— From a Late-Night Conversation About the Death of Iran’s Leader Khamenei

By Jane Sonnenschein · Drafted March 2, 2026 · Revised August 8, 2026

Early that evening, I casually said to Chris, “You know what? Something huge happened today.”

Iran’s religious leader, Khamenei, had been killed by a U.S. missile.

Chris hadn’t heard about it. He immediately opened his computer and started searching. Wikipedia had already updated its page. What was unusual was that, for once, we reached exactly the same conclusion almost immediately: the world might be heading into chaos again.

The sudden death of a religious leader with enormous influence in the Middle East was obviously about more than one person dying. A power structure that had maintained a certain balance for a long time had suddenly been torn open. The power vacuum left behind would not simply sit there quietly. It would bring struggles, anxiety, and a new contest over power and resources. We even found ourselves voicing the same slightly dramatic concern: was the world about to slide in an even more dangerous direction?

Oddly enough, agreeing on that made me feel a little calmer. At least at the beginning, we were looking at the situation from the same starting point.

The real disagreement emerged later.

That evening, Chris came over again. He had spent a long time reading online and looking through different sources. Then he told me quite seriously that maybe removing this man was not necessarily a bad thing. A dictator was gone, he said. Perhaps the Iranian people finally had a chance to choose a different future.

When he started talking about “freedom” and “democracy,” I suddenly felt a kind of tiredness that was hard to explain.

It wasn’t because I was against freedom, or because I thought people should not have the right to choose. What exhausted me was hearing that familiar, overly simple story once again—as if all the complexity of history could be compressed into a clean formula of cause and effect: overthrow one person, and a country will be reborn.

I rolled my eyes. Even I found my own reaction a little funny. Apparently, I had reached the point where hearing this kind of narrative immediately made me cautious.

Later, I realized that what I resisted was never “freedom” itself. It was the logic that treats “overthrowing a dictator” as the same thing as “automatic rebirth.” The story is simply too neat, almost like a math problem. Remove one person from the system, and history will naturally begin moving in a better direction.

But reality has never worked that way.

A country is never just one person. It is institutions, organizations, networks of interests, and a complicated machine made up of layer upon layer that has developed over time. A leader can be removed in an instant, but the networks of power around him, the way resources are distributed, religious influence, and factional relationships do not disappear with a single explosion. If anything, once the center suddenly vanishes, those tensions can become even sharper.

That is why tearing something down is often much easier than building something new in its place.

Outside intervention can happen very quickly. A missile may take only seconds. But rebuilding a society’s institutions, order, trust, and ability to organize itself may take decades, or even several generations.

Chris told me that the Iranian people finally had a chance to choose.

I asked him, “Choose what?”

Who would organize that choice? Who would lead what came next? Were there people capable of bringing scattered forces together again? Was there a clear political program? Was there an economic foundation strong enough to support a new system? If mature alternatives did not yet exist, could the “opportunity” we were talking about simply become the beginning of another, even more chaotic period?

Outside force can certainly destroy an old order. But it cannot grow a new skeleton for a society.

This is what I have always cared about: a society’s capacity to renew itself from within. Whether a society can regenerate from inside and whether it has the ability—or simply the opportunity—to remove an existing leader are two completely different questions.

Later, we also talked about freedom and democracy. When people discuss these ideas, there often seems to be an assumption in the background: once people have the right to vote, elections will naturally produce rational political choices.

But is it really that simple?

An electoral system does not automatically ensure that the right people end up in the right positions. How much can ordinary voters actually know about a candidate’s ability to govern? How does the media shape a public image? How does money influence communication? How do different narratives shape people’s judgment? Whether a complicated state can function steadily clearly depends on much more than the act of casting a vote.

Voting is a procedure. Governing is an ability.

There is nothing particularly romantic about saying this. It certainly does not sound as inspiring as “the people are finally free.” It may even feel a little discouraging. But when all the difficult questions are removed and only a few attractive slogans remain, discussion can very quickly turn into little more than emotion.

We talked deeply that night, for almost three hours altogether. As the conversation went on, I also began to notice that Chris had changed in certain ways.

In the past, when we talked about politics, he sometimes ended a discussion very quickly by saying things like, “You’ve been brainwashed.” This time, he would stop and think. He would say that perhaps the issue really was not that simple. He even brought up problems with the efficiency of Germany’s political system on his own, saying that if different political parties were genuinely willing to sit down and work together, perhaps some problems would not remain stuck for so long.

That was when I suddenly realized that the way we talked to each other was changing too.

In the past, political discussions between us had often felt like attempts to knock down each other’s positions. This time, we were talking about “structure.” We were trying to understand how a system actually works instead of rushing to decide who was right and who was wrong.

The change was subtle, but it mattered to me. Real maturity does not always mean that someone suddenly changes their political position. Sometimes it simply means becoming more capable of living with complexity and less eager to explain everything with one simple answer.

Of course, we were not calm and patient with each other the entire time. After talking for so long, there were still moments when both of us became visibly irritated.

I told him I was tired of hearing the story that once people were freed from dictatorship, freedom would naturally follow. He still believed that whatever the final outcome might be, people should at least have the right to choose.

Neither of us completely convinced the other.

But the conversation really was different this time.

In the past, whenever I criticized the United States, he would become visibly uncomfortable. There was a subtle defensiveness in him, almost as if criticizing America meant rejecting some part of who he was. He knew perfectly well that the United States had many problems and criticized them himself, but when those same criticisms came from me, he would still instinctively tense up.

This time, though, he kept trying to find the places where we actually agreed.

At one point he stopped and asked, “So we agree on these points, right?”

At other moments he simply said, “I agree with you on that.”

Later, it occurred to me that this tension between outside force and growth from within does not exist only in politics or at the level of a country. It exists in relationships too.

It is not very difficult to overpower someone in an argument. Finding a weakness in something the other person has said and winning a few exchanges is not especially hard either. What is much harder is for two people who genuinely see things differently to slowly find a place where they can still stand together.

Overturning someone’s position does not mean that understanding has been created between you, just as overthrowing a political system does not mean that a new order will naturally appear. Things that last are rarely created by one external victory. A system, a society, or even two people in a relationship usually need time to develop their own ability to adjust, repair, and grow.

By the end of that evening, I was no longer so eager to argue back, and Chris was no longer trying to arrive at a definite conclusion.

We simply acknowledged something that sounds obvious but is surprisingly easy to forget: the world is more complicated than slogans, institutions are more complicated than labels, and people themselves are far more complicated than we often imagine.

Perhaps the most important question is not simply who has been overthrown. It is whether, after the old structure falls, a society has the ability to grow new organizations, new forms of order, and a new balance from within.

And between two people, perhaps what matters most is not who finally manages to convince the other.

It is that after all those disagreements, we can still sit there together and keep talking.

This essay is also available in other languages:

Chinese version: 外力与内生：为什么“推翻”不等于“重生”？

German version: Äußere Kräfte und innere Erneuerung: Warum „Sturz“ nicht automatisch „Neuanfang“ bedeutet