In certain quarters of Washington, one imagines corks popping. The news flashes across screens: a coordinated American and Israeli strike has killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with senior commanders. The president posts a triumphant video in the small hours of the morning, urging the Iranian people to seize their moment. Commentators speak of a “decisive blow”, of history turning, of freedom’s imminent arrival in Tehran.

If only geopolitics were so obliging.

There is a recurring temptation in American statecraft — the belief that precision munitions can accomplish what patient politics cannot. Remove the tyrant. Decapitate the regime. Trust that civil society, long suppressed, will rise phoenix-like from the rubble and embrace liberal democracy with grateful tears.

It is a theory. It is also, more often than not, a fantasy.

International politics is not a morality play in which villains exit stage left and heroes stride in from the wings. It is an arena of power, fear, interest and inertia. When one smashes the central authority of a state — especially one of more than 90 million people with deep institutions, hardened security services and a powerful ideological core — it does not create a vacuum that angels rush to fill. It creates a vacuum that militias, warlords and the most ruthless actors scramble to dominate.

We have seen this scenario before.

In Iraq, the toppling of Saddam Hussein was supposed to inaugurate a democratic transformation of the Arab world. Instead, it unleashed sectarian carnage and paved the way for jihadist movements that metastasised across borders. In Libya, the removal of Muammar al-Gaddafi — wrapped in the rhetoric of humanitarian intervention — left a fractured state, rival governments and open-air slave........

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