Eager to show that he can do what no American leader has done before, President Donald Trump has chosen conflict over diplomacy and gone to war with Iran. The Islamic Republic, knowing that this fight is existential, retaliated quickly with deadly missile and drone attacks on Israel, U.S. bases in the Middle East, and targets in Gulf states and beyond. This is now a regional war with global impact, disrupting oil and financial markets, supply chains, maritime commerce, and air travel. Threats to Americans and the death toll in Iran mount by the hour. These growing risks were predictable long before the war became reality, which might help explain why no previous president took the United States down this perilous path.
How this war will end remains uncertain. But when it does, the United States will have to face what comes next. To the extent that the Trump administration has considered plans for “the day after,” it seems to have made a series of overly optimistic assumptions about how the war might reshape Iran and the Middle East. For one, the Trump administration has insisted—including in Trump’s social media post on February 28 announcing the war—that a relentless degradation of Iranian leadership and military capabilities would weaken the regime enough that the Iranian people could rise up and “take over the government.” Even if that doesn’t happen, the administration’s logic goes, Iran would be defanged and so preoccupied with internal problems that it could no longer pose a threat to the region or American interests. Taking the current Iranian regime out of the equation, Washington assumes, would remove one of the largest sources of regional instability and usher in a new Middle East more to the United States’ liking.
But the outcome of this war will likely fall far short of these rosy expectations. After the bombing ends, Iran and the region could look worse, or at least not better, than they did before the war. The fighting could create a power vacuum in Tehran, sour U.S. allies on their partnerships with Washington, and produce ripple effects on conflicts elsewhere in the world, all without removing sources of regional strife that have nothing to do with the regime in Iran. The risks increase the longer the war goes on, so Congress and U.S. allies must press for a cease-fire now if there is to be any hope of mitigating these day-after dangers.
SAME OLD STORY
Few in the United States would mourn the demise of an Iranian regime that was founded on an anti-American ideology and has long supported terrorism. U.S.-Iranian hostility has been a constant since the Iranian Revolution in 1979; it has now lasted longer than the Cold War. But as much as Washington would like to see the end of the Islamic Republic, replacing the regime with a pro-American one through military force is unlikely to work. Iran is not Venezuela, with a figure like Delcy Rodríguez waiting in the wings to do Washington’s bidding. In the wake of the United States’ and Israel’s assassinations of Iran’s senior leadership, Trump acknowledged that “most of the people we had in mind [as potential new leaders] are dead.”
One option favored by some in Washington and the Iranian diaspora is to try to install a pro-American exile such as Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last shah of Iran, whom the United States helped bring to power and was overthrown in the 1979 revolution. But the level of support Pahlavi has within Iran is unknown; even Trump has expressed doubts about whether Iranians would accept his leadership. No other clear alternative has emerged from the divided Iranian opposition. What would more likely emerge is rule by a hard-line faction of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or a regime collapse that creates a political vacuum, dragging the country into a prolonged period of chaos and violence. Neither scenario promises a less hostile and more pragmatic Iranian government.
Iranian weakness will also not in itself resolve the local grievances and disputes fueling conflict across the Middle East. Arab states and Turkey play far more significant roles than Iran does in lingering conflicts in countries such as Libya and Sudan. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict began well before the emergence of the Islamic Republic, and the Iranian regime’s downfall would not repair the divides that fuel it. And in countries where Iran has played a dominant role through its sponsorship of proxies, which include militias in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen, these groups are concerned with their own survival as much as Iran’s. They have their own domestic political projects and sources of power that do not rely only on Tehran: the Houthis, for example, have built a diffuse supply network and cultivated non-Iranian financing to support domestic arms production, and Hezbollah has developed its own capabilities to produce drones.
The United States will have to face what comes after the war.
This is not to say that taking Iran out of play doesn’t matter. Hezbollah would feel substantial pain from a change of leadership in Tehran, given how much Iran has invested in it. The fall of the longtime Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in late 2024 had already disrupted the flow of arms and funds from Iran to Hezbollah through Syria. A loss of Iranian support entirely, combined with the military pressure of a renewed Israeli offensive in Lebanon, would further strain Hezbollah’s resources, giving the Lebanese government an opportunity to diminish Hezbollah’s influence.
But in general, militancy in the region will not be quashed even if Iran is defeated. The anti-Israeli sentiment that often drives recruitment to groups such as Hezbollah has been inflamed by Israel’s military operations in Gaza and throughout the region, including its renewed bombing in Lebanon. This could help Hezbollah survive and spark the formation of new militant groups hostile to Israel and the United States. And the militant groups not backed by Iran—including Sunni extremist movements such as the Islamic State—will remain a challenge regardless of the outcome of this war.
Hope that the war may push countries in the region further into the American orbit or toward normalization with Israel, even if it is not pushing them toward Tehran, may prove unfounded. Iran has attacked nearly all its neighbors since the conflict began, aiming not only at U.S. military bases but also at critical oil and gas infrastructure, economic targets including Amazon data centers in the United Arab Emirates, and central urban areas and airports in cities such as Doha and Dubai. Tehran aims to exact costs on American partners in the hope that they will pressure Washington to end the war. This is a risky gambit that may only reinforce the antipathy many Arab states feel toward Iran after years of Iranian interference through proxy forces, and could set back the recent rapprochement between Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
But given their extensive economic ties and geographic proximity, Gulf states will still need to maintain some kind of relationship with Iran once this war ends. And their frustration with Iran does not automatically mean the United States will gain. The war may instead fuel popular resentment toward the United States and Israel in the region. Although Gulf states have no alternative to U.S. security guarantees, this conflict has underscored the danger of hosting American military forces—namely, that it puts these countries in the cross hairs of a U.S.-Israeli-Iranian confrontation. American bases were meant to protect Gulf states from external attacks, not invite them. And if these countries believe that the United States did not sufficiently defend them from Iranian missile and drone strikes or that it favored Israel’s defense needs over theirs, resentment toward Washington could grow.
There is no silver bullet to bring about a more stable Middle East.
The war is likely to turn regional publics more strongly against normalization with Israel, too. There is already a widespread perception that Israel has been launching military attacks across the region with impunity, both near its borders and as far afield as Qatar, where it struck the Hamas leadership in Doha last September. Arab populations are still angry about the war in Gaza and threats of Israeli annexation of the West Bank. Israel’s current campaign in Lebanon is triggering another displacement crisis. The United States’ collaboration with Israel to launch this war will further damage both countries’ reputations, and Arab leaders in influential countries such as Saudi Arabia are highly attuned to public sentiment opposing normalization.
The war may also have the unintended effect of imperiling some of the authoritarian leaders that the United States counts among its allies, which those who care about democracy and human rights may see as a silver lining. In Bahrain, where the ruling monarchy is Sunni but over half the population is Shiite, some people took to the streets to celebrate Iran’s recent attacks inside Bahrain targeting U.S. forces. They were expressing opposition to a government that, with Saudi support, has repressed them for years. There has been little space for protests of this kind—or for any calls for accountability and rule of law—since the suppression of the Arab Spring uprisings well over a decade ago. But the latest demonstrations may not be the end of public unrest in Bahrain or elsewhere.
The damaging global consequences of the war, meanwhile, are expanding beyond the immediate financial and commercial shocks. International laws and norms constraining the use of force had already been undermined by U.S. and European hypocrisy in immediately condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but not doing the same for the Israeli assault on Gaza. Now, the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran, launched without evidence of an imminent Iranian attack that would justify the use of force, undermines it further.
Both China and Russia, although nominally allies of Iran, may also benefit from the United States’ being tied down by this war. China may believe it has a window to ramp up pressure on Taiwan as Washington shifts its military capabilities from Asia to the Middle East—an upside that could outweigh Beijing’s concerns about the disruption to oil supplies from the Middle East on which China depends. Russia, for its part, would not want to see another regional ally overthrown after the fall of the Assad regime in Syria. But the war in Ukraine is Russia’s priority, and Iran’s war may give Moscow at least a temporary advantage in that fight. Indeed, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has warned that the diversion of U.S. weapons to the Middle East could hurt Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against Russia.
DAMAGE CONTROL
There is no silver bullet to bring about a more stable Middle East. On the contrary, a war of choice that promises to free the region from an Iranian threat may have consequences that the United States did not intend and that ultimately damage its interests. Ridding the region of a brutal and destabilizing regime via a military intervention by an outside power that is also increasingly lawless and destabilizing is hardly a recipe for long-term peace.
Now that it has made the dangerous decision to start this war, however, the Trump administration must do what it can to mitigate the negative consequences. It will need to help Iran’s neighbors prepare to accept refugees to prevent the upheaval of the war from spiraling into a wider humanitarian crisis. It will also need to help countries in the region defend themselves from unpredictable attacks and reinforce infrastructure that has been impaired or destroyed by Iran’s salvos during the war.
At this point, aiming for anything more than damage control is unrealistic. Unfortunately, even as polls show that the majority of Americans oppose the war, too many American leaders continue to harbor fantastical expectations about shaping the Middle East through American power. In reality, that power is diminished by another reckless and costly war. Rather than help usher in a new Middle East, this war is likely to prolong the life of the old one, whether or not change comes to Iran. The time to end it is now.
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