The current war between Israel, the United States (US), and their Gulf allies against Iran is being viewed primarily as a decisive effort to degrade Iran’s nuclear and missile capabilities. But as the conflict reshapes the country’s internal balance of power, there could be a deeper and potentially more consequential outcome.

This is according to Andre Pienaar, writing in The Common Sense last month.

Pienaar says that Iran is not a homogeneous nation-state but a multi-ethnic society in which Persians make up an estimated 50% to 55% of the population, with the remainder consisting of large minority groups including Azerbaijanis, Kurds, Arabs, and Balochs.

For decades, these groups have operated under a highly centralised political system enforced in part by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Tehran’s ideological shock troops. Pienaar says that this system has not only limited political dissent but also constrained cultural and linguistic expression across large parts of the country.

The current war has altered that equation. The strikes by the US and Israel, which targeted military infrastructure, missile systems, and command networks, hit thousands of targets in the opening phase of the campaign. The resulting degradation of Iran’s security apparatus has weakened the mechanisms through which Tehran has historically maintained control.

This has created what some analysts describe as a strategic opening. In regions such as Khuzestan in the southwest of the country, which contains much of Iran’s oil and gas reserves, and Kurdish areas along the western border, longstanding grievances over political exclusion and economic marginalisation are once again coming into focus.

The key question now is whether any post-conflict settlement will address those underlying tensions. A return to a reconstituted central authority without structural reform, Pienaar says, risks entrenching the conditions for future instability.

Pienaar argues for an Iran in which autonomy for the country’s various minority communities is guaranteed. He says that partition is not an option, and will create its own risks, including further destabilising the region.

The idea is not without precedent, says Pienaar. In Spain, a highly centralised state with deep historical tensions has been restructured to allow meaningful regional autonomy through its system of autonomous communities. While imperfect, it has shown that decentralisation can accommodate identity and grievance without triggering outright fragmentation. In Iraq, the Kurdistan Region offers a more fragile but still instructive example, where a federal arrangement has provided a degree of stability and self-rule in an otherwise volatile environment. These cases are not templates to be copied wholesale, but they demonstrate that alternative models are workable.

Applied to Iran, any credible autonomy framework would need to move beyond rhetoric and into institutional design. That would begin with constitutional recognition of minority languages, ensuring their use in education and public administration rather than suppressing them. It would require a rebalancing of fiscal power, particularly in resource-rich regions such as Khuzestan, so that revenues generated locally are shared in a way that reflects their origin, rather than being absorbed entirely by the central state.

Security would be equally central. A durable settlement would need to address the role of the IRGC, particularly units that have functioned as instruments of internal control. This implies some form of demobilisation or restructuring tied to regional accountability.

Finally, any such arrangement would need external backing. Not symbolic guarantees, but enforceable mechanisms, including monitoring and economic conditionality, to ensure that commitments made in a post-conflict settlement are sustained in practice.

Pienaar concludes by saying that a federal Iran built on genuine minority autonomy would be a fundamentally different state from today’s centralised Persian-Shia system. Power would be dispersed across regions, reshaping how decisions are made and limiting the dominance of a single national authority.

That shift would carry into foreign policy. A federal structure tends to slow and complicate external decision-making, as competing regional interests must be balanced. The result is a state less able to act with speed and cohesion beyond its borders.

Its strategic culture would become more fragmented and inward-focused. Political energy would be directed toward managing internal balances between regions, identities, and resources rather than projecting power outward.

In effect, Iran would move from a system geared toward regional influence to one preoccupied with maintaining internal stability.