Après moi, le déluge: the Iranian Conundrum

It's no secret that U.S. President Donald Trump is a competitive man and the world has grown used to his constant employment of hyperbole in describing his (real or perceived) achievements. This is especially true whenever he compares himself (always favorably) to his predecessors in the role.

In this vein, perhaps over eager to show that he can do what no American leader has done before, Trump has chosen conflict over diplomacy and essentially gone to war with Iran. The word essentially has to be employed because by dint of the Constitution only Congress can declare war, which is precisely why the president has been seeking to call it anything else -- an "excursion," for example. For it's part, the Islamic Republic, knowing that this fight is existentially about its survival, retaliated quickly with missile and drone attacks on Israel, U.S. bases in the Middle East, and targets in Gulf states and beyond.

This has now become a regional conflict with substantial global impact, disrupting oil and financial markets, supply chains, maritime commerce, and air travel. Threats to Americans (and other global citizenry caught in the line of fire) and the death toll in Iran mount by the hour. These growing risks were predictable long before the war became reality, which might help explain why no previous president had elected to send the United States down this perilous and fraught path.

It's not to say that American chief executives have not used war either as a tool of diplomacy or to exert their relevancy as they are more constrained in the domestic arena, but there are clear reasons why Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, both George Bushes, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden never sought to poke this particular bugbear: it's devilishly difficult to envision a viable endgame, much less the strategy by which it could be reached.

Thus, how this war will end remains uncertain. But when it does, the U.S. will have to face what comes next. To the extent that the Trump administration has considered plans for “the day after,” it seems to have made a series of overly optimistic assumptions about how the war might reshape Iran and the Middle East. For one, the Trump administration has insisted—including in Trump’s social media post on February 28th announcing the war—that a relentless degradation of Iranian leadership and military capabilities would weaken the regime enough that the Iranian people could rise up and “take over the government.” Even if that doesn’t ultimately happen, so goes the administration’s logic, Iran would be militarily defanged and so preoccupied with internal problems that it could no longer pose a plausible threat to the region or, more importantly, American interests. Taking the current Iranian regime out of the equation, Washington assumes, would remove one of the largest sources of regional instability and usher in a new Middle East more to the U.S.'s liking.

But at this juncture the outcome of this war will likely fall far short of these expectations. After the bombing ends, Iran and the region could look worse -- or at least not better -- than they did before the war. The fighting could create a power vacuum in Tehran, sour U.S. allies on their partnerships with Washington, and produce ripple effects on conflicts elsewhere in the world, all without removing sources of regional strife that have nothing to do with the regime in Iran. The risks increase the longer the war goes on, so Congress and U.S. allies must press for a cease-fire now if there is to be any hope of mitigating these day-after dangers.

Deja Vu All Over Again

Few in the United States (or indeed the world) would mourn the demise of an Iranian regime that was founded on a ferociously anti-American ideology and has long supported global terrorism. U.S.-Iranian hostility has been a constant since the Iranian Revolution in 1979; indeed, it has now lasted longer than the Cold War. But as much as Washington would like to see the end of the Islamic Republic, replacing the regime with a pro-American one through military force is unlikely to work. Iran is not Venezuela, with a figure like former Vice President (and now President) Delcy Rodríguez waiting in the wings to do Washington’s bidding. In the wake of the U.S's and Israel’s assassinations of Iran’s senior leadership, Trump acknowledged that “most of the people we had in mind [as potential new leaders] are dead.” Those who remain, faced with the extinction of their governing order, are unlikely to roll over and relinquish power willingly. Whether or not the new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is actually alive or not is irrelevant: the same gang who supported his father, is clearly still in power. In fact, a regime which feels cornered is even less likely to compromise and more than willing to engage in what they see as an apocalyptic battle between ideologies.

