President Donald Trump is saying he wants to end the Iran war within the next few weeks, according to White House insiders. This fits his frequent comparisons of the action against Iran with the swift operation against Venezuela in January. He has compared the two expeditions many times, such as when, a week into Operation Epic Fury, he told CNN, “It’s going to work very easily. It’s going to work like it did in Venezuela.”
This has drawn scorn, for it is easy to misrepresent the comparison as suggesting a vain belief that the challenges of tackling Venezuela and Iran are similar in scope and scale when they are not. But Trump invokes Venezuela, not to suggest Iran will be a pushover. He knew it wouldn’t be, at least since his briefings from Gen. Dan “Razin’” Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Trump has been told it would be no quickie to be measured prematurely in hours or days. That was a given.
So what did Trump mean? Epic Fury against Iran has equaled Absolute Resolve in Venezuela in sophistication and success, but Trump was referring, rather, to America’s early exit and the mechanics of making that happen. In his interview with CNN, the president continued, “We have a wonderful leader there. She’s doing a fantastic job. It [Iran] is going to work like in Venezuela.”
This referred to Delcy Rodriguez, who stepped into the top spot in Caracas after dictator Nicolas Maduro was seized by U.S. forces and taken away in shackles to face trial as a narco-terrorist. Rodriguez was a senior member of his illegitimate government that stole the 2024 election.
Supporting Rodriguez rather than opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado seemed brutal of Trump, even dishonest, especially when he claimed Machado “doesn’t have the support within or respect within the country.”
But he was referring not to popular support but to sufficient support, which includes that of the military. He was making the realpolitik point that installing Machado immediately could probably plunge Venezuela into civil conflict, the opposite of the stability that Absolute Resolve had as its goal. Having decapitated the regime, Trump wanted to take the off-ramp opened by installing an interim government intimidated by military defeat into pliancy, so the United States would not be required to insert a large force to support a nation-building exercise.
In Venezuela, Trump is content for a popular government to be a foreseeable, but not an immediate, prospect. If the transition takes months or perhaps a few years, then so be it. The president has no intention of imposing instant democracy at the price of exposing American forces to daily danger.
That’s how he hopes it can work in Iran. He, with Israel, has used the military to remove Iran’s threat to the U.S. and to weaken the regime by working down a kill list of Iran’s most extreme, repressive, and hostile leaders until he reaches someone he thinks he can do business with in the short and medium term.
It is too early to say whether this strategy can succeed or must fail. Trump may have miscalculated, perhaps catastrophically, for he is dealing in Iran with religious fanatics not merely with amoral mercenary thugs on the Venezuelan model. It is unclear that the U.S. has identified anyone in Tehran with whom it can deal. Trump says negotiations have already begun, but Iran says that’s not so and continues to fight.
Nevertheless, the parallel with Venezuela is clear. The U.S., unwilling to insert an occupation army, won’t purge everyone from the tyrannical regime the way it did in Iraq to install a popular government. Instead, military dominance and systematic elimination of the Islamic Republic’s cult leaders in the Revolutionary Guard and clerisy is intended to produce an intimidated remnant of the existing regime that is acceptably pliant toward the U.S. and sufficiently weakened that Iran’s 92 million tyrannized people may reasonably soon take power themselves.
There’s no doubt that most Iranians want this. Those who can be interviewed say they want the U.S.-Israeli bombing to continue. And some are sending photographs and videos from Iran, revealing the location of missile sites and the hiding places of members of the repressive security apparatus. But it’s not clear how many are involved in this, and certainly the Iranian people have not risen up in a mass to overthrow their oppressors.
The danger is that the Islamic Republic will not crack, and successive elimination of the regime’s top echelons may not reveal anyone with whom to do business or who can speak for the regime. It may be Islamist fanatics all the way down. And the fanatics perhaps calculate that if they give an inch and allow regime change, their victims of 47 years will show no mercy.
Trump’s 15-point proposal hinges on this question. It offers Tehran an end to hostilities but at the price of a neutered regime no longer capable of threatening the world with nuclear weapons, incapable of shutting down international trade through the Strait of Hormuz, shorn of its terrorist proxies such as Hamas and Hezbollah, and no longer able to hit the Middle East, most of Europe, and U.S. bases with ballistic missiles.
Iran rejects all this and denies it is even willing to talk. There may be more going on behind the scenes, but Tehran’s rhetoric is still all about punishing the “aggressor” U.S.-Israel alliance.
With Tehran apparently as recalcitrant as ever, now is not the time for Trump to swerve toward an off-ramp. He does not appear to be doing so, but he is certainly looking for that exit lane. The danger is that this will encourage the Iranian tyrants to believe they can outlast his willingness to fight.
But bailing out now, when the Islamic Republic regime is not tamed and would claim victory for the simple feat of remaining in place unbowed, would be a disaster for the Middle East and for American national security and global leadership.
As Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once reminded President George H.W. Bush during the first Gulf War, “This is no time to go wobbly.”