For Trump, a Path Forward on Iran That Goes Beyond Bombs

Iran has witnessed cycles of protests in the recent past, but the popular uprising that ignited on Dec. 28 is something altogether different—broader in scale, more desperate in tenor, and far more threatening to the survival of the Islamic Republic.

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The spark for the uprising was the market. When the Iranian currency, the rial, plunged yet again, bazaar merchants in Tehran—the traditional backbone of the Islamic Republic—walked out of their shops and into the streets. The protest quickly metastasized into an anti-regime storm. Within days, unrest radiated out from provincial towns to the capital, university campuses, industrial centers and neglected borderlands.

The brave people of Iran knew the risks. Iranian security forces have—yet again­­­­—met dissent with batons, bullets and mass detentions: thousands of protesters have been killed and tens of thousands arrested. The real numbers are likely to be far higher than published figures given an almost total internet blackout.

A nation of 90 million people, Iran is the most combustible place in the Middle East right now, caught between the iron fist of its regime’s oppression and the looming specter of U.S. military intervention. The stakes could hardly be higher: mismanaging the crisis in Iran won’t affect Iran alone; it could undermine regional economic and political stability.

Shadow of the 12-day war

The uprising in Iran unfolding in the aftermath of the 12-day war between Iran and Israel and American military strikes on Iran in June 2025—a conflict that shredded key parts of Iran’s nuclear program, decimated segments of its military leadership, and exposed the sheer vulnerability of the Islamic Republic. Iranian leaders spun mere survival as victory. The Islamic Republic, they claimed, had endured the worst blows its enemies could deliver—a resilience owed to domestic cohesion and revolutionary resolve.

But the war highlighted the Islamic Republic’s decay. It further eroded its legitimacy. For years, the Iranian regime had justified its domestic repression as the price of stability in a turbulent region. But when it failed at the basic task of protecting the homeland, that social contract—authoritarianism in exchange for security—began to look less like a bargain and more like a fraud.

The popular frustration with Iran’s leadership encompasses a catalogue of failures that have eroded the regime’s external ambitions and its domestic legitimacy. After two years of low-intensity conflict with Israel—sparked by Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack—much of the “axis of resistance,” a coalition of regional forces that Tehran built over decades at a cost of billions, billions building, lies in ruins.

At home, the much-touted “resistance economy,” designed to blunt U.S. sanctions through self-reliance and non-oil trade, has devolved into a byword for scarcity, mismanagement and corruption. Inflation has ravaged household budgets. Basic infrastructure is crumbling. Environmental degradation has turned water and electricity into rationed privileges in a resource-rich state. Voter turnout has plummeted to humiliating lows, and the regime’s pretense to popular mandate has withered.

The core failure is political. The Islamic Republic led by Ali Khamenei, the 86-year-old Supreme Leader, has confronted and survived wave after wave of dissent with the same blunt calculus: crush the protests, reject demands for reform, and carry on as before. The strategy has bought time, but at a mounting cost. By declining to expand social and political freedoms, by refusing to fundamentally overhaul the economy, the leadership has steadily narrowed its own options—moving from the merely ineffective to the actively self-destructive. 

Today’s revolt is the predictable result of permanent refusal to adapt and change.

To strike, or not to strike

Overlaying this domestic storm in Iran is a dangerous external dimension: the regime’s enmity with the United States and Israel. President Donald Trump has eschewed the circumspect rhetoric of previous administrations, which feared that American endorsement might delegitimize protesters by association. He has vociferously threatened the regime with military intervention and the imposition of tariffs on nations that trade with Iran.

Trump may well make good on those threats in the hours or days ahead. Even as the  U.S. military pursues a show of force in the Caribbean, directed at Venezuela, the White House is openly weighing punitive options against Iran: cyber operations to undermine Iran’s repressive apparatus, or targeted strikes on its leadership and military facilities. Each path the Trump Administration chooses carries risks that extend beyond Tehran’s ruling elite.

Iran is not Iraq in 2003 or Libya in 2011­—interventions where the U.S. military initially had wide freedom of action, though both wound up being costly mistakes. Iran is a larger country, more cohesive in certain respects, and, crucially, it sits atop near-weapons-grade uranium, the whereabouts of which remain partly unknown in the aftermath of the 2025 war.

A sudden collapse of central authority could unleash not only sectarian and ethnic violence but also a scramble for nuclear material among rival factions, including  competing elements within the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. 

External intervention designed to weaken the regime’s repressive machinery might simply prompt a scorched-earth backlash against the Iranian people, while neighboring states, anxious about instability, radicalization, and an influx of refugees, look on with mounting alarm. These concerns, compounded by anxieties over an increasingly ascendant Israel, have prompted countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Oman to actively discourage the Trump Administration from resorting to military force.

Although U.S. military intervention in Iran might appear reckless, doing nothing is equally untenable. The status quo—an ossified theocracy presiding over a bankrupt economy and an aggrieved populace—has already proven unsustainable. The challenge for Washington lies in avoiding the false choice between regime change by force, with unforeseen consequences, and spectacular but cynically symbolic action.

A more promising course, if still fraught, involves deploying Washington’s available incentives to encourage political renewal. The substance of such metamorphosis must be defined by Iranians themselves, not dictated by Americans. Ideas already in circulation within Iran include an internationally monitored vote for a constituent assembly to design a new order. Yet the U.S. can offer Iranian dissidents crucial support by clarifying to the regime that sanctions relief will require more than nuclear safeguards and commitments not to attack neighbors—it would need concrete steps by Iran toward a government commanding greater popular legitimacy.

This approach remains a long shot but the alternatives range from unpalatable to unattractive. The hope is that it might splinter the Iranian leadership, which closed ranks during the recent brutal crackdown on the protests, in part because it perceives no viable path for a soft-landing.

Such a strategy would also align U.S. policy with the aspirations of ordinary Iranians rather than with the impulses of those in Washington who view every problem as a nail requiring the hammer of military action. And it offers one of the few instruments available that might gradually loosen the dead grip of a moribund system without plunging a pivotal country—and, potentially, the region alongside it—into chaos.

Just as airstrikes offer no shortcut to democracy, there is no safe path back to business as usual. There is only the slow, uncertain task of granting Iranians leverage over their own future and the moral imperative not to squander their courage in yet another Middle Eastern misadventure.