By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The Right Way to Deploy Military Threats

When U.S. President Donald Trump returned to office for a second term, he inherited a historic opportunity to reshape the standoff between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran, then in its 46th year. Tehran entered 2025 weaker than at any point since the 1979 revolution. Its economy continued to suffer under the weight of U.S. sanctions and mismanagement. Its regional proxy network was significantly weakened by the fall of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and by Israel’s decisive campaign against Hezbollah and Hamas. Public resentment of the government was mounting. Washington, as a result, had real leverage; it could negotiate a new agreement to relax sanctions in exchange for limitations on Iran’s nuclear program, pursue regime change through sustained pressure and force, or simply keep Tehran constrained while prioritizing other challenges.

Instead, in a dizzying first year, Trump pursued all three strategies at once. He signaled a willingness to reach a deal with Tehran, only to give Israel the green light to start a war, which the United States joined. After striking Iran’s nuclear facilities at Natanz and Fordow last June, he declared Iran’s nuclear program “obliterated” and seemingly lost interest. Now Trump is mulling U.S. intervention in response to an unprecedented crackdown by the regime against protests he helped fuel, including raids by U.S. forces inside Iran. This frenetic approach has produced deeply contradictory results. Iran’s nuclear and missile programs have suffered meaningful setbacks, but visibility into what remains of the program is at an all-time low. The regime is more fragile than at any time in its history - but that fragility has coincided with grotesque repression that has killed thousands. Chaos, mass violence, and instability are at least as plausible as any orderly or positive transition of power. Meanwhile, the risk that the region will erupt in an intermittent war is the new status quo.

Whether Trump ultimately becomes the most consequential U.S. president for Iran since Jimmy Carter or merely an accelerant of instability will hinge on whether his administration can move beyond improvisation and develop a coherent strategy. A plan that carefully coordinates military restraint, economic pressure, and support for the opposition, all while keeping the door open to diplomatic solutions with Tehran, could yield a managed transition from the current regime to new leadership that benefits the Iranian people, the United States, and the Middle East. If the administration continues with its scattershot approach, however, the United States could find itself drawn into a prolonged military confrontation with Iran that only further destabilizes the country and causes yet more suffering for Iranians.

 

Man Without a Plan

Trump’s Iran policy over the past year unfolded in three distinct phases. The first, in early 2025, combined renewed pressure with exploratory diplomacy. Trump formally reinstated the “maximum pressure” economic sanctions campaign but did so halfheartedly, never stepping up sanctions enforcement compared with the final years of the Biden administration. In March, he sent a personal letter to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei proposing direct nuclear talks. Five rounds of negotiations followed. Both sides entered those talks seriously, but they never advanced beyond atmospherics. Despite public posturing from Washington and Tehran, neither was close to a deal. Trump was satisfied with bolstering his image as a dealmaker regardless of outcome, and Tehran used the talks to signal openness without committing to the concessions that a real agreement would require.

That diplomatic interlude ended abruptly in June, when Iran’s decades-long proxy war with Israel erupted into a direct 12-day conflict. Israel justified its preemptive strikes as necessary to halt Iran’s nuclear advances, but the deeper driver was Hamas’s October 7 attacks. After a brutal war in Gaza and a successful campaign to degrade Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as two limited exchanges with Iran itself in 2024, Israel concluded that Tehran’s deterrence was hollow. On June 13, Israel struck Iranian nuclear and military targets, killing senior commanders along with more than 900 civilians.

Iran responded with its largest missile barrage ever against Israel, killing roughly 40 civilians and destroying thousands of homes. Unlike previous presidents who restrained Israeli leaders from striking Iran, Trump had already given Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a green light to undertake strikes. On June 21, the Trump administration went one step further, entering the war directly by striking key nuclear targets with bunker-buster bombs that Israel did not possess. Three days later, the White House brokered a cease-fire. Trump claimed that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated.” The actual results of the strikes were a significant setback for Iran, but great uncertainty persists regarding the disposition of Iran’s uranium stockpile. Iran chose to formally end cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency in July, making its nuclear program much more opaque to foreign scrutiny.

From Trump’s perspective, the 12-day war seemed like a triumph. He declared the Iran problem solved and boasted of having brought peace to the Middle East. “The World, and the Middle East, are the real WINNERS! Both [Israel and Iran] will see tremendous LOVE, PEACE, AND PROSPERITY,” he declared on Truth Social. More quietly, the administration internalized a critical lesson: the United States could take extraordinary military action against Iran without being dragged into a prolonged war. Israel drew a different conclusion: that it could strike Iran with relative impunity. Despite suffering embarrassing and significant setbacks, the Iranian leadership did little to reform or change strategy in the wake of the strikes.

