In September 1996, I visited Tehran for the first time. I stayed at the Homa Hotel, formerly a Sheraton. I wrote at the time that fixed above the door in the lobby was a sign that read, in English, “Down with U.S.A.” As I pondered that sign, I remember thinking something like: Wow, that’s not graffiti! That’s firmly attached. That won’t come down easily.
The late 1990s were a fleeting moment of openness in Iran, which is how I got a visa. I was hopeful that the obvious quest then of many of Iran’s young people to join the world economy would eventually triumph over its leaders who had fixed those words into the wall. It didn’t happen. The words were too deeply embedded.
Now, we’re more than a week into the war with Iran launched by President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, and the biggest question I have is this: What if the necessary is impossible? What if the transformation of Iran is so much more important than the war’s critics admit, but so much more difficult than the war’s designers understand?
Yes, nothing would improve the prospects of the people of Iran, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Gaza, Yemen and Israel more than removing the Islamic regime in Tehran.
But what if that regime is also so embedded — in mayoralties, schools, police stations, government jobs, the banking system, the military, neighborhood paramilitaries — that, despite its unpopularity with a majority of Iranians, it can’t be removed without plunging the entire Iranian landmass, about a sixth the size of the United States and home to 90 million people, into chaos? What if the only quick alternative to Iran’s Islamic autocracy is not democracy but disorder on an epic scale?
Nothing underscores the embeddedness of this regime more than the fact that Iran just replaced its supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, killed early in the war, with his son Mojtaba Khamenei, said to be another hard-liner.
Because this war took me and many others completely by surprise, I am feeling my way forward — trying to think through the best-case and worst-case scenarios with humility, because none of us have been here before.
As I do, events are telling me that Trump and Netanyahu should take their military achievement and call it a day, at least for now. Why?
First, it is obvious that Trump and Netanyahu started this war without any clear endgame in mind.
Netanyahu, I suspect, would probably be happy to turn Iran into another big Gaza and to just keep “mowing the grass,” or periodically putting down threats there, as he was so inclined to do in Gaza. As the Haaretz military analyst Amos Harel put it: “A few months ago, Netanyahu described Israel as a modern Sparta. But to preserve its militarist identity, a Sparta requires permanent military friction — of a kind that would also enable its ruler to remain in power — regardless of the price it exacts from the country.”
Keeping Israel at war with Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah enables Netanyahu to drag out his corruption trial and avoid a commission of inquiry for his failure to prevent Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion. (If you think that is too cynical, you don’t know Netanyahu.)
For his part, Trump has been all over the map when talking about the morning after in Iran — and saying truly ridiculous and often contradictory things that reveal a commander in chief who is just making it up as he goes along. One day it’s regime change, one day not; one day he doesn’t care about Iran’s future, the next day he will have a say in choosing the country’s next leader; one day he’s open to negotiations, the next day he is demanding “unconditional surrender.”
I thought the Middle East analyst Hussein Ibish summed up the Trump strategy in Iran concisely when he wrote: “It goes like this: The U.S. and Israel bomb and destroy assets. Then (fill in the blank) Iranians will secure (fill in the blank) political change that will achieve (fill in the blank) U.S. war aims.”
Would you invest in a company whose leader, without warning, embarked on a radically new business strategy and then, in the next week, described its goals in five different ways? That is a flashing red light.
That said, Trump and Netanyahu appear to have significantly knocked back Iran’s nuclear capabilities and its ability to project power through its navy, air force and missiles. That is good for the Iranian people, given how many have been killed by the regime controlling that power, and it is good for the region. The wise thing to do now is pause and see how this plays out on what I call “the morning after the morning after.”
That is when real politics happens. That is, if the United States and Israel declared that, having achieved most of their military objectives, they are now ready to halt their attacks — as long as Iran does as well — the surviving Iranian leadership would most certainly declare to the world and its people the morning after: “We showed them — we defied the combined power of the Great Satan and the Little Satan.”
But the morning after the morning after, I’d bet on an explosive debate and infighting among the ruling elite in Tehran. Many voices of the people, merchants and reformers in the regime will surely declare to Iran’s hard-liners: “Look at the disaster you have brought upon us. If this is a great victory by Iran, what does defeat look like? We have lost our savings, our economy, our environment, much of our military and the friendship of all our immediate neighbors. What future do we have?”
Just consider the infighting we are already seeing between Iran’s president and hard-line military factions over the wisdom of Iran attacking its Arab neighbors in hopes of getting them to pressure Washington to stop the war. Who knows what could emerge between the Iranian people and the regime, and within the regime, over time when the war stops and the true bill for Iran’s extreme behavior comes due.
To be sure, no one can guarantee that this morning-after-the-morning-after politics will end in a change in the regime or of the regime. But it has every bit as much a chance as just bombing Tehran and Beirut into rubble and hoping a popular uprising will emerge.
We are already seeing a desalination plant in Iran being bombed, and, in retaliation, Iran striking Bahrain’s desalination plant. If that trend spreads, people are going to run out of water very fast. The potential for Iran’s becoming an even bigger environmental disaster than the ayatollahs have already made it is very real; no one will be able to live there.
There was a haunting passage in a Times article on Monday about the mood in Tehran about the war.
“Peyman, a digital entrepreneur in Tehran, worries that the price has grown too high. Like many Iranians interviewed, he said he spent his days at home, unable to work, watching the destruction with increasing fear and unease. He wondered how locals could prevent even petty crime with police stations bombed out — let alone how any government could pick up running the country after so much had been destroyed.”
Peyman told The Times, “If we are going to live in Iran in the future, no matter what government we have, we still need institutions.”
Iran’s regime is a disgrace — a menace to its own people, to its neighbors and to a rules-based order as much as any other nation. I pray that it can pass into history soon, at a reasonable cost, and unlock the Iranian people’s enormous potential to contribute to humanity.
But endlessly bombing it, destroying more and more military and civilian infrastructure and just hoping that Iranians seeking democracy will come together — with barely any internet to communicate with, and where moving anywhere on the roads can be deadly dangerous — and topple this entrenched killer regime on their own … well, show me where that has ever happened in history.
My guess is that this regime will break only from the top, which will be a process that will start only after there is a cease-fire.
The best that the Trump-Netanyahu bombs-away strategy can do is start that process; just tilting Iran onto a better track where it is less of a threat to its own people and neighbors would be a significant achievement. The worst the strategy can do is so devastate Iran with endless aerial bombardments that it becomes ungovernable for anyone. That would be a disaster of incalculable proportions.
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