President Donald Trump made a bold and consequential decision to confront one of the most destabilizing regimes in the world. By joining Israel in striking the Islamic Republic’s military infrastructure, he did what many before him avoided: he directly challenged a regime that has spent decades exporting violence, repression, and instability. That decision has already begun to reshape the strategic landscape in the Middle East. But what comes next will matter even more. Military success is the easier part. The harder part is making sure it is not undone.
That is now the real question in Iran. Not whether the regime can be weakened. It can. The question is whether Washington, after helping break key parts of the regime’s military capacity, will settle for a political outcome that leaves the same system in place under a different label.
This is where things often go wrong. Wars rarely fail because of the battlefield. They fail when political follow-through falls short. A transition that leaves intact the regime’s security apparatus, ideological machinery, and networks of coercion is not a solution. It is a pause.
Many Iranians worry that Washington may drift in that direction, toward a cosmetic transition that removes a few faces, elevates others, and calls the result stability. We have seen versions of this before. Venezuela is one example: pressure reshaped the surface of power, but the underlying system endured.
In Iran, that kind of outcome would be even more dangerous.
The Islamic Republic is not just another authoritarian government. It is a deeply embedded security state built around the IRGC, reinforced by ideology, and practiced in both internal repression and regional disruption. If meaningful parts of that structure survive, they will not evolve into something moderate. They will regroup.
Iranian regime spent decades playing the long game
And they know how to do that. The regime has spent decades playing a long game. It can compromise when it must and sound pragmatic under pressure. But once that pressure lifts, once attention shifts or a different administration comes into office in Washington, it reverts to its baseline. It resets to factory settings. That is why any plan built on the assumption that regime insiders will behave differently this time is, by definition, temporary.
For the United States, this is not just about fairness to the Iranian people. It is about strategy. If the purpose of this campaign is to eliminate a long-term threat, then preserving the regime’s networks in repackaged form is not prudent. It is a postponement. It all but guarantees the same problem will return, perhaps less visibly but no less dangerously.
There is another reality Washington should not ignore. The political center of gravity inside Iran has shifted. Across cities, generations, and social classes, Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi has emerged as the only opposition figure with broad recognition and real legitimacy. His name has been chanted across the country, often at considerable personal risk. For many Iranians, he is not simply one political option among others. He represents a clear break from the Islamic Republic and a link to Iran’s national continuity outside it.
That matters more than many assume. In moments like this, legitimacy is not theoretical. It determines whether a transition stabilizes or runs into resistance.
Earlier this year, when the exiled Crown Prince called for nationwide protests, millions responded. That did not happen spontaneously. It reflected years of accumulated trust and the absence of any other figure with comparable reach inside the country. Ignoring that reality will not produce stability. It will produce friction, and likely something worse.
A managed transition that sidelines him would start with a legitimacy deficit and struggle from day one. In that scenario, the United States risks being tied, directly or indirectly, to a political arrangement that many Iranians reject, while facing renewed unrest and possible repression by figures it helped keep in place.
None of this means there can be no contact with individuals inside the regime. In a transition of this scale, communication channels can serve a purpose. But the purpose matters. Those channels should be used to deepen fractures, encourage defections, and hasten the disintegration of the regime’s coercive core, not to repackage it.
Washington should also be realistic about Israel’s role. Israel is not simply an external observer. It has built deep intelligence penetration inside the regime, and recent operations have shown how effective it is at disrupting command structures and removing key decision-makers. It also has working channels and a level of trust with Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi that Washington lacks. And unlike the United States, it is a regional actor that will live with the immediate consequences of whatever political order emerges next.
For those reasons, the United States should not try to monopolize the political endgame. It should be prepared to let Israel participate in shaping the transition away from the Islamic Republic, one that dismantles the system rather than recycles it.
The choice before Washington is not complicated. It can use this moment to help bring about a real political break from the Islamic Republic. Or it can settle for a managed outcome that preserves too much of the old order and postpones the next crisis.
Trump has already made the difficult decision to act militarily. The question now is whether that decision will be carried through politically or diluted into an arrangement that allows the regime, in one form or another, to survive.
If that happens, the result will not be stability. It will be a pause, followed by the regime’s reconstruction, repression, and another confrontation.
Saeed Ghasseminejad is a senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and Director of the Iran Prosperity Project at the National Union for Democracy in Iran. Follow him on X @SGhasseminejad. Navid Mohebbi is an independent Iran expert living in Washington, DC. Follow him on X: @navidmohebbi.