The Question Trump Avoids: What to Do About the Islamic Republic?

The Pentagon has instructed US Central Command, CENTCOM, to complete preparations for a possible resumption of large-scale strikes against the Islamic Republic. According to Axios, Donald Trump has not yet made a final decision, but attacks on nuclear facilities, energy infrastructure and other strategic targets are under consideration. Other publications, including The Atlantic, have also reported preparations for military options, potentially before the US midterm elections.

Yet the central issue is neither the timing of an attack nor even the attack itself. What political outcome does the United States seek from another offensive?

If Washington’s principal objective remains to contain the Islamic Republic’s nuclear programme, that programme has already been severely damaged by strikes over the past two years—and completely destroyed, according to the US president’s own statements. The nuclear issue alone therefore no longer adequately explains the continuation of a war on this scale. Moreover, the war may have strengthened the opposite argument within the regime: had the Islamic Republic possessed nuclear weapons, the United States and Israel would not have been able to bomb its nuclear, military and logistical facilities, or strike its leadership, with such freedom.

A war intended to prevent the regime from acquiring nuclear weapons may therefore be perpetuating the very crisis it was supposed to resolve. It may even have given the most hardline factions within the ruling establishment a fresh incentive to pursue the bomb, whether or not they publicly acknowledge it.

What, then, do the United States and, following its lead, Israel intend to do? If their answer is to bomb the Islamic Republic again whenever it rebuilds its nuclear or missile capabilities, talk of resolving the crisis becomes hollow. That would mean becoming trapped in a dangerous logic that a regime such as this—one that generates crises and depends on them—actively seeks.

The real question is therefore no longer simply what to do about centrifuges or enriched uranium stockpiles. It is what the United States and other Western powers intend to do about the Islamic Republic itself.

Even without nuclear weapons, the regime has spent nearly half a century building a network of regional armed groups, turning the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea into arenas of confrontation, and using the Strait of Hormuz as an instrument of pressure. Despite sustaining severe blows, it remains capable of imposing substantial costs on the United States, Europe and the global economy.

The Trump administration appears to want to weaken the regime enough to force it to yield, but not enough to bring about its collapse. Such a precise boundary may not exist in practice. This ambiguity seems rooted in Washington’s fear, shared by other Western governments, of the unpredictable and potentially uncontrollable consequences of the Islamic Republic’s fall. But apprehension cannot substitute for a strategy or conceal its absence.

If Washington believes that the same regime, weakened and bound by an agreement, can become less dangerous, it must explain why and identify the guarantees on which that expectation rests. If, instead, it regards the Islamic Republic’s own structure as a permanent source of crises, it cannot simultaneously make the regime’s survival a premise of its policy.

That is what makes CENTCOM’s preparations significant. The question is not simply when another attack might begin, but what that attack is supposed to do to the Islamic Republic, and where it is supposed to leave it. Without a clear political answer, every offensive or military success may be no more than a prelude to further crises.

Ultimately, however, the Islamic Republic’s fate is not for Trump, Israel or any other foreign power to determine. That task belongs to the Iranian people. The question is how Iranians can, this time, end the regime at the lowest possible cost and use the present opportunity to build a different political order.