Trump Has Lost the Plot in Iran

Like many of his predecessors over the past five decades, Donald Trump risks having his presidency hijacked by Iran. The 1979 revolution and subsequent hostage crisis ended Jimmy Carter’s presidency. The Iran-Contra affair tainted Ronald Reagan’s. Iranian machinations in postwar Iraq sabotaged George W. Bush’s. The Iran nuclear deal—and the bitter partisan fight over it—consumed the second half of Barack Obama’s presidency. The October 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas, a member of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance,” triggered a brutal war that subsumed Joe Biden’s. Trump may have envisioned a second term spent striking deals to resolve wars, but Iran has now sucked him in, too.

What Trump seems to have hoped would be a Venezuela redux—a quick decapitation of the regime followed by a swift deal with the leader’s successor—has deteriorated into a regional war. Tehran telegraphed that this would happen, but it still apparently caught Trump by surprise. Now the United States is approaching a quagmire as news reports suggest that the CIA is arming Kurdish groups inside Iran.

In Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez—who concurrently oversaw the ministry of petroleum and the ministry of economy and finance while serving as vice president—maintained deep foreign connections, including a private back channel to the Trump administration even before President Nicolás Maduro’s capture. Her willingness to meet with CIA Director John Ratcliffe for a two-hour summit in Caracas underscored her authority to pivot the entire state apparatus toward a new energy partnership with the West.

[Read: The real reason Trump went to war]

The post-Khamenei landscape in Iran lacks any such singular, empowered interlocutor. The Islamic Republic’s parallel power structure, coupled with a 47-year ideology of resistance, has for decades created an enduring dilemma: Those who want to make amends with America cannot deliver, while those who may be able to deliver do not want to make amends. No one currently in Tehran has the will or the weight to break from the inherited stance of resistance and broker a deal à la Delcy Rodríguez.

Given the pace of Israeli political assassinations inside Iran, the architecture of power in the Islamic Republic is constantly changing. Mojtaba Khamenei, the 56-year-old son of the assassinated supreme leader, is now reportedly the top contender to replace his father. Within the regime’s hard-line circles—men who command little popular support but control every organ of repression—his stock has risen in the wake of the attacks that killed his father, mother, and wife. Although there are reports that he may have been wounded, Mojtaba is reportedly keen to take the reins of power. Backed by two particularly ruthless strongmen of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hossein Taeb and Ahmad Vahidi, he would resume his father’s ruinous legacy.

Yet Mojtaba faces a crisis of both legitimacy and longevity. He lacks a public mandate, a recent Bloomberg report ties him to extensive overseas money laundering, and he would have to elude Israel’s continuous campaign of decapitation. His father ruled for 37 years—Mojtaba might not last 37 days.

In the meantime, sources inside Tehran suggest that the country is essentially being administered by two individuals: Ali Larijani and Mohammed Baqer Qalibaf. Larijani is managing political affairs and Qalibaf, a former IRGC commander, is managing military affairs. During normal times, these two men have a rivalrous relationship—both are former presidential candidates who aspire to lead the country—but during war, they have banded together.

Larijani sees himself as a pragmatic revolutionary insider in the style of China’s Deng Xiaoping. But his record thus far—he was reportedly one of the architects of Iran’s January crackdown, which according to some accounts killed 30,000 people—appears long on massacring and short on modernizing.

Qalibaf, a trained pilot with a public record of corruption, has long sought to portray himself as a modern strongman—the technocratic face of the IRGC. Despite these modern pretensions, he has closely aligned himself with Mojtaba Khamenei, a bet on the past rather than on the future.

These two pretenders reflect an insider debate whose subject is not the existence of the Islamic Republic but the best method of its survival. Both are committed to preserving the regime, including by means of domestic brutality. Their disagreement is over the strategic posture of resistance that has defined the past 47 years: One camp favors internal brutality coupled with external resistance; the other favors internal brutality coupled with external détente. Trump has never been troubled by how a regime treats its own people—only by whether it treats him with deference. Tehran’s embattled new leaders must decide whether a pact with him will save the revolution’s life or destroy its soul.         

Trump has treated the opening week of the war as an improvisational jazz session, riffing on different analyses, strategies, and endgames in conversations with numerous reporters. This is not deliberate strategic ambiguity to throw an adversary off base, but rather a symptom of genuine confusion. I have spoken with current and former U.S. officials privy to the decision making (none was authorized to speak to the public), who describe a total lack of planning and contradictory aims among those worried about the war effort and those more concerned about the war’s domestic political implications. One official claimed that the administration has weighed easing the sanctions on Iran’s oil exports—the lifeblood of its economy—to reduce the spike in oil prices the war has brought.

[Brynn Tannehill: The dangerous mismatch between American missiles and Iranian drones]

Tehran has recognized for decades that American public opinion is one of its most potent allies in restraining the regional ambitions of U.S. presidents. This lesson first came clear in 1983, when the Iranian-directed bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut eventually compelled President Reagan to withdraw American forces from Lebanon. Today, the regime is reaching for the same playbook. By wreaking havoc on its Gulf neighbors and threatening the transit of 20 million barrels of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, Tehran aims to spike global energy prices and soil the domestic political climate in the United States. The goal is to weaken Trump’s resolve by making him choose between a protracted war and the pocketbooks of his voters. Tehran’s hope is that he will abruptly declare a hollow victory and abort the mission.

Amid this brutal game of power politics is the spark that ostensibly lit the fuse: Trump’s warning to the Iranian authorities to stop the killing of protesters. Less than one week into this war, the hope that it would spawn an Iranian spring is already withering. At the moment, Iranian citizens are not participants but observers of this war, trying to steer clear for safety.

Populations living under tyranny understandably yearn for a “magic bullet”—a surgical strike that would destroy the oppressor while sparing the innocent. But like all wars, “Operation Epic Fury” has been far less precise than this fantasy. Only hours into the conflict, an errant strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in southern Iran served as a gut-wrenching reminder of the cost of such illusions, and a testament to the grim truth that those who pay most dearly for the fog of war are almost always the innocent.

As of right now, this is a war that virtually all sides are losing.