In recent weeks, untold numbers of ordinary Iranians have taken to the streets of their towns and cities to protest the repression and incompetent economic management of the country’s ruling theocratic regime. The regime itself appears intent on slaughtering its way to survival, murdering thousands of ordinary Iranians in what has become one of the bloodiest domestic crackdowns the world has seen in decades. Supposed moderates have closed ranks behind the regime, and cracks have yet to appear in the regime itself or among security services like the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). While its immediate fate remains uncertain, the regime’s long-term prognosis appears terminal: too much popular discontent with a regime too ideologically rigid and corrupt to face (much less solve) Iran’s severe economic problems.
Even if the Iranian people topple the present regime and replace it with a more liberal and democratic one that reflects the actual aspirations of the Iranian people, that new government may not see eye to eye with the United States when it comes to regional and global politics. But it would lack the current regime’s ideological zealotry and would probably not maintain Iranian support for terrorist and militant groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis that sow chaos and destruction across the Middle East and the rest of the world.
For his part, President Trump threatened military action against Iran if it continues its crackdown — though it’s not clear what the use of force would actually achieve. Destroying some regime security services facilities — say, a few IRGC barracks — probably would not do much to stop the regime’s current killing spree; this is, after all, an existential question for the regime from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on down. Moreover, an American-led air campaign seems just as likely to disrupt protests as hamper the regime’s repression: many ordinary Iranians would understandably head for cover to avoid incoming missiles and bombs, while the regime would use such strikes to attack protestors as tools of foreign powers and pose as the defenders of Iranian sovereignty. Even if air strikes precipitated the fall of the present regime, moreover, it’s hard to believe that a new Iranian government that rose to power in the wake of American military action would prove entirely stable or legitimate even in the short run.
Nor, for whatever it’s worth, do America’s regional partners — Israel and Egypt as well as Gulf monarchies Oman, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia — want the United States to take military action against Iran. Most Americans agree, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll that finds some 70% of registered voters opposed to American military intervention in Iran.
Fortunately, the United States does have smarter and potentially more effective policy options beyond the use of military force to support Iran’s protestors: cyber operations could disrupt the regime and its security services as they continue their murderous crackdown on the Iranian people, making coordination between elements of the security services more difficult and giving protestors more room for maneuver against them. It could also deny the regime the ability to censor and jam communication with the outside world, allowing Iranians to get their story out without regime interference. Functional American public diplomacy and support for civil society groups could also have proven useful in Iran today had not the Trump administration made them an early target of its lawless attack on the federal government; indeed, Trump slashed funding for initiatives intended to help dissidents and protestors circumvent internet shutdowns of the sort imposed by Iran’s regime.
It would also be useful for the United States to coordinate with its allies and partners in the European Union, bringing additional pressure to bear on the regime from governments that historically have had more avenues for engagement with Tehran. But President Trump’s insane impulse to seize Greenland by whatever means necessary has created a rift with America’s European allies that only consumes time, attention, and resources that could’ve been devoted to real problems — not just the Iranian uprising, but support for Ukraine in its ongoing fight against Russian aggression. Instead, America and its European allies find themselves in a wholly unnecessary crisis of Trump’s own making.
What’s more, the United States could offer carrots in the form of sanctions relief that could both buoy protestors and create rifts within the regime itself. Ironically enough, Trump himself has precedent here: he lifted sanctions on the new post-Assad government in Syria last year, and could make a similar pledge to do so in Iran if the regime changes there. And if Iranians were to, in fact, change their regime, it would certainly be helpful if the United States had some sort of foreign assistance agency to help any new Iranian government establish itself and take root — but with the destruction of USAID, no such agency exists.
But President Trump and his administration appear more interested in military action against Iran for its own sake, only loosely tethered at best to any political or strategic objectives — to say nothing of an actual sense of how the use of force might help achieve them. They seem to believe their earlier uses of military force — against Iran’s nuclear facilities last June, against small boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, and most recently against Venezuela — have been wholly unqualified and unblemished successes, leading Trump and his administration to level military threats not only against Iran but Colombia, Mexico, and Greenland as well.
There’s a word for this sort of overconfidence: hubris. And hubris inevitably leads to nemesis: downfall and ruination.