The final phase came in early 2026, as protests erupted across Iran following years of economic collapse and political repression. Trump inserted himself almost immediately, publicly warning Tehran against harming protesters and promising support. A day later, the United States stunned the world by capturing the Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro in a covert operation. The message to Iranians was unmistakable: regimes could fall - and Washington was willing to do its part.

U.S. President Donald Trump speaking in the Oval Office, Washington, D.C., January 2026

Protests surged. Then came the crackdown. Iranian state media acknowledges at least 5,000 deaths; according to the Human Rights Activist News Agency, the real toll is likely far higher. Just as he did in 2025, Trump has swung wildly between diplomacy and belligerence in his response. He floated new nuclear talks, imposed new tariffs on countries doing business with Iran, then called on Iranians to “KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!” over Truth Social as U.S. naval forces began to move toward the Gulf, promising that “HELP IS ON ITS WAY” despite having no plan to support or protect them. When protests peaked and security forces began killing civilians, the U.S. military was not yet properly positioned in the region to strike and to protect U.S. and partner interests from Iranian retaliatory strikes.

This year of turbulence has produced a series of contradictions. The likelihood of regime change or collapse in Iran is as high as it has been since 1979, but so is the likelihood of chaos, continued state violence, immense suffering, and instability. Iran is as militarily weak as it has been in a generation, but the likelihood of perpetual rounds of conflict between Israel and Iran, drawing in the United States, remains high. And even as the strikes greatly diminished Tehran’s nuclear program, the probability of a diplomatic breakthrough is low, and Iran could rebuild the program clandestinely.

US Aircraft Carriers Vulnerable to Iran Hypersonic Missiles, Trump Still to Decide on Attack

 

Fourth Time’s The Charm?

Trump’s missteps have made an already volatile situation even more chaotic and unpredictable. But he can still use this moment to pursue several long-standing U.S. goals in Iran: encouraging the Islamic Republic’s gradual (and increasingly inevitable) decline while avoiding the most violent and destabilizing outcomes, preventing Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, and averting perpetual rounds of direct conflict between Israel and Iran.

The first step should be restraint. Washington should not follow through on Trump’s threats to strike Iran in response to the crackdown on protesters. At this point, such strikes, coming weeks after the violence, would have less to do with toppling the regime than with assuaging hawkish critics of the administration at home. No one, including Trump, has any idea what effect strikes would have on the psyche of those resisting the regime and those upholding it. U.S. strikes could galvanize protesters and lead to defections among the security services necessary to foment a change in regime. But they could just as easily lead to a cycle of violence that could accelerate an uncontrolled descent into chaos. An indecisive outcome against a wounded, cornered regime increasingly willing to use violence against its population could replicate the conditions that led to the Syrian civil war, further destabilizing the country and the region.

But restraint does not mean total disengagement. The United States should intensify economic and diplomatic pressure to isolate the regime internationally and hasten its demise. After years of deliberation, for example, the European Union recently decided to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization, placing the organization alongside groups such as al-Qaeda. Europe’s move can serve as a model of the types of decisive action Washington should now rally allies to take. Tehran’s brutal repression of the protests has dramatically reduced the prospect of gradual reform through engagement with the regime. That possibility may have existed a decade ago, when many Iranian people were still clamoring for regime reform and celebrating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the 2015 nuclear deal. But after the first Trump administration’s withdrawal from the JCPOA, years of escalation, and the regime’s decision to slaughter its own people, that path has narrowed. The Islamic Republic is a pariah state, most likely in a death spiral.

All the same, if there is a place for diplomacy right now, Trump should take advantage of the opportunity to pursue a narrowly defined, transactional understanding with Tehran. In exchange for holding off on further strikes, he should demand that Iran allow International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors back into the country, restoring at least minimal visibility into what remains of the nuclear program.

Washington should also support the Iranian opposition carefully and patiently. Rather than a compliant government willing to accede to U.S. demands, the United States should be seeking an Iranian government that fundamentally alters Iranian foreign policy and respects the rights of its own people. The Trump administration should thus encourage the opposition to leave space for regime defections and reforms in a post-Khamenei era and promote unity across factions inside Iran and within the diaspora rather than privileging any single group or personality.

The United States must also play a stabilizing regional role. Trump can leverage his overwhelming popularity in Israel to restrain Netanyahu, making clear that the United States does not support a strike, while working as quickly as possible with Israel to restock its missile defense capabilities, which have still not been fully replenished from the June war. Washington should work with Israel and its Gulf partners to establish reliable communications channels with Tehran to prevent miscalculation, such as the near crisis, averted only by backchannel communications through Russia, sparked by Iran’s missile exercises last December.

A strategy of containment and pressure is far wiser - and far less likely to produce mass violence—than the improvisation of the past year. If pursued consistently, it offers the best chance of a managed leadership transition in Tehran rather than one born of regional war or internal collapse. If Trump can bring about such a transition, he may yet earn his self-bestowed title of “peacemaker in chief.”

 

 

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