The US Has Two Paths in Iran. Tehran’s Clerics Will Decide Both.

The US has bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities, and nobody, inside or outside the White House, can be sure how it will play out. That now depends entirely on the Iranian response and on what was destroyed at the deeply buried nuclear site at Fordow.

For there are two possible paths to American success in the war that Israel cornered President Donald Trump — a man who claimed near-magical powers for ending and preventing wars — into joining. Both will test assumptions about the Islamic Republic’s strength and messianic nature, because both are for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his generals to decide.

The clearest path to success is that Iran’s nuclear program has indeed been “obliterated” and would require years and fortunes to rebuild, neutralizing that toxic issue for the foreseeable future. In this scenario, Iran’s leaders may talk Armageddon and “everlasting” consequences for “The Great Satan,” but they choose any retaliation against US targets very carefully. Their goal would be to avoid a direct military escalation with the US that they might survive, but at enormous risk and cost. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth made clear on Sunday, during a press conference, that was the hope. He said there were "both public and private messages being directly delivered to the Iranians in multiple channels, giving them every opportunity to come to the table.”

Trump’s fiercest critics would have to concede that this would be a good outcome, and that his options in any case had become quite limited the day Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered his air force to take out Iran’s nuclear program. With Fordow still intact, Iran would remain in possession of the feedstocks and enrichment cascades needed to create weapons-grade fuel. A nuclear breakout would have been far more likely, for never would the case for owning a nuclear deterrent have been clearer.

A second path to victory — at least in the eyes of Netanyahu — would be through a bombing campaign so devastating and targeted in scope that it destabilizes Khamenei and results in a change of regime friendly to Israel and the West. The assumption is that the country would be taken over by the urban opposition, which despises the clerical elite that’s run Iran since the 1979 revolution, and has no interest in their country’s continued isolation.

With scenarios like these, no wonder so many opponents of American involvement are reaching back to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq for parallels. That, too, was justified by claims of an urgent nuclear threat and the promise of replacing an oppressive regime. The outcome was horrendous.

But for one important aspect, which I’ll come to, this isn’t like Iraq. Trump wasn’t itching for war with Iran, but was dragged into one by Israel. The likelihood of an Iraq-style ground invasion and occupation is approximately zero. The Iranian threat, including possession of an advanced nuclear program, wasn’t fabricated. Iran has enriched enough uranium to 60%, a level that has no conceivable civilian use, to make nine warheads. Not even Iran disputes this. The only question is what they intend to do with it and how quickly.

Also, unlike Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Iran does pose an active threat — above all to Israel — through the active organization, funding and arming of mainly proxy assaults, especially since the Hamas terrorist attack of Oct. 7, 2023. Iran isn’t only publicly committed to the eradication of the Jewish state, but has persistently taken action to further that goal. I’ll leave it to others to parse whether all that justifies Israel’s self-defense claims in terms of international law. Here’s what concerns me more:

First, the Iranian state has far more power to bring the region and global economy down in flames than Iraq ever did.

Second, we don’t yet know whether Fordow’s bunkered enrichment cascades were, in fact, destroyed. Trump said they were; the Iranians said they remain untouched and that, in any case, vital equipment and people had been removed. Both have ample cause to lie, but if the cascades weren’t destroyed, this is not yet over. There will be more airstrikes, more pressure for retaliation, more casualties and unintended consequences. Indeed, in terms of preventing an Iranian bomb, the outcome could well prove worse than if the US and Israel had done nothing at all.

Nor does the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency know where Iran’s stockpiles of enriched uranium are, because these were removed by Iran to avoid their being blown into the atmosphere by US and Israeli munitions. That’s good; there has to date been no radioactive contamination reported beyond immediate-impact areas. But it also means that the key feedstock for attempting to dash out a bomb is no longer under IAEA surveillance.

If the prospects for ensuring a non-nuclear Iran are far from certain, those for forcing a positive change of regime are still less so. What we know of this phenomenon is, first, that it works best when the authority under attack has lost the will to kill, or lacks control over the security services needed to carry out its orders. Second, that it’s best done organically, from within, and not through foreign military intervention. And finally, that success rests on the pre-existence of organized democratic opposition. None of these apply in Iran.

Far more likely is that any change would come from within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, where a decision might be taken to remove the 86-year-old supreme leader for having insisted on a policy that proved disastrous. Maintaining Iran as a threshold nuclear power provoked Israel, the US and their Gulf allies by developing a nuclear program so clearly angled toward an eventual military purpose, but without producing the arsenal that might have provided the country with a North Korea-style immunity from attack.

Would these be modernizing pragmatists who want to deescalate with the West? Or hard-liners determined to fix Khamenei’s error? Would they liberalize the economy that, under international sanctions, the IRGC came to dominate? Would they liberalize politically, in a country that is, in reality, one of the last land empires, with large and sometimes restive Turkic, Kurdish, Arab and Baluchi minorities? The potential for an Iraq, Libya or Syria-style chaos is real.

More likely is that the Islamic Republic survives, with or without new leadership, and that the question of Iran’s nuclear proliferation remains unresolved. That leaves what happens next primarily up to clerics and generals in Tehran. Trump could yet emerge the hero he so badly wants to be. And yet, perhaps ironically, he and Netanyahu now need to hope Khamenei and the younger IRGC commanders replacing those killed by Israeli strikes are more rational, and less messianically driven than they’ve been portrayed.