.

The Islamic Republic may eventually fall or yield to another political system. Iran will outlive it. A strategy that asks Iranians to choose between freedom and the survival of their country may lead many to defend the latter, even under rulers they oppose. By threatening to defeat Iran’s government, Israel and the United States could give that government one more reason to survive.