The worst case in Iran is not that the regime murders thousands of civilians and survives in power. The worst case is that the regime commits mass murder and survives in power despite American intervention. The result would resemble what happened to President Jimmy Carter in 1980. When the Marines failed to extract American hostages from Iran, operational failure led to domestic diminishment. Carter’s clean-up in an election year accepted the ayatollahs as the legitimate rulers of Iran, because no one else was in a position to seize the crown.
The Obama-Biden folly of trying to reconcile with Iran by indulging its leaders’ millenarian psychopathy produced a similar worst-case scenario. America squandered its credibility as Iran’s nuclear program tiptoed past every red line while America and the Europeans winked. Allowed to export oil, Iran funnelled cash to the Islamist militias that underpinned its empire-building across the Middle East. The result was the regional war that Hamas launched against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. That culminated, at least for now, in President Donald Trump attacking Iran’s nuclear sites in July 2025.
Trump now finds himself in much the same position as the Democrats’ three stooges, Carter, Obama, and Biden. Once you’ve committed to an outcome, anything less than success is failure. Once you’ve admitted that you’ve noticed the barbaric repression — torture, shootings, hangings — you cannot ignore it without looking, as Obama, John Kerry, Ben Rhodes, and all the other mullah-strokers now look, morally depraved as well as strategically dumb. Once you’ve committed to erasing every trace of Obama infamy, you have to do it. When Trump tells Iran’s protesters to “keep protesting,” and that help is on its way, he doubles down. But what is his best case, and how to get there?
Richard III is said to have found the crown of England hanging on a thorn bush after the Battle of Bosworth. Reza Pahlavi, exiled crown prince and son of the last Shah, is unlikely to catch a similar break, battle or not, in the near term. The regime has a monopoly on force. It has controlled Iran for 45 years. At that point in the Soviet era, the Russian leadership still believed they could win and tried taking the war to the enemy by planting missiles in Cuba. Iran’s leaders also lack the ideological flexibility that the Chinese revolutionary regime of 1949 showed when it turned to the markets in its fifth decade. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is doing Allah’s work, as they see it, and it pays well. They control everything, including the economy and the mercenary Arab militias that they call on to massacre Persian protesters.
As Niall Ferguson argues, the Western media are wrong to call the protests a revolution. They’re a counterrevolution, an attempt to restore Iran to what it was before 1979. Counterrevolutions usually fail because they don’t have the weapons. They won’t have much regional support in this case, either. Apart from Israel, America’s regional allies are almost entirely opposed to returning to 1979 or going back to a future in which Iran returns to being a pro-American pivot state.
Turkey backs the Iranian regime because it fears that chaos in Iran will allow Kurdish Iranians to secede, secure critical access to the Persian Gulf, and even link up with Iraqi Kurdistan. Saudi Arabia prefers a weak and nominally Islamic Iran to a strong, liberal Iran. The Saudis have more oil, but Iran has more people and more talent. A pro-American Iran reduces the Saudis’ regional status, and an onrush of cheap Iranian oil will further imperil Mohammed bin Salman’s lavish but faltering plans to broaden the Saudi economy and liberalize its society. The Islamist regime in Qatar also prefers a failing Iran to an Iran that resumes its historic alliance with Israel. Regardless, the future that Trump must now secure is one in which Iran returns to being an American ally.
A faltering revolutionary regime can suppress a counterrevolution, but it struggles to defeat a revolt from within, especially one coming from the military. The candidate list for Iran’s Napoleon Bonaparte has been drastically shortened by Israeli and American missiles. This may be to the advantage of both Americans and Iranians. If Trump hadn’t whacked IRGC pinup and Islamist maniac Qasem Soleimani in 2020, Soleimani would be the sort of figure who might now seize the crown. There will be no Iranian Gorbachev and no mullah lite. And a Venezuela-style “decapitation” strategy, with strikes against regime infrastructure, could fracture Iran before it emerges from tyranny. But Iran will emerge sooner or later, one way or another. The administration needs to state its terms.
Trump also faces a revolt from within. The America First isolationists believe that Vice President JD Vance is their man, and are crooning the sweet nothings of Obama’s accommodations in the key of hemispheric retrenchment. But the thorniness of the challenge should not mean the administration falls back on doing nothing. A great power must act in its interest or cede the field to its rivals. Iran is too important to lose again.
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.