The Forty-Year Failure
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been at war with the United States since November 4, 1979. That's the date the regime-backed student militants seized the American embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. Every American administration since Carter has responded to that foundational aggression with the same basic toolkit: sanctions, diplomatic pressure, occasional military strikes at proxies, and a reluctance to name the actual enemy. The toolkit has produced forty-five years of Iranian nuclear advancement, regional destabilization, and American personnel killed by Iranian-directed forces.
The policy has failed. Not partially. Completely.
Operation Epic Fury, now entering its second week, represents the first American military action explicitly targeted at the Islamic Republic's core infrastructure rather than its peripheral proxies. That's a category shift. And the critics screaming about "regime change" as though it's a dirty phrase are making the same mistake American strategists have made since 1979: treating the Islamic Republic as a permanent fixture to be managed rather than a destabilizing force to be ended.
What Deterrence Actually Requires
The nuclear deal framework — in all its iterations, from JCPOA to the various successor proposals — operated on a deterrence theory that Iran could be incentivized into compliance. Enrich less, sanction less. Behave, receive economic relief. The theory assumed the Islamic Republic valued economic integration and regime survival over ideological objectives. That assumption was wrong. Iran accepted economic pain — significant economic pain, with millions of Iranians genuinely suffering — rather than abandon its nuclear program or its regional proxy network.
When a regime demonstrates that it will absorb enormous costs to maintain a particular capability or policy, deterrence theory has to update. The updated conclusion should be obvious: the people making decisions inside the Islamic Republic are not making them on the basis of cost-benefit analysis amenable to external pressure. They are making them on the basis of an eschatological and ideological framework that treats the regime's survival as less important than the ideology's persistence. You cannot deter that with sanctions. You cannot negotiate it away. You can only defeat it.
I've spent time in the Gulf region, talking to analysts from Riyadh to Abu Dhabi, and the consensus among Gulf Arab governments — hardly natural American allies — is uniform: the Islamic Republic is an existential threat to regional order, and the question has never been whether it should end, only when and how. They've been waiting for Washington to reach the same conclusion for two decades.
The Critics' Bad Faith
The critics of military action in Iran have a problem: they're arguing against regime change while offering no coherent alternative that hasn't already been tried and failed. Diplomacy? Tried. Sanctions? Tried. Targeted strikes on nuclear facilities? Israel tried multiple times, set the program back, never ended it. The JCPOA? Iran used the sanctions relief to fund Hezbollah, accelerate ballistic missile development, and maintain centrifuge manufacturing capability.
The argument that regime change is destabilizing assumes the current situation is stable. It isn't. Iran-backed forces killed hundreds of American servicemembers in Iraq and Syria since 2003. Hezbollah transformed Lebanon into a failed state. The Houthis shut down Red Sea shipping lanes for months. Hamas launched October 7. All of this funded, trained, and directed from Tehran. The "stability" we're protecting by avoiding regime change is a fiction — it's actually managed chaos that bleeds American interests and regional partners year after year.
Pete Buttigieg, who served exactly eight months in Afghanistan as a naval intelligence officer before entering politics, told a television audience last week that this is a "war of choice." Everything is a war of choice in that framing. America chose not to fight in 1938. That choice had consequences. The choice to limit engagement with the Islamic Republic has had consequences for forty-five years. At some point, the choice not to act is the more consequential choice.
What Comes After
Regime change in Iran does not mean American occupation of Iran. It means the collapse or transformation of the Islamic Republic's governing structure — which could happen through military pressure, internal revolt, or both simultaneously. The Iranian population is not the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Protests in 2009, 2019, and 2022 demonstrated that enormous segments of Iranian society reject the regime. Mahsa Amini's murder by morality police in September 2022 triggered one of the largest protest waves in Iranian history. The people are not the problem. The structure of clerical authoritarianism is the problem.
A post-Islamic Republic Iran — whatever form it takes — would not automatically become a liberal democracy. That's not the standard. The standard is: does it continue funding terrorism, pursuing nuclear weapons, and directing proxy forces against American interests and allies? A weakened or collapsed Islamic Republic does not. Even a nationalist successor government in Tehran would have different incentives than the current regime, which derives its legitimacy from anti-American and anti-Israel ideology.
The endgame in Iran has always been the same. Every analyst who's thought seriously about the problem reaches the same conclusion: no arrangement short of fundamental regime transformation produces durable regional stability. American policy has simply lacked the political will to say it out loud. Operation Epic Fury may be the moment that changes. If it is, it won't be a mistake. It will be the end of a forty-five-year mistake.
