Maybe the answer to the gut question “So how does this end?” in Iran is simple: It doesn’t. Not for a long while.
Iran War
There will probably be some sort of ceasefire, maybe soon. Tanker traffic will resume through the Strait of Hormuz. Bombing by U.S. B-52s and B-2s will stop. Iran and its proxies will refrain from drone attacks across the Persian Gulf. Tehran may haggle over ceasefire conditions, but that won’t matter much because its military power has mostly been destroyed—at least for now.
President Donald Trump will declare victory, as he always does, even when he loses. He did so Wednesday, saying “We’ve won,” adding the caveat, “we’ve got to finish the job.” But this may be a “win” like the ones that Israel has declared for decades after wars that pounded its adversaries in Gaza and Lebanon. These military victories reflected an overwhelming advantage in firepower, but they didn’t vanquish the enemy.
If there’s one lesson America and Israel should have learned in recent decades, it’s that military success doesn’t usually translate to political victory—in Gaza, Afghanistan or, now, Iran. The adversary keeps coming back. The Israelis have learned that they have to keep “mowing the grass,” the harsh phrase they use for the cycle of recurring violence. America, after avoiding an all-out clash with Iran for 47 years, may now be caught in a similar cycle.
The Iran war will be a tactical triumph in the short run, and all the encomiums about America’s unmatched military power will remain true. If the conflict ends tomorrow, Iran will have lost nearly all its nuclear facilities and scientists, most of its missiles and missile launchers, most of its weapons factories, most of its navy, and much of the command and control for its military, intelligence and security forces.
But the regime survives. It has taken America’s best punch, and it’s still standing. Tiers of senior military, intelligence and political leaders are dead, but they have been replaced by others. There’s no sign of a popular uprising. The cadres of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps hide among piles of rubble, but they haven’t been eliminated.
This will be the Islamic Republic 2.0. For the foreseeable future, it will be an IRGC state, working in a corrupt but pragmatic alliance with Iran’s business interests. The old theocracy had run out of gas. Ali Khamenei had no obvious successor as supreme leader after the death of Ebrahim Raisi, his preferred heir, in a 2024 helicopter crash. Khamenei’s son Mojtaba, chosen last week, lacks charisma and religious authority, but he will be driven by hatred and a desire for revenge. He has lost his father, wife and son in this war.
Perhaps a wily manipulator like the late former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who held the real power during much of the elder Khamenei’s reign, will emerge—and find a path to Trump. But that’s not the future desired by the thousands of brave protesters who were gunned down in January, back when Trump said he was coming to their rescue.
I truly wish that “regime change” were possible in Iran. This dreadful government has brought misery to its people and its neighbors and deserves to go. But that process is hard to imagine for hard-line intelligence experts in the United States and abroad who have been studying the mullahs for decades. “I don’t think we are going to break their will,” fears one senior Gulf official who passionately opposes the regime. “They will rebuild as long as they’re alive.”
Mohammad Marandi, an Iranian professor who speaks for the regime, posted a defiant video even as the bombs fell: “The Iranians will push this war until the United States and the West recognize that attacking Iran is not an option. Not now and not ever again. So, this war is not going to end any time soon unless the other side capitulates.”
Why does the regime keep fighting? Well, Iran’s leaders can read the financial pages, and they can chart the West’s vulnerability in a long war. They can also read the U.S. political calendar. Polls say this is an unpopular war, supported by less than half the country, and the midterm elections are coming. Iranians can even listen to Joe Rogan, the popular podcaster who’s usually a Trump fan, who said Tuesday the war was “crazy.”