Maybe the answer to the gut question “So how does this end?” in Iran is simple: It doesn’t. Not for a long while.
There will probably be some sort of ceasefire, maybe soon. Tanker traffic will resume through the Strait of Hormuz. Bombing by U.S. B-52s and B-2s will stop. Iran and its proxies will refrain from drone attacks across the Persian Gulf. Tehran may haggle over ceasefire conditions, but that won’t matter much because its military power has mostly been destroyed — at least for now.
President Donald Trump will declare victory, as he always does, even when he loses. He did so Wednesday, saying “We’ve won,” adding the caveat, “we’ve got to finish the job.” But this may be a “win” like the ones that Israel has declared for decades after wars that pounded its adversaries in Gaza and Lebanon. These military victories reflected an overwhelming advantage in firepower, but they didn’t vanquish the enemy.
If there’s one lesson America and Israel should have learned in recent decades, it’s that military success doesn’t usually translate to political victory — in Gaza, Afghanistan or, now, Iran. The adversary keeps coming back. The Israelis have learned that they have to keep “mowing the grass,” the harsh phrase they use for the cycle of recurring violence. America, after avoiding an all-out clash with Iran for 47 years, may now be caught in a similar cycle.
The Iran war will be a tactical triumph in the short run, and all the encomiums about America’s unmatched military power will remain true. If the conflict ends tomorrow, Iran will have lost nearly all its nuclear facilities and scientists, most of its missiles and missile launchers, most of its weapons factories, most of its navy, and much of the command and control for its military, intelligence and security forces.
But the regime survives. It has taken America’s best punch, and it’s still standing. Tiers of senior military, intelligence and political leaders are dead, but they have been replaced by others. There’s no sign of a popular uprising. The cadres of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps hide among piles of rubble, but they haven’t been eliminated.
This will be the Islamic Republic 2.0. For the foreseeable future, it will be an IRGC state, working in a corrupt but pragmatic alliance with Iran’s business interests. The old theocracy had run out of gas. Ali Khamenei had no obvious successor as supreme leader after the death of Ebrahim Raisi, his preferred heir, in a 2024 helicopter crash. Khamenei’s son Mojtaba, chosen last week, lacks charisma and religious authority, but he will be driven by hatred and a desire for revenge. He has lost his father, wife and son in this war.
Perhaps a wily manipulator like the late former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who held the real power during much of the elder Khamenei’s reign, will emerge — and find a path to Trump. But that’s not the future desired by the thousands of brave protesters who were gunned down in January, back when Trump said he was coming to their rescue.
I truly wish that “regime change” were possible in Iran. This dreadful government has brought misery to its people and its neighbors and deserves to go. But that process is hard to imagine for hard-line intelligence experts in the United States and abroad who have been studying the mullahs for decades. “I don’t think we are going to break their will,” fears one senior Gulf official who passionately opposes the regime. “They will rebuild as long as they’re alive.”
Mohammad Marandi, an Iranian professor who speaks for the regime, posted a defiant video even as the bombs fell: “The Iranians will push this war until the United States and the West recognize that attacking Iran is not an option. Not now and not ever again. So, this war is not going to end any time soon unless the other side capitulates.”
Why does the regime keep fighting? Well, Iran’s leaders can read the financial pages, and they can chart the West’s vulnerability in a long war. They can also read the U.S. political calendar. Polls say this is an unpopular war, supported by less than half the country, and the midterm elections are coming. Iranians can even listen to Joe Rogan, the popular podcaster who’s usually a Trump fan, who said Tuesday the war was “crazy.”
But there’s a deeper reason for Iran’s persistence, and it’s a characteristic of war that the United States and Israel should have learned long ago. People who feel they have nothing left but their pride and dignity will keep fighting even when facing an overwhelming adversary.
This persistence is mysterious. Israeli generals must have wondered as they fired tons of ordnance into Gaza why Hamas didn’t just give up. Trump’s Iran negotiator Steve Witkoff said last month that Trump was “curious … why they haven’t capitulated” as America threatened to attack. An earlier generation asked the same question about the Viet Cong and North Vietnam.
Let’s recognize the obvious: A clear pattern in modern warfare is that “strategic” bombing designed to break the popular will usually backfires. People dig in, rather than surrender. They keep fighting in what seems a lost cause. Even under a miserable government like the Iranian regime, there is national pride, identity and resistance to control by foreigners.
Trump’s war planners seem to understand the long-term danger of poisoning public sentiment in Iran. They understand that most Iranians dislike the regime and want a better future. So they’re said to have cautioned Israel against striking targets like energy facilities or the power grid that could cripple the country for decades.
But for every sensible Pentagon recommendation, there’s a comment like this from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth: “We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.” Or Trump’s nonsensical suggestion that it was an Iranian Tomahawk missile that destroyed a girls’ school. Or a report that U.S. bombs have damaged precious Iranian cultural heritage sites. Such moments can breed abiding anger.
What comes next now that Trump has taken us over the waterfall? This war has so altered the old status quo that it’s hard to make predictions. But a few basics seem obvious.
Gulf states that were attacked by Iran will now have to protect themselves, one way or another. They can bolster their defenses against Iranian drones, or quietly reopen diplomatic channels to Tehran, or a mix of both. The United Arab Emirates, which has been hit by more missiles and drones than Israel, will likely erect a high-tech defense shield. Some vulnerable neighbors may lean toward Tehran. Oman, for example, has already sent congratulations to the new supreme leader.
The United States, having been a prime mover in the conflict, will be expected to restore freedom of navigation in the Gulf. But that would be wildly expensive, putting U.S. Central Command on a permanent war footing. Trump likes the show of American power, but he prefers that others pay the bills. Unfortunately, he has burned so much goodwill among allies with his tariffs and talk of seizing Greenland that he will have trouble organizing a common rescue plan.
A last, deadly consequence, I fear, could be a resurgence of terrorism from Iran and its sympathizers. That’s the shoe that hasn’t dropped so far. But it could be a supremely dangerous one. Middle East watchers with long memories recall Black September, the secret, deniable terror network created by the Palestine Liberation Organization after its crushing defeat in Jordan in 1970. Iranian terror networks are much deadlier than the PLO ever was.
The curse of covering the Middle East for more than 45 years is that you feel as if everything has happened before. Consider this quote from the memoir of Kermit Roosevelt, who organized the 1953 coup that brought the shah to power and arguably began the cycle of action and reaction the world is still experiencing.
“If we [the CIA] are ever going to try something like this again, we must be absolutely sure that [the Iranian] people and army want what we want. If not, you had better give the job to the Marines.” He was right, except about the Marines. A new Iran will be created someday, somehow, but only by the Iranian people. Let’s start thinking now how to help them.
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