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, sanctions, and at times diplomacy, producing a hostile but never decisively weakened state. 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 and sustained this adverse stalemate. This self-perpetuating arrangement has failed to neutralize Iran, instead turning what could have been a natural regional stabilizer into a source of endless U.S. entanglement.
Currently (as of Febuary 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 quantitatively 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 Islamic regime. For them, the Islamic Republic is just 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 comparatively by the 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. However, this is not a “terminal phase” as the news purports it to be. History proves 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.
Iran is not an Arab country in any civilizational sense. Persian national identity predates Islam by more than a millennium. In 1501, Shah Ismail adopted Shiism — the foundation of the modern Islamic Republic — because it drew the sharpest distinction for Persia against Arab homogenization that would later produce anti-Western Pan-Arab and Ba’athist projects. U.S. foreign policy has viewed these conflicts through a one-size-fits-all liberal universalist lens for some time, assuming that democratization is the only path to stability and cooperation. Optimistically assuming civil unrest will magically produce a democratic Iran while ignoring this distinct ethno-historical context is unrealistic. Any successor state to modern Iran will almost certainly remain illiberal and centralized, perhaps with restricted political pluralism and a strong executive authority. The Strait of Hormuz could be a shared commercial artery rather than a permanent hostage of Iran, neighboring states with a monopoly on oil could lose ground in dictating oil prices due to Iranian competition, Jihad auxiliaries could 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. The most dangerous long-term trajectory for U.S. interests is not chronic proxy skirmishes or even boots on the ground war, but the accidental consolidation of Iran into a low-equilibrium, isolated fortress — a Persian variant of the North Korean model — that has normalized indigent autarky and acquired nukes at the price of regime continuity. Once that threshold is crossed, no realistic off-ramp remains. A nuclear-armed Iran operating from an ideologically hardened, externally isolated posture would permanently anchor American forward deployments in the Gulf, sustain state-sponsored terrorism, and provide China with its most strategically valuable foothold in the western Gulf littoral.
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 and risk American troops, and redirecting our 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.
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.