Phase I Is Going Okay Militarily. But It’s Phase II That’s Terrifying.

When the U.S. and Israeli militaries launched offensive operations against Iran, President Trump delivered an address making two claims. First, that he was eliminating an imminent threat to the United States; second, that he was calling for the Iranian people to rise up and depose the existing regime. On the first count, there’s little evidence to support this assertion. On the second, ask the Kurds how well it turned out for them when they tried to rebel against Saddam Hussein after President George H.W. Bush called on them to do so in 1991 with implied US military support.

But assuming that these reasons aren’t just a pretext for getting a cut of Iranian oil revenue (like U.S. operations in Venezuela turned out to be), even cursory analysis shows that Trump is unlikely to achieve either of these goals. There are only two realistic possible outcomes at the end of hostilities: either the Iranian regime remains in power, or it doesn’t. Both scenarios end badly for the U.S., Iran, and the world in general.

The first and more likely scenario is that Iranian leadership remains in the hands of the Guardian Council and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Despite the successful decapitation strikes against Ayatollah Khamenei and other leaders, we can already see the Iranian government naming successors and reconstituting its chain of command, while divvying out war-time responsibilities. The new leadership is younger and appears to be more hardline than Khamenei was.

For instance, IRGC security chief Ali Larijani is reportedly emerging as the kingmaker in the process of rebuilding the government. Larijani was reportedly the mastermind and driving force behind the massacre and execution of up to 30,000 civilians this past January during the people’s uprising against the government.

Based on what we have observed, the Iranian response strategy for this war is to inflict as much pain points as possible on Gulf States via long range drones and missiles, while bleeding the U.S. and Israel dry of interceptor munitions. These munitions were already likely in critically short supply after the exchange of volleys in 2025. The U.S. production rate for defensive Theater High Altitude Air Defense (THAAD), SM-3, and SM-6 missiles is low and require years to scale up. Similarly, the U.S. is burning through its stocks of precision guided attack munitions, which also take years to rebuild.

At the same time, the nuclear carrier USS Gerald Ford is setting post-Vietnam records for deployment length while 80 percent of her toilets reportedly are inoperative. Morale is reported to be abysmal.

Trump administration officials have described this campaign as designed to last for “weeks.” During that time the U.S. and Israel will likely be able to significantly degrade Iranian air defenses, missile production facilities, and naval assets. The missiles themselves are more difficult to eliminate, if you remember the Scud hunts of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Indeed, heading into the third day of the conflict, Iran is still launching volleys at targets throughout the region.

But the campaign is unlikely to dislodge the Islamic regime. Because the U.S. has no intention of using ground troops, Iran can simply rope-a-dope and accept much more favorable terms when the U.S. is running out of offensive and defensive munitions to throw at them. Any attempts at revolting against the regime will likely be crushed ruthlessly, and there is little sign that its survival is in any sort of danger now. To their credit, the U.S. and Israel have not been engaging in war crimes by targeting energy and water infrastructure. Ironically, though, these are the targets that would most likely facilitate and encourage revolution.

At the end of the day, the most likely result is an American acceptance of concessions from an even more radicalized Iranian government that is likely to decide that building and testing a nuclear weapon is the only thing that will guarantee its safety. Iran is also capable of replenishing its stocks of drones and missiles more quickly and cheaply than the U.S. can build the systems to shoot them down. In short, in some ways Iran will recover from this more quickly than the U.S.

This new Iranian government will also crush public dissent even more ruthlessly, which is a high bar to begin with. It will be more hostile to America and more likely to support terrorism targeting the continental U.S. The regime still enjoys support from the fundamentalist portion of the public, even if it is the minority. It just happens that this minority is willing to kill as many people as necessary to remain in power. It will take years to re-build U.S. stockpiles of interceptors, and some time to replace its precision fires munitions. U.S. carrier maintenance schedules will be disrupted for years, if not decades.

Thus, after the shooting stops, the U.S. will have failed to achieve its goals of replacing the regime, of making it more hesitant to engage in operations against the U.S., or of striking American targets in the region.

But let’s say that somehow the Iranian regime gets overthrown. The odds are that will turn out badly as well. The Trump administration failed to consider conditions on the ground and what happens after the revolution. There’s no government in waiting, no new constitution that can be copy-and-pasted.

The government is full, top to bottom, with loyalists who think the punishment for not loving the Ayatollah enough is death. This means that the entire government apparatus needs to be emptied out, and to start over, and particularly within the military, IRGC, courts, and police. The problem is, the U.S. tried to do this in post-Saddam Iraq as part of the de-Baathification program, and it was a catastrophe.

There’s also still strong fundamentalist support for the government in pockets. Sending the IRGC and police home without jobs is likely to produce a particularly bloody civil war and insurgency where both sides believe the other should either be put to death or utterly subjugated. If this sounds familiar, it’s basically the situation we created in Iraq.

The number of peacekeepers necessary to tamp down an Iranian civil war would likely be over half-a-million troops in a nation of 90 million people. There is zero chance any country would want to put their sons and daughters in such numbers between factions that would do anything to tear each other apart. At the same time, these troops would be trying to nation-build in a country with no history of democracy, while defending a weak nascent government. Thus, I cannot envision a scenario in which any country would be willing or even capable of sending the troops necessary to tamp down an Iranian civil war.

Alternately, when a power vacuum is created in a repressive state like this, usually someone (or multiple someones) even more ruthless fills it. We’ve seen this repeatedly in Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Russia. So, the alternative to a bloody civil war if the regime gets overthrown is something even more repressive, willing to put down pro-democracy factions and pro-Islamic Republic hold outs. Think of the Taliban in Afghanistan, or other ruthless dictatorships. The best that can be said for this scenario is the new leaders might be favorably inclined toward Trump (he likes dictators). But it’s more likely they fall into China or Russia’s orbits given Iran’s economic and military ties with America’s adversaries over the past 50 years, and the fact that neither of them has bombed Iran or assassinated its senior religious leaders. And with that reset, we’d be right back where we started, minus a hundred billion in munitions.

Tactically, and operationally, the U.S. military is performing exactly as it should. However, at the strategic political and foreign policy level, the Trump administration is walking into a virtually unwinnable scenario. Iran will likely emerge from this with an even more hardline Islamist government that is even more hostile to the U.S. and more dedicated to putting down dissent violently. Iran will be able to rebuild its stockpiles of munitions more quickly than the U.S. and will be more dedicated to obtaining and demonstrating a nuclear weapon. Even the best-case scenario results in a brutal and protracted civil war in Iran, or a new dictator who reigns with an iron fist.

It is evident that no one within the Trump administration has thought through how this will play out. One online commentator described it as the Trumpists are “underpants gnoming” their way through a conflict where the grand war plan has essentially three phases:

1. Bomb Iran for 2-3 weeks

2. ?

3. U.S. wins and the Iranian people are free

I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for Trump, Pete Hegseth, or Marco Rubio to articulate what phase two is, because they clearly don’t know either. Unfortunately, everyone is going to be a lot worse off for it.