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Last week, during his State of the Union address on Tuesday and again on Friday, just before launching Operation Epic Fury, Donald Trump laid out his case for attacking Iran.
The US president offered a lengthy bill of indictment against Iran’s Islamic Republic, stretching back to the 1979 revolution: the takeover of the American embassy in Tehran, support for terrorism, brutality towards its citizenry, and support for proxies that have killed Americans.
Above all, Trump stressed the peril the US and its allies would face were Iran to build nuclear bombs. Despite the absence of confirming intelligence, he claimed that it would soon possess a missile that could reach the American homeland.
Despite this litany of complaints and his characterization of Iran’s government as “evil”, Trump sent his envoys to Geneva to negotiate with Tehran about its nuclear program. After three rounds, Trump tired of diplomacy and blamed the Iranians for refusing to say the magic words: Iran will not become a nuclear weapons state. In fact, senior Iranian officials have done so time and again. “Iran will under no circumstances ever develop nuclear weapons,” Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi tweeted on 24 February.
Beyond that, Iran made significant concessions at the talks. Oman’s foreign minister, Badr Albusaidi, who mediated the Geneva talks, said that Iran agreed to reduce uranium enrichment to below 3.67% – the ceiling stipulated in the deal Tehran struck with the Obama administration in 2015 – and allow international nuclear inspectors back into the country with full monitoring powers. The Iranians went even further by agreeing not to accumulate and store any enriched uranium.
If Trump were smart, he would have pocketed these unprecedented concessions, claimed victory and bragged – justifiably – about squeezing a better deal out of Iran than Barack Obama had. Trump’s real motive, however, was far more ambitious: the Islamic Republic’s downfall.
In January, as the Iranian security forces violently suppressed nationwide demonstrations, Trump urged the Iranian people to “take over your institutions” and assured them that “help is on the way”. Last Friday, one hour after the United States and Israel began their second bombing campaign against Iran in less than a year, he again called on Iranians to “take over your government” once the military operations ended and to not squander what might be “your only chance for generations”. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who may be more determined than Trump to topple the Islamic Republic, made similar appeals.
In hindsight, the Trump administration’s nuclear talks with Iran look more like a check-the-box exercise than a genuine effort to resolve the nuclear problem. Even had the Iranian officials agreed to end all uranium enrichment, the war would probably have happened given the maximalist goal of Trump and Netanyahu. The talks may have been designed to demonstrate that Trump tried diplomacy before deciding on another war.
Realizing that what Trump really seeks is the destruction of the Islamic Republic, its leadership – now under fire – won’t go down without a fight to the finish, no matter the wider consequences. The killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s “supreme leader for the last 37 years”, has shown them that the Islamic Republic’s very existence hangs in the balance.
The war has already become regional: Iran is attacking American-aligned Arab states in the hope that they will pressure Trump to sign a ceasefire. In addition to firing missiles at Israel in retaliation, Iran has attacked Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, which host various US military facilities. As the war continues, Iran may escalate further by blocking the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supplies pass annually. The shock waves would be felt worldwide.
Trump and Netanyahu are betting that Iranians will rise up en masse, as they did in January, and put an end to clerical rule. But whenever Iranians take to the streets, Iran’s security forces crack down ferociously. If protesters swarm the streets once again, the government will be even more merciless: it understands that everything is now on the line.
Trump has called on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Iranian police to lay down their weapons in return for “complete immunity”, but they may instead stand by the regime. The mass demonstrations that have occurred in Iran over the years and the jubilation over Khamenei’s death in parts of Iran prove that many Iranians revile their government. Yet it would be a mistake to believe that it lacks any broad support and rules solely through fear and force.
Neither the United States nor Israel will deploy ground troops, but they can’t destroy the Iranian state with air and missile strikes alone. That will require sustained resistance on the ground. By calling for a mass revolt, they are, in effect, asking unarmed Iranians to serve as their ground troops.
If “regime change” does occur, it will not necessarily usher in stability. The American record in such undertakings offers little reassurance. In Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan, the collapse of the state didn’t produce stability, let alone democracy – but prolonged anarchy, intra-state violence, refugee flows, and the spread of terrorism across borders.
Iran is larger, more populous and more strategically situated than any of these countries. Its territory exceeds that of France, Germany and Spain combined. It sits astride vital energy corridors, and its 93 million people include diverse ethnic and political constituencies with competing visions of the country’s future. A sudden power vacuum in such a setting could produce turmoil.
If a war aimed at ousting the Islamic Republic produces disorder rather than order, the consequences – above all for Iranians – could eclipse the upheaval that followed earlier regime change wars. The instability may not remain confined within its borders; it could ripple across the Middle East and unsettle global energy markets.
Can anyone predict how this war will unfold? No. That includes American and Israeli policymakers. War, once unleashed, can produce all manner of unintended consequences, including some that prove uncontrollable and enduring.
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Rajan Menon is professor emeritus of international relations at Powell School, City University of New York, and senior research fellow at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. Daniel R DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a syndicated foreign affairs columnist at the Chicago Tribune.
