Trumping Iran

By: Dylan Cawley

All eyes are on Iran right now. Nobody wants a repeat of the failures from the War on Terror, but the temptation to “fix” Iran through force or grand operations is real; however, so is the memory of how those paths end. For four decades, Washington has viewed the Islamic Republic as a permanent fixture of regional instability, oscillating between strikes and sanctions (and at times diplomacy), producing a hostile but never decisively weakened Iran. The JCPOA under Obama sought behavioral moderation through sanction relief, which temporarily capped enrichment but underestimated Tehran’s ability to pocket concessions, inadvertently allowing the advancement of covert nuclear work. Biden’s mix of diplomacy and strikes did little to sustain this adverse stalemate. This self-perpetuating arrangement has failed to neutralize Iran, instead turning what could have been a natural regional stabilizer and potential ally into a source of endless U.S. entanglement.

Currently (as of 2026), Iran’s protests are entering their third month. The regime has survived perhaps the most lethal internal challenge since 1979, as this current wave of unrest has proved qualitatively different from those of 2009 or 2022 in scale. The clerical establishment no longer fields any meaningful deference beyond its shrinking core; Iranians born after the 1990s have no memory of the Iran-Iraq War, no nostalgia for the founding era, and no attachment to the regime. For them, the Islamic Republic is the inherited order, and a bad one at that. Social unrest is exacerbated by yet another currency collapse, as inflation has made basic foodstuffs unaffordable, mass youth unemployment, and a middle class whose savings have deteriorated over the past decade. For Iranians, the map of everyday life is shaped by the visible prosperity of neighboring states that have normalized relations with the West. Outside of Iran, Iran’s “axis of resistance” is fragmenting. Syria no longer fields a reliable forward theater for Russian and Iranian influence, Hezbollah has been steadily weakened by Israeli operations, the Popular Mobilization Forces are splintering, and Tehran’s ability to decisively shape crises in Gaza and the West Bank has diminished. Iran’s geopolitical isolation is increasing. However, this is not a “terminal phase” as the news purports it to be. Authoritarian regimes can endure mass killing and repression so long as no defection from leadership occurs. The only thing that could tip the scale is the United States—facing another narrow but real window to move beyond indefinite containment toward a strategy that accelerates the emergence of a new Iran.

Iran is not an Arab country in any civilizational sense. In 1501, Shah Ismail adopted Shiism—the foundation of the modern Islamic Republic—because it drew the sharpest distinction for Persia against Arab homogenization, which would later produce Pan-Arab and Ba’athist projects in Iraq and Syria. U.S. foreign policy has viewed these conflicts through a one-size-fits-all liberal universalist lens, assuming that democratization is the only path to stability and cooperation. This ignores Iran’s distinct ethno-historical context. Optimistically assuming civil unrest will magically produce a democratic Iran is unrealistic. The successor state to modern Iran will almost certainly remain illiberal and centralized, perhaps with restricted political pluralism and a strong executive authority (some talk about reinstating the Shah). This may be scary for some of us on the old right, but it is a reality we are going to have to accept. Think: The Strait of Hormuz could be a shared commercial artery rather than a permanent hostage of Iran. Saudi Arabia would lose ground in dictating oil prices due to Iranian competition. Jihad auxiliaries would face a credible eastern counterweight, and China would lose its most promising foothold on the western Gulf. For Washington, the gains would be immense: lower energy prices, a sharp reduction in state-sponsored terrorism, decreased need for vulnerable land bases and rotations, and a strategic bandwidth redirected toward our priority theater—Asia. None of these outcomes requires Iran to become a liberal democracy.

The alternative: sustaining calibrated pressure without a transition theory—is no longer defensible. Sanction evasion has grown into a sophisticated parallel financial system spanning China, Russia, India, Turkey, and the UAE. Doing nothing, increasing strikes to cause temporary setbacks, or doubling down on pressure without a credible path to transition amounts to betting on a spontaneous, stable, non-hostile post-regime outcome. History offers us little support for that bet. This is the most dangerous long-term trajectory for U.S. interests; Not chronic proxy skirmishes or even boots-on-the-ground war, but the accidental consolidation of Iran into a low-equilibrium, isolated fortress akin to North Korea that has normalized indigent autarky and acquired nukes at the price of regime continuity. Once that threshold is crossed (primarily the nuclear acquisition), no realistic off-ramp remains. We will have created a proxy that will likely be sustained by Russia or China. The strategic imperative is to prevent that fortress consolidation from becoming a probable future. The question is how.

The only viable path forward is one that aligns with core national interests. Securing energy independence for the United States, reducing forward deployments that tie down American troops and risk lives, and redirecting finite military and budgetary capacity toward defense against Chinese sustained proxies. Pressuring adversaries like Iran to negotiate from positions of genuine weakness would work, but only through calibrated, low-risk means that avoid nation-building quagmires or endless proxy entanglements that drain American blood and money without a return on investment. Democracy promotion is out of the question; it has proven a costly distraction that confuses ideological crusades with national interests. The Trump administration has proven itself to reject that Obama-era obsession with multilateral containment, which the newly released National Security Strategy explicitly calls out as having allowed Iran’s regional networks to persist.

This is contingent on executing the current NSS’s framework: targeted coercion designed to exploit Iran’s internal fractures and succession vulnerabilities, paired with explicit off-ramps tied to verifiable, concrete concessions on nuclear capacity, ballistic missile ranges, and proxy supply lines. This approach leverages military signaling—such as the repositioning of our naval assets in the Arabian Sea—to restore credible deterrence without any prelude to invasion. Iran is perhaps the biggest test of Trump’s strategic discipline. Success means extracting more predictable global energy markets, defeating state-sponsored threats to U.S. personnel, fewer vulnerable bases, and delivering on his campaign promise of side-stepping forever wars. Failure to stay within these bounds risks repeating the very entanglements the NSS was written to escape. We cannot turn another weakened adversary into a permanent drain on America.