One option favored by some in Washington and the Iranian diaspora is to try to install a pro-American exile such as 'Crown Prince' Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last shah of Iran, whom the U.S. helped bring to power and was overthrown in the 1979 revolution. But the level of support Pahlavi has within Iran is unknown (especially given that he's been living in exile for many years); even Trump has expressed doubts about whether Iranians would accept his leadership. No other clear alternative has emerged from the divided Iranian opposition, many of whom are also exiled overseas, with no appreciable in-country support. What would more likely emerge is rule by a hardline faction of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) or a regime collapse that creates a political vacuum, dragging the country into a prolonged period of chaos and violence.

Neither scenario promises a less hostile and more pragmatic Iranian government. Conversely, what Trump seems to have got is a more entrenched, even more hardline enemy, with the vast U.S. military surprisingly unprepared to adapt towards the IRGC's use of asymmetrical warfare.

Iranian weakness will also not in itself resolve the local grievances and disputes fueling conflict across the Middle East. Arab states and Turkey play far more significant roles than Iran does in lingering conflicts in countries such as Libya and Sudan. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict began well before the emergence of the Islamic Republic, and the Iranian regime’s downfall would not repair the divides that fuel it. And in countries where Iran has played a dominant role through its sponsorship of proxies, which include militias in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen, these groups are concerned with their own survival as much as Iran’s. They have their own domestic political projects and sources of power that do not rely only on Tehran: the Houthis, for example, have built a substantially diffuse supply network and cultivated non-Iranian financing to support limited domestic arms production, and Hezbollah has developed its own capabilities to produce drones.

What Next?

This is not to say that taking Iran out of play doesn’t matter. Hezbollah would feel substantial pain from a change of leadership in Tehran, given how much Iran has invested in it as proxy. The fall of the longtime Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in late 2024 had already disrupted the flow of arms and funds from Iran to Hezbollah through Syria. A loss of Iranian support entirely, combined with the military pressure of a renewed Israeli offensive in Lebanon, would further strain Hezbollah’s resources, giving the Lebanese government an opportunity to diminish Hezbollah’s influence.

But in general, militancy in the region will not be eliminated even if Iran is ultimately defeated or neutralized. The anti-Israeli sentiment that often drives recruitment to groups such as Hezbollah has been inflamed by Israel’s military operations in Gaza and throughout the region, including its renewed bombing in Lebanon. This could help Hezbollah claw itself back towards survival and spark the formation of new militant groups hostile to Israel and the U.S. And the militant groups not backed by Iran—including Sunni extremist movements such as the Islamic State—will remain a challenge regardless of the outcome of this war.

Hope that the war may push countries in the region further into the American orbit or toward normalization with Israel, even if it is not pushing them toward Tehran, may prove unfounded. Iran has attacked nearly all its neighbors since the conflict began, aiming not only at U.S. military bases but also at critical oil and gas infrastructure, economic targets including Amazon data centers in the United Arab Emirates, and central urban areas and airports in cities such as Doha and Dubai. Tehran aims to exact costs on American partners in the hope that they will pressure Washington to end the war. This is a risky gambit that may only reinforce the antipathy many Arab states feel toward Iran after years of Iranian interference through proxy forces, and could set back the recent rapprochement between Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

But given their extensive economic ties and geographic proximity, Gulf states will still need to maintain some kind of relationship with Iran once this war eventually concludes. And their frustration with Iran does not automatically mean the United States will gain. The war may instead fuel popular resentment toward the U.S. / Israeli alliance in the region. Although Gulf states have no alternative to U.S. security guarantees, this conflict has underscored the danger of hosting American military forces on their soil—namely, that it puts these countries squarely in line of slight of a U.S.-Israeli-Iranian confrontation. American bases were meant to protect Gulf states from external attacks, not act as enticement. And if these countries believe that the United States did not sufficiently defend them from Iranian missile and drone strikes or that it favored Israel’s defense needs over theirs, resentment toward Washington could grow.

