The war’s three-pronged objectives—regime change, military degradation, and diplomatic leverage—have proven mutually exclusive. While decapitation strikes removed Ali Khamenei, subsequent attacks on dual-use infrastructure and threats of civilizational destruction have alienated the Iranian public, strengthened hardline resilience, and trapped the U.S. in a cycle of escalation that baffles its own leadership.
With a tenuous cease-fire now in place and the possibility that the fighting may resume, it is worth revisiting what the United States and Israel were actually trying to accomplish in their war with Iran. Despite a jumbled public rollout, three goals stood out: facilitating regime change in Tehran; degrading Iran’s capacity to threaten its neighbors; and gaining leverage to pressure Iran to accept a deal governing its nuclear program that was acceptable to Washington.
This multiplicity of goals made the war harder to win for two reasons. First, competing goals can conflict with one another, with the tactics that serve one undermining another. In particular, facilitating regime change would point toward targeted strikes aimed narrowly at the regime itself, while degrading enemy military capabilities suggests much wider ones that support its broader capacity to produce weapons. Second, the desire to maximize leverage in a deal could incline you to dial the crisis up to 11, but doing so can also narrow your own freedom of action, not just that of your adversary. If the enemy does not back down, expansive threats can create a “credibility trap” that forces you into a conflict wider than you intended. If the current cease-fire breaks down and fighting resumes, both problems will return with a vengeance.
The US and Israel had somewhat different versions of each goal as well as a different prioritization among them. On regime change, Israel hoped for the rise of a secular regime in Tehran with a different orientation toward the West; President Donald Trump appeared content with any change of leadership he could dub “regime change” and open to negotiating with him. On degradation of Iran’s capacity to threaten its neighbors, both sought to eliminate its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, but they diverged on the rest of the priority list, in line with their different geographies and strategic postures. The US focus included Iran’s naval capacity, its ability to close the Strait of Hormuz, and the short-range ballistic missiles threatening its Gulf neighbors. For Israel, those were secondary; what mattered most, after the nuclear file, was Iran’s medium-range ballistic missiles, which struck Israel throughout the war and remain a threat now, as well as Iran’s proxy network — chiefly Hizballah.
The third goal, leverage for a deal, was purely American and vintage Trump. He engineered a pending global crisis through the massive pre-war buildup, which became an actual economic crisis once fighting began. Throughout the war, all the way to the day the cease-fire was announced, he raised the stakes beyond the imaginable, threatening that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” He appears to have assumed leverage would shorten the war, that Iran would fold under superior American firepower. Its refusal to “surrender” seems to have baffled him; its leaders were behaving, in his phrase, like “crazy bastards.”
The three goals began to collide almost immediately. If the grand prize was regime change, the central operational task would be to widen the wedge between the regime and the Iranian people. Regime change would happen at the hands of the citizens, or by factions within the elites, and the more unpopular the regime, and the more tolerable the foreign intervention, the better the odds of success.
As a general rule, but especially if this is your primary objective, no effort should be spared to minimize damage not only to civilian lives but to civilian infrastructure as well. The distinction between the regime and the people must be made unmistakable to the very people you need as agents of change. This should have dictated the nature and scope of operations — and initially it did. Soon, however, muddled or evolving priorities started to shift the nature of the campaign, thus undermining the prospects of toppling Iran’s ruling structures.
Targeting dual-use infrastructure, which airstrikes increasingly went after, can certainly also deprive the regime of capabilities, and could serve the second goal of degrading them, but strategy requires prioritization: if regime change is the primary goal, Iran the country must suffer as little as possible. Iranians are among the most pro-American populations in the Middle East. That is an enormous asset, and one that must be preserved despite an American war. Threats to “bring them back to the Stone Ages where they belong” do the opposite.
The same logic ultimately convinced Trump to nix any effort to foment uprisings among ethnic minorities, such as Iranian Kurds, which Israel, and possibly the US, had reportedly been cultivating. Most Iranians — and particularly the Persian majority — view such efforts as a threat to their country, not the regime.
What if America’s campaign was really about gaining leverage at the negotiating table? Given Trump’s approach to foreign policy, this surely was his aim at times, simultaneously with other ones. Trump prefers to create an enormous crisis as an opening salvo even for modest gains later. Threaten Iran enough, demonstrate your capacity and will to inflict massive damage, and the enemy is supposed to fold.
But this is the trap of always striving for maximum leverage. A core principle of conflict is to preserve your own freedom of action — to maintain your ability to shape events and calibrate escalation dynamics. Yet when the US issues bombastic threats, it puts its own credibility on the line and creates expectations that it will follow through, regardless of the wisdom of such action later. Threats can corner your adversary, but they can corner you as well. Pressure is an essential tool of negotiation and conflict. It does not follow, however, that more pressure is always better.
Given disagreements over cease-fire terms and the conflicting interests ahead, the war may yet resume. If it does, it would be essential that the United States and Israel agree on clear goals and the priority among them. Fighting without a clear goal makes it easy to get into a war, but nearly impossible to win it. Strategy and tactics must all work in consort toward an objective. If the objective is unclear, you flounder. Indeed, a war can be lost even when it is won militarily. The stakes here are too high for that kind of victory.