Depending on who you ask, the U.S. war against Iran is either designed to knee-cap the country’s military capability or pave the way for the Iranian people to take over their own government. President Trump, whose presidential campaigns promised to end the kinds of regime-change wars that have tied down U.S. resources in the past, alternates between overthrowing the mullahs in Tehran and coercing what’s left of the Iranian leadership back to the negotiating table on his terms.
What we know for sure is that the Middle East is now in a regional war with no end in sight.
When Trump ordered the bombing of Iran’s three main nuclear facilities in June, the objective was clear and limited: degrade its ability to enrich uranium and lengthen the time Tehran needed to acquire a nuclear weapon. Today’s operations are far more comprehensive, with the target set encompassing everything from Iran’s political leadership and ballistic missile sites to air defense systems and the Iranian navy. Trump has refused to rule out U.S. troops on the ground and has said operations could last four to five weeks. The U.S. and Israel struck more than 2,000 targets in Iran during the first day of the mission. The death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s top decision-maker for the last 37 years, in a joint U.S.-Israeli strike reveals the extent to which both states are committed to grinding Iran down until one of two things happens: The regime surrenders to Trump’s demands or falls apart completely.
The Iranians, however, have some cards to play. While Tehran can’t compete with the United States or Israel in conventional terms, it has the ability to cause a degree of chaos in the region that could compel other states to lobby Trump to cut the war short.
If Iran’s response to last year’s American attack was symbolic and choreographed, its retaliation to date has been indiscriminate. High-rise buildings in Bahrain have been struck by Iranian drones. Missiles continue to rain down on Israel. Saudi Arabia’s state oil company, Aramco, suspended operations on March 2 after an oil-storage facility was hit. An Iranian drone attack also forced Qatar, one of the world’s largest producers of liquified natural gas, to shut down its biggest export facility. Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway in the Persian Gulf through which approximately one-fifth of the world’s oil passes, is being avoided by shipping companies as a precautionary measure.
The fundamental question hovering over all of these fast-moving developments: Is there a way out of this conflict?
The answer depends on what the Trump administration is after. Unfortunately, the White House has been quite muddled on this score, suggesting that Trump doesn’t know what he wants even as the war continues or that the internal debate in the lead-up to conflict was woefully deficient. Either scenario is a bad one.
If the objective of the war is a full-scale decapitation of the Iranian leadership and its replacement with a more compliant crop of officials, then Washington is likely to be disappointed by the outcome. Khamenei and several dozen Iranian military commanders may be gone, but the supreme leader had a succession plan that virtually guarantees that the regime will stand after his death. Sooner or later, a new supreme leader will be selected.
Unlike Venezuela after the capture of dictator Nicolás Maduro, Iran is more insulated from U.S. pressure tactics: It doesn’t share a hemisphere with the United States; its oil industry is less susceptible to the kinds of de facto embargoes the U.S. executed against Venezuela; and Iran’s political institutions are still functioning properly. Airpower alone is highly unlikely to produce regime collapse in Tehran — and even if it does, nobody can say with any confidence that its replacement will be any better for U.S. interests.
If the U.S. is merely trying to weaken Iran’s military power, this can certainly be done in the short term, as the Iranians are learning. But over the long haul, this would be the very definition of an unending mission. Just as it did after last summer’s 12-day war, Iran will inevitably rebuild its military capacity once the U.S. concludes its air campaign. This is particularly the case with respect to missiles, the component of the Iranian armed forces that can put U.S. troops and Israel at greatest risk. If he took this route, Trump would be signing the U.S. military up to periodic U.S. bombing operations in perpetuity, with all the associated costs and risks.
What about negotiations? If Trump is as interested in returning to diplomacy with Iran as he says he is, then talks could provide Washington and Tehran with an off-ramp from endless war. Yet this isn’t as straightforward as it seems. First, Trump’s objectives remain as maximalist today as they were before U.S. and Iranian negotiators sat down for talks last month: no Iranian enrichment, no more support to proxy groups in the region, capitulation on missiles and an otherwise 180-degree turn on Iran’s foreign policy. As long as those demands remain, the Iranians will have little reason to return to the table and might gamble on stringing out the war in the hope Washington’s Arab partners pressure Trump into a ceasefire.
There’s another serious obstacle to negotiations: Iran has been burned by Trump three times before. In 2018, Trump withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal even though Tehran was implementing its end of the bargain. In June, Trump agreed to support Israel’s war against Iran even though U.S. negotiators were scheduled to continue talks days later. A similar story happened this time around as well. Before Trump opted for force, his envoys were set to return to the table in a week. Therefore, the Iranians have reason to be highly skeptical of Trump’s entreaties.
“We negotiated with the United States twice in the past 12 months, and in both cases, they attacked us in the middle of negotiation, and that has become a very bitter experience for us,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told ABC News on Sunday.
Trump remains confident of victory. It would be nice if he clarified what victory means.
Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a syndicated foreign affairs columnist.
