The Iranian regime may be in its weakest position since the Islamic Revolution.
Iran’s so-called “Axis of Resistance” is in shambles. Hamas in Gaza is a shadow of its former self. The terrorist group’s benefactors in places like Qatar are paring back their tacit support for it and, by extension, the mullahs in Tehran. Hezbollah has been decapitated, its top echelons wiped out, and thousands of its fighters are incapacitated or dead. The prohibitive influence Tehran once wielded over the structure of the Lebanese government is diminished, perhaps to the point of negligibility. Similarly, Iraqi prime minister Mohammed al-Sudani recently backed away from the desire to see U.S. troops withdraw from his country, complicating the ambitions of the Iran-backed Shiite militias that exploited America’s post-2011 withdrawal.
Vladimir Putin, Tehran’s most capable accomplice, is so tied down with his expansionist war in Ukraine that he seems incapable of sustained power projection in the Middle East. In December, Iran’s vassal regime in Damascus imploded with spectacular speed, due in no small part to Iran’s denuded capacity to prop up its embattled ally. This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Iran’s seemingly intractable military presence in Syria has all but evaporated. “Syria’s new government,” the Journal added, “views Iran as a major threat and plans to work to keep Tehran from rebuilding its military presence in the country.”
On the home front, the Iranian regime faces a number of distinct but overlapping domestic crises. For weeks, Iran has been struggling with an unprecedented energy shortage, which the British journalist Maryam Sinaiee noted is “severely damaging some of the country’s critical industries which are now struggling to pay workers and keep businesses afloat.” That, in combination with a surge in the U.S. dollar exchange rate in Iran, has contributed to severe economic stagnation. In response to all this, the Iranian people are growing restless. There are reports of protests, labor strikes, and highway-blocking exercises in industrial cities nationwide.
The Iranian empire is in retreat, and the Islamist regime’s position at home — long sustained by its adventurism abroad — has not been so precarious in years. The Trump administration would be well advised to push on the Iranian edifice to the point of collapse, both by restoring the “maximum pressure” campaign over which it presided in the last decade and by supporting the kinetic military operations that are currently decimating the constellation of terrorist outfits Tehran cultivates.
The president-elect is on board with the first part of this approach. “He’s determined to reinstitute a maximum pressure strategy to bankrupt Iran as soon as possible,” a source close to the transition team told the Financial Times. That phrase, “maximum pressure,” describes a suite of policies implemented through a whole-of-government approach. Washington Institute for Near East Policy fellow Richard Nephew explains:
Iran sanctions enforcement matters were discussed at the senior-most levels of the government almost constantly and at a level of detail that went far beyond the routine. The United States prioritized the issue of sanctions enforcement at the UN, in other multilateral bodies such as the Financial Action Task Force, and in its diplomatic engagement around the world for years. The United States leveraged its economy heavily in the endeavor, especially its banking system, and was prepared to put at risk U.S. economic recovery after the Great Recession to target Iran’s export of oil even before the advent of the shale oil revolution.
But replicating that campaign will be more difficult today, Nephew warns. The goal of that effort was to forestall an Iranian nuclear breakout, and the Islamic Republic is far closer to a fissionable device today than it was in 2020. But the Trump administration’s objectives should not be limited to merely preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear bomb. The goal should be to extirpate that evil regime from the face of the Earth.
That, too, would entail an interagency process that utilizes all the administration’s resources. If it were a serious effort, it would compel the Trump administration to maximize non-kinetic pressure on Iran’s proxies. It would involve dispensing with Joe Biden’s foolish restrictions on the dispensation of weapons and battlefield tools like bulldozers to the Israeli government, which is busily doing the world a civilizational service by wiping out Iran’s proxies. And it would oblige Trump to double down on the military campaign over the skies of Yemen the president-elect will inherit from Joe Biden. Degrading the Houthis’ capacity to target commercial and Navy vessels should be an administration priority, if only by virtue of the damage that collection of Islamist pirates has already done to global commerce and America’s reputation as the guarantor of free maritime navigation. Even in the absence of that imperative, taking another Iranian chess piece off the geopolitical board further limits the regime’s ability to destabilize its region and the world.
Of course, Iran’s nuclear program looms large. Indeed, the threat posed by an Iranian breakout was apparently so acute that even the Biden administration’s senior officials seriously considered preemptive military action against Iran’s nuclear sites. That little detail will provide Trump with political cover should he feel compelled to pull the trigger on a similar operation. Indeed, they may have no choice. “Several Trump advisers privately concede Iran’s [nuclear] program is now so far along that the [“maximum pressure”] strategy might not be effective,” Axios’s Barak Ravid reported. “That makes a military option a real possibility.”
The prospects for such an operation’s success (which should not be overstated) notwithstanding, the objections to such an attack rest on the notion that Iran would retaliate against the West and that a conflict might induce solidarity between the regime and its oppressed people. Maybe. But perhaps not.
The achievable objectives in an armed conflict are limited to less-bad outcomes, and a rational Iranian government may conclude that it would not survive a direct confrontation with the United States. Indeed, if it lashed out following a targeted strike on its illicit nuclear program, Tehran would invite retaliation against its conventional military and governmental facilities. It’s unlikely that the Iranian people — at least, those in Iran’s urban power centers — would rally around the burnt-out carcass of the repressive apparatus against which they’re presently protesting.
The risks associated with an even more muscular “maximum pressure” campaign must be weighed against those associated with the continued existence of the locus of terror in the modern age. For almost a half-century, the Iranian regime has exported violence and Islamist ideology all the world over. “Iran uses terrorism as a tool of its statecraft,” Trump’s counterterrorism coordinator, Nathan Sales, told reporters. “It has no reservations about using that tool on any continent.” The Islamic Republic is not a fact of life with which we must come to terms.
The world will be a safer place in the absence of that regime, but only the Iranian people can be the authors of their liberation. If the Trump administration can imagine a world without that wicked regime, it might also find that the conditions to make such a happy prospect a reality are already present.
