The U.S. and Israeli conflict with Iran may be departing from the cooling phase it entered in passing weeks, when the Trump administration ended its aggressive military bombing campaign and instead used sanctions and a blockade on the Strait of Hormuz to force the Islamic Republic into a beneficial negotiating posture.
Last week, President Donald Trump rejected the Islamic Republic’s offers to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which include no immediate concessions on their nuclear aspirations, including the fate of 440 kilograms of 60% enriched nuclear material.
In a National Security Presidential Memorandum from February, President Donald Trump stated that it is “in the national interest to impose maximum pressure on the Iranian regime to end its nuclear threat, curtail its ballistic missile program, and stop its support for terrorist groups.”
After receiving a subsequent offer from Iranian leadership in recent days, the U.S. launched its “Project Freedom” campaign Monday, offering to help ships navigate the Strait of Hormuz by providing insight on avoiding underwater mines and remaining in the vicinity to support any vessels targeted by Iran.
As part of the effort, the U.S. military announced that it destroyed six Iranian boats on Monday after Iran attacked U.S. Navy and commercial vessels with drones, cruise missiles, and boats.
Iran also launched missiles at the United Arab Emirates, the first attack on the nation since Iran and the U.S. signed a ceasefire on April 8.
Fox News’ Chief Foreign Correspondent Trey Yingst reported that Trump promised Iranian leaders that if they attack any U.S. vessel implementing Project Freedom, “they’ll be blown off the face of the earth.” As a result, Iranian leaders have reportedly been “much more malleable” in talks.
With Iran and the U.S. once again exchanging fire, it remains unclear whether the Trump administration will resume large-scale attacks on Iranian leadership and military sites, continue to pursue an offramp through peaceful dialogue, or even reinvigorate prior efforts to support forces that may internally work against the Islamic Republic.
The Special Operations Association of America (SOAA) has rounded up insights from a host of experts about how those next choices could shape Iran’s future.
Can Military Action Lead to Success?
In March, Behnam Ben Taleblu, the Iran Program Senior Director and a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, offered four distinct scenarios for Iran’s future based on whether the U.S. carried out a four- to five-week timeline of attacking the country’s military leadership, or truly worked to take on the “apparatus of repression, to include the Basij, the police, and the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps].”
Ben Taleblu suggested that carrying out weeks of targeted strikes may “defang” the Islamic Republic’s strike capabilities and gut its nuclear program, but insisted that the regime “will still claim victory.” Ben Taleblu predicted that this would turn the regime into “a hardened pariah state with a bunker mentality,” which would continue campaign of “arrests, torture, and mass suppression” as well as have an intensified interest in pursuing a nuclear weapon “through whatever covert pathway remains available.”
Were the U.S. to maximize pressure on the Islamic Republic, Ben Taleblu predicted a future in which the Iranian deep state “opt[s] for a friendlier face at the top to create the appearance of change” but “preserve[s] the core of the system.”
For a true revolution that “offers durable relief for the Iranian people and for U.S. national security,” Ben Taleblu says an expanded military campaign would be in order, one that “shreds command and control and is paired with covert operations and an information campaign” in order to “force defections and desertions from Iran’s security forces.” Though far from a “bloodless” option, Ben Taleblu says “it is the only option that doesn’t require America or Israel to return and mow the grass every few years.”
Finally, if there is no power holder that can consolidate control, Ben Taleblu said “the result could be state collapse in a nation of 92 million.”
The National Intelligence Council warned in a February assessment that neither a limited aerial campaign nor a longer-term military campaign has resulted in lasting changes to the Islamic Republic’s government.
Future Considerations
In a New York Times editorial compilation, various writers offered their thoughts on the future of the Islamic Republic.
Like Ben Taleblu, Yasmine Farouk, the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula project director at the International Crisis Group, warned that state collapse would be disastrous, “scatter[ing] nuclear, drone, missile, cyber and proxy capabilities among the remnants of a disgruntled fallen regime, as well as aspiring militants.” Farouk also warns that a migration crisis could ensue, and “a corridor of violence and illicit trafficking in drugs, arms and humans” could form “along Iran’s already volatile borders with Pakistan and Afghanistan.”
Most contributors foresaw a future that still included the Islamic Republic.
Trita Parsi, founder and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, noted that nationalist sentiment inside Iran has grown in response to U.S. and Israeli strikes, and that concerns about a Kurdish separatist movement could be “even more consequential” for increasing Iranian support for the Islamic Republic leadership.
Ali Vaez, Iran project director for the International Crisis Group, noted that the IRGC may be the group best positioned to seize power and “rule from behind the curtain.” The possibility of disintegration is not small, with Vaez arguing that “it is conceivable that no single figure commands enough legitimacy in the corps to control it.”
Though Trump has previously implored the Iranian people to “take over” the government, Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, noted that “there is no unified opposition structure that stands ready to transform regime instability into a coherent political transition.” While Vaez says that “a democratic transition in Iran remains conceivable,” he argues that “the aperture is narrowing” if opposition forces do not “forge a pluralistic coalition, engage with factions of the existing security establishment and secure the backing of the United States, regional powers, and, above all, the Iranian people.”
Ethnic Minorities’