Can the Trump administration do in Iran what it pulled off in Venezuela last month?
That was the tantalizing question posed by Paul Pillar, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies (with 28 years’ experience in the CIA before that), at a Thursday gathering in Washington, DC.
The occasion was a Center for the National Interest panel on what comes next for Iran, with experts Sina Azodi, director of Middle East Studies at George Washington University, and Alex Vatanka, Middle East Institute senior fellow, weighing in.
Pillar is a longtime critic of America’s foreign policy, and no one would mistake him for a MAGA supporter — but his question showed how President Trump has changed the conversation in Washington.
A week earlier, in the same room, I was shocked to hear an alumnus of the Clinton and Biden administrations — former State Department official James Rubin — likewise acknowledge how Trump has remade the foreign-policy game, in ways even his opponents sometimes have to admit are for the better.
Jacob Heilbrunn, the editor of The National Interest magazine, asked Rubin whether Trump’s successful capture of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro has cured America of the modern equivalent of “Vietnam syndrome” — a reluctance to use force born of the nation’s bitter experience with “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Trump took out Maduro seemingly with ease; could he do the same to Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei?
Vatanka had no doubt about one thing: The 86-year-old’s reign of terror is coming to an end.
The hard question is just how bloodily it ends — and how violent what comes next will be.
The Tehran-born, British-educated Vatanka stressed “regime defection” is critical.
As he tells it, even some of the Islamic Republic’s lower-level leaders recognize there’s no future with Khamenei or other hardliners.
The ayatollah’s anti-Americanism and hatred of Israel have been a failure — this regime has lived by slogans, and it’s only reaped misery for everyone, including the insiders.
They want to save their own skins, Vatanka contends, and they’ll betray the ayatollah and his inner circle if they get a chance.
Regime decapitation of the sort Trump carried out in Venezuela will only work, according to Vatanka, if America first sets the stage for elite fracture within Iran’s corridors of power, just as elements within Maduro’s socialist tyranny turned on the tyrant himself.
What America has to avoid, he cautions, is giving less-resolute officials in Iran a sense they have no way out and might as well fight to death.
Their hopes of survival are a powerful asset we can use against Khamenei, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the rest of the regime’s most murderous actors.
Vatanka sees a role for Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed shah, in driving the now-senile “revolutionary” Islamic regime out of power.
The overwhelming majority of Iranians — 70% in Vatanka’s estimation — have come of age since 1979. They have no harsh memories of the monarchy’s own brutalities; all the horrors they’ve endured have been perpetrated by the clerical regime, and if nothing else, Pahlavi is a symbol of some — any — alternative.
Every Iranian knows his name, and they know he represents something different — that might be enough, at least for a transitional leader.
The panel’s other speaker wasn’t buying it: Sina Azodi used to be a Pahlavi supporter, but he now feels the exiled heir to the shah is surrounded by untrustworthy people more interested in revenge than orderly transition, while Pahlavi himself wants “a reimposition from the top and not revolution from the bottom.”
“He is not a unifying factor,” Azodi says, and by threatening to hang anyone associated with the present regime, he only reinforces its cohesion.
Azodi warns if the regime feels utterly doomed, it’ll go berserk, lashing out at every state in the region with the ballistic missiles that are its only effective offensive capability.
The Gulf Cooperation Council — Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates working together for regional security and economic development — fears that more than anything, though Vatanka argues the GCC may be more motivated by the prospect of doing business with a stabilized Iran than by alarm at the chaos greater instability will produce.
The entire region’s advancement is being held up by Khamenei’s obsessive yet futile animus toward America and Israel.
So if the ayatollah goes — seen off by realists within the regime itself — will the problem be solved?
The panelists noted that Shi’a Islam doesn’t have to have a supreme cleric, let alone one with political power: The role Khamenei occupies is far less traditional than outsiders realize, a religious as well as political innovation by Khamenei’s predecessor, the founding ideologue of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini.
Much as Khamenei’s time is up, so too is the era of clerical dictatorship, whose appeal has evaporated even with regime insiders.
Iran has lost 47 years to this fanatical but feckless regime, and its open opponents aren’t the only ones who know it.
But the panelists saw little prospect of the Artesh, the army’s main body, stepping in to overthrow its political overlords, and the IRGC keeps the ayatollah in power.
If he were snatched away like Maduro — or bombed to smithereens like the Fordow reactor — the regime, like a hydra, would re-grow its head, unless the body is first split apart by defections.
A “Maduro option” is no simple fix for Iran.
Yet if Vatanka is right, more and more figures within the government itself think they’re better off taking their chances with Trump than sticking with Khamanei.
The president has already changed the way Washington sees the world; he’s steadily changing the way Tehran sees it, too.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.
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