No Easy Answers

The war is likely to make regional publics more averse to normalization with Israel, too. Already there is a widespread perception that Trump has allowed Israel relative impunity to launch military attacks across the region, both near its borders and as far afield as Qatar, where it struck the Hamas leadership in Doha last September. Arab populations are still angry about the war in Gaza and threats of Israeli annexation of the West Bank. Israel’s current campaign in Lebanon is triggering another displacement crisis. The United States’ collaboration with Israel to launch this war will further damage both countries’ reputations, and Arab leaders in influential countries such as Saudi Arabia are highly attuned to public sentiment opposing normalization, whatever they may be saying different things behind closed doors.

The war may also have the unintended effect of imperiling some of the authoritarian leaders that the Americans count among their allies, which those who care about democracy and human rights may see as a silver lining. In Bahrain, where the ruling monarchy is Sunni but over half the population is Shiite, some people took to the streets to celebrate Iran’s recent attacks inside Bahrain targeting U.S. forces. They were expressing opposition to a government that, with Saudi support, has repressed them for years. There has been little space for protests of this kind—or for any calls for accountability and rule of law—since the suppression of the Arab Spring uprisings well over a decade ago. But the latest demonstrations may not be the end of public unrest in Bahrain or elsewhere.

The damaging global consequences of the war, meanwhile, are expanding beyond the immediate financial and commercial shocks. International laws and norms constraining the use of force had already been undermined in perception by U.S. and European in their immediately condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but not doing the same for the Israeli assault on Gaza. Now, the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran, launched without evidence of an imminent Iranian attack that would justify the use of force, undermines it further.

Both China and Russia, although nominally allies of Iran, may also benefit from the United States’ being tied down by this war. China may believe it has a window to ramp up pressure on Taiwan as Washington shifts its military capabilities from Asia to the Middle East—an upside that could outweigh Beijing’s concerns about the disruption to oil supplies from the Middle East on which China depends. This seems less likely though, in the wake of Xi Jinping’s ongoing purge of senior military officials as command and control would be severely degraded in any such adventure. Russia, for its part, would not want to see another regional ally overthrown after the fall of the Assad regime in Syria. But the war in Ukraine is Russia’s priority, and Iran’s war may give Moscow at least a temporary advantage in that fight. Already, the Svengali-like Putin has seized the opportunity to reach out to Trump offering to act as an ‘intermediary’ to Iran in an effort to de-escalate the war. Indeed, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has warned that the diversion of U.S. weapons to the Middle East could hurt Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against Russia.

Taking On Water

There is no silver bullet to bring about a more stable Middle East, a realization that Lawrence of Arabia must have reached more than a century ago when he participated in the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire. On the contrary, a war of choice that promises to free the region from an Iranian threat may have consequences that the United States did not intend and that ultimately damage its interests. Ridding the region of a brutal and destabilizing regime via a military intervention by an outside power that is also increasingly lawless, and destabilizing is hardly a recipe for long-term peace and stability.

Now that it has made the decision to start this war, however, the Trump administration must do what it can to mitigate the negative consequences. It will need to help Iran’s neighbors prepare to accept refugees to prevent the upheaval of the war from spiraling into a wider humanitarian crisis. It will also need to help countries in the region defend themselves from unpredictable attacks and reinforce infrastructure that has been impaired or destroyed by Iran’s salvos during the war.

At this point, aiming for anything more than damage control is unrealistic. Unfortunately, even as polls show that the majority of Americans oppose the war, too many of their leaders continue to harbor expectations about shaping the Middle East through air power alone. In reality, that power is diminished by another painful lesson of history that seems to keep being ignored: one can dominate an enemy's skies but boots on the ground are needed to secure regime change and ensure complete military victor.

Rather than help usher in a new Middle East, this war is likely to prolong the life of the old one, regardless of whether or not change comes to Iran. Without a clear endgame, unilaterally declaring ‘victory’ and disengaging will leave a mess that can only inevitably haunt both the US and the rest of the global community for some time to come.