How does President Trump expect the Iran war to end? He’s been ambiguous about the answer, saying in an interview last Friday that he’ll know it “when I feel it in my bones.” Some of his advisers and supporters urge him to stop short of a change of regime in Tehran. But the logic of regime change is inexorable.
If the president wasn’t fully resolved to remove the ayatollahs, he should never have initiated so ambitious a military effort. Strikes on military targets alone won’t topple the regime. Instead, they must debilitate the institutions of state power, notably the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the basij militia. That would prove the regime’s inability to defend itself, signifying it can’t long survive and exacerbating divisions within a system already rocked by an accelerated succession crisis and the elimination of many top leaders. Iran’s opposition must help intensify regime collapse by working with disaffected officials, civil and military.
Mr. Trump is already failing in one key respect: Many Iranians feel betrayed, fearing mortal reprisals if the regime survives. Regime-change failure would also pose grave risks in three critical areas: oil, international terrorism and nuclear weapons.
Tehran last week closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which most Gulf-produced oil passes, causing turmoil in global markets,
increased oil prices and stock-market declines. The administration says the blockade took it by surprise.
In the war’s opening days, the U.S. and Israel rightly gave priority to eliminating Iran’s air defenses and its ballistic-missile retaliatory strike capability. But closing Hormuz was also an Iranian retaliatory option that warranted urgent attention. Iran’s mine-laying ships were destroyed late, 10 days into the operation, and attacks on drone and small-boat mine-laying efforts, reducing threats to oil tankers, are still under way, as the strikes on Kharg Island underline. A reported attack over the weekend on Bandar-e Jask, outside the strait, might have stopped Iranian oil exports there.
It would be untenable for the White House to declare victory while it remains unsafe to export Gulf oil. The ayatollahs now have palpable evidence of what closing the strait means for the global economy. If they remain in power, they will never forget it.
The lessons being learned in the Strait of Hormuz apply with even more force to Tehran’s support for international terrorism and its nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile programs. Should the regime survive, it will undoubtedly resume work on both fronts. On terrorism, if the U.S.-Israeli campaign is fostering a new generation of terrorists, as some anti-regime-change critics contend, those future threats will be far more menacing if a terrorist-sponsoring, oil-rich regime holds sway in Tehran.
Russia and China have undoubtedly provided Iran nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile assistance in years gone by. Moscow is reportedly supplying Tehran with both military intelligence and battlefield insights from its experience using Iran’s drones in combat against Ukraine. If regime change fails, the ayatollahs will seek increased cooperation on such matters—and more, such as missile defense. South Korean missile defenses now operational in the United Arab Emirates have doubtless attracted attention in both Iran and North Korea. Future destruction of Iran’s nuclear program will only be harder.
The president’s partner, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, knows the inexorable logic of regime change well. So do Iran’s ayatollahs, whose fanaticism justifies any sacrifice to ensure not military victory but regime survival, living to fight another day. And Mr. Trump has made this point himself. In Kentucky on March 11, he said: “We don’t want to go back every two years. . . . There will be some day when you don’t have me as president. . . . Perhaps you’ll have a weak, pathetic person like we’ve had in the past.”