Nine hundred years ago, the Iranian philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazali argued that tyranny can be preferable to state collapse and civil war. Or as he put it: “The tyranny of a sultan for a hundred years causes less damage than one year’s tyranny exerted by the subjects against each other.”
That intuition (surfaced in Robert D. Kaplan’s 2023 book “The Tragic Mind”) has new relevance amid the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran. When President Donald Trump initiated the war last weekend, he declared that “freedom for the people” — an end to the Islamic Republic’s 47-year tyranny — was his goal.
The instruments of Iran’s tyranny are under ruthless attack from two of the most powerful air forces in the world. This pummeling could lead to the organic emergence of a more decent government in the multiethnic country of 93 million. But if the state’s monopoly on force disintegrates, it could also invite the kind of tyranny “exerted by the subjects against each other” — that is, anarchy of the kind that followed U.S. interventions in Iraq and Libya.
Partly as a result of that worry, senior officials in the Trump administration have been walking back the political objective of “freedom” that the president initially described. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in particular keeps underlining the war’s “scoped” military purpose: The degradation or destruction of Iran’s missile capacity, nuclear program and navy. In his telling, the United States is targeting the Islamic Republic’s means of projecting power beyond its borders, not the prevailing form of government within them.
Under that conception of the war, Trump ought to be able to declare victory at the time of his choosing — even in the coming days, with the highest-value known military targets taken out by thousands of strikes from air and sea. That might be the best outcome, both for Trump politically (he can avoid the risk of sustained economic tumult heading into the midterms next fall) and for the U.S. strategically (it will have badly damaged a hostile military without mass American casualties or a quagmire).
But as is often the case with wars, the temptation to dig in is growing. On Friday, Trump demanded “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER” from the regime. The war’s political aims and its military aims can’t be entirely separated. After all, it was internal political events in Iran — the regime’s bloody repression of an uprising in January — that prompted Trump to send the U.S. armada to the Middle East in the first place.
What if Iranians answer Trump’s call again, only to again be put down? Without regime change, that’s all but certain. It’s easy to see how the Pentagon could decide that the introduction of special forces — in a limited way at first, of course — is necessary to give cover to a would-be new government and ensure that Trump’s objective is realized.
Michael Singh, who served on the National Security Council in the George W. Bush administration and is managing director of the Washington Institute think tank, describes how the war could yield diminishing returns over time. “This is a case where we might be able to achieve eighty percent of our objectives in relatively short order, but the remaining twenty percent could require ground forces and ten years,” he tells me in a message. One question is whether Trump can settle for 80 percent.
America’s regional allies have no incentive to ask the U.S. to stop. The Persian Gulf states are livid with Iran for responding to the U.S.-Israeli assault by attacking their territories with missiles and drones. They want that capability eliminated, but fully extinguishing Iran’s ability to fire at its neighbors might be a long-term project. During Israel’s response to the Oct. 7, 2023, attack, Hamas managed to keep up intermittent rocket fire for months. That’s despite tens of thousands of Israeli boots on the ground in Gaza — an area less than one four-thousandth of Iran’s geographic size.
Some in the Trump administration would presumably be satisfied with off-ramps in Iran short of the “total victory” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised in Gaza. But it’s getting harder to see what they would look like. After all, Iran came under attack not because it was strong, but because it was weak. That is the Darwinian way of the Middle East, but the problem with that war logic is that it contains no end point.
If the Islamic Republic was weak when the U.S. and Israel attacked it with overwhelming force a week ago, it’s even weaker now. With Iran’s air defenses largely destroyed and its missile supplies dwindling, American and Israeli pilots can hit targets in the country at lower risk. There will always be more drone factories to mop up and more punishment to inflict on the regime as long as it stands.
The longer the war goes on, then, the more ambitious the goals may become. Replacing the Islamist tyranny that rules Iran with a freer government would obviously be the best outcome for the U.S. and the Iranian people. But short of such regime change, the U.S. might soon need to decide whether it is willing to settle for a weakened tyranny in Tehran with a decimated military at its disposal. The prudent choice, the conservative choice, would be to take the past week’s gains and walk away.
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