The joint U.S.-Israeli air campaign against Iran represents a genuine opportunity for long-term Middle Eastern stability. The early results are good.
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is dead, as are dozens of senior Iranian military and political figures. The regime is already heavily decapitated in a way that is historically unusual. The hunt for Saddam Hussein and other top regime figures took many months back in 2003. In so doing, this campaign is re-establishing the deterrent credibility of American military power.
Yet, killing leaders is the simpler part of the equation. The administration has yet to identify who, inside Iran, can seize the initiative once the bombs stop falling. Trump has called on Iranians to rise up and reclaim their country. But the practical problem is that unarmed civilians face an armed loyalist apparatus of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Basij forces that controls the streets. The question is whether Washington can find organized groups capable of becoming effective formations against the regime’s ground apparatus.
Critics argue that this military campaign may plunge Iran into instability (they forget that this regime was recently murdering 30,000 of its own citizens in the streets), and lead to sectarian violence such as that seen in Iraq. But this is a civilization stretching back three millennia, with a Persian identity that has unified its people across centuries. Ethnic minorities, including the sizable Azerbaijani population, are far more integrated into national life than their counterparts were in Iraq or Syria; Khamenei himself was ethnically Azerbaijani. The risk of territorial disintegration is considerably lower.
Equally important is the disposition of the Iranian public. The protests of January 2026, the largest since the 1979 revolution, spread to more than 100 cities. The regime responded with mass killings, ordering the Guard and Basij to fire on demonstrators. That Iranians continued to resist, even at extraordinary personal cost, reveals a population already prepared to reclaim its country. It is foolish to assume that the Iranian people will sit placidly in the face of the bleeding remnants of an evil regime.
Others have cautioned that this campaign may inadvertently lead to more militaristic leadership replacing the current one. Yet it is worth asking: what is more militaristic than a regime that has spent 47 years sponsoring proxy warfare from Beirut to Baghdad while massacring its own citizens?
Yes, the stakes are high. Trump launched the most ambitious American military operation in over two decades, and if the current Iranian regime survives, his credibility will take a major blow. Yet beyond credibility, there is a strategic logic for seeing this through. This region has no path to equilibrium while a virulently hostile Iran sits at its center.
THREAT FROM IRANIAN RETALIATION STRIKES SPREADS ACROSS MIDDLE EAST, TARGETING EMBASSIES AND AIRPORTS
Iran, if less hostile, could act as a positive counterbalance to growing Turkish influence. It would also require fewer U.S. military assets deployed to the Middle East to deter it.
Trump should hold firm in pursuit of this better future.