Trump’s Stone Age Threat Will Lead to Tragedy

Someone in the White House seems to have put the word out: Stop talking about a free and prosperous Iran, and start talking about pulverizing Iran until you can sift the rubble through a tennis racket. On Wednesday, Donald Trump vowed to bomb Iranian targets hard enough to send them “back to the Stone Ages where they belong.” Pete Hegseth also tweeted “back to the stone age,” a military cliché so lazy and flabby that if it were one of his generals, it would be frog-marched to an elliptical machine and forced to melt away its belly fat until its abs showed through. The messaging shift over the past couple of weeks reflects a change in plans, after Iran’s resistance proved more vigorous than expected. If Iran will not change its regime’s intentions, America will reduce it to resisting American imperial aggression with sticks and stones.

This mismatch—with America measuring its success by its destruction of Iran’s capabilities, and Iran measuring its success by its stubborn will to fight—has left Trump sounding frustrated. How badly must he devastate the Iranian military before he is allowed to declare victory? On Wednesday, he claimed that the Iranian navy and air force were “gone,” their radar destroyed, their ability to produce and fire missiles “beaten,” and their defense-industrial base on the way to being “annihilated,” with the exception of their ability to produce oil. He furthermore vowed to destroy “each and every one of their electric generating plants, probably simultaneously.” Some of the targets in the industrial base of Iran, such as steel plants, can plausibly be considered military targets. “Every one” of Iran’s electricity plants cannot.

But these lopsided outcomes have not persuaded the media to treat the war as an American strategic success. Last week’s Economist cover story announced Advantage Iran, and noted two unhappy outcomes of the war so far: Iranian hard-liners have consolidated power at home and clenched the Strait of Hormuz shut. Drifting into cliché itself, The Economist argued that for Iran, “mere survival counts as a victory.”

[From the May 2026 issue: Someday in Tehran]

What counts as victory for The Economist or Donald Trump, however, is not what counts for the Islamic Republic. For Iran, what counts is resistance, against arrogant and wicked oppressors, chiefly the United States and Israel. This resistance need not be accompanied by battlefield triumphs. When I traveled in Iran (years ago, before foreign visitors became regular and lucrative kidnapping targets for the regime), the soaring rhetoric of resistance became familiar and tedious. Decades of this rhetoric have driven most Iranians—who have noticed that the wages of resistance are misery, hardship, and slaughter by their own wicked oppressors—to despair. But the leaders of the Islamic Republic have not wavered in their valorization of resistance, as an end in itself.

It is little wonder, then, that Iran’s enemies were surprised by its willingness to fight a war that it will certainly lose, by any material standard. Iran recently put out a call for children as young as 12 to fight; countries coasting toward success tend not to recruit from the Bluey demographic. To imagine why resistance, even in the face of devastation, might be attractive, one need only imagine a soldier whose model of heroism is Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad and the figure most venerated in the Iranian state religion. Hussein is famous for being hacked apart by Sunnis at the Battle of Karbala in 680. Like the Battle of the Alamo for Texans, this bloody spectacle is for regime-loyal Shia the defeat that outshines in glory any possible subsequent victory. The Islamic Republic, by this standard, has already acquitted itself with honor, by continuing to fight even as their ships and aircraft are obliterated and their comrades blown apart.

“We are systematically dismantling the regime’s ability to threaten America or project power outside of their borders,” Trump said Wednesday night. “Regime change was not our goal,” he continued, not very convincingly. The war was begun, it seems, with the hope that the regime would fall and be replaced by a less fanatical one. The pivot in recent weeks toward attacking Iranian infrastructure is the predictable reaction to the failure to appreciate the vigor of the ethic of resistance. If you cannot change the regime, or otherwise modify the intentions of the Iranian leadership, then the only way to reduce the threat the regime poses is to deprive it of its powers and ability to recover them.

[Read: An army shake-up in the middle of a war]

This dynamic portends a tragic end for Iran. The more resilient the regime—and its resilience is remarkable—the more Iran would have to be devastated to avoid leaving residual capability intact. Most Iranians I know want the regime to fall, but they also think that the successor to this regime will probably need some steel factories, electricity plants, and refineries. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—the military center of gravity of the regime—has its paws on virtually every element of the Iranian economy. Bombing its bases might render it harmless, but ending its ability to respawn might mean killing a large part of the Iranian economy and consigning ordinary Iranians to years of hardship. Trump’s comments suggest that he intends to pursue this dynamic to its grim conclusion.

There is one possible reason for optimism in this analysis. The emphasis on resistance, as the metric of success, might paradoxically give the Islamic Republic a way out. The former Iranian diplomat Hossein Mousavian once scolded Americans for failing to realize that his people are prideful and vain, and that negotiations meant to humiliate and insult them won’t get far. (These are arguments that I, as a non-Iranian, would not dare make, so I am grateful to Mousavian for making them for me.) The current rhetoric of the regime is prouder than ever. It has dealt very painful blows against Israel and the United States. It has stood up to them. It has resisted. Under the current circumstances, if Tehran decided to make a deal with the U.S., it could not be accused of having wimped out or compromised. It could be vain even in defeat. That bargain—you get to keep your pride; we get to destroy your military—might be the beginning of a basis for negotiation.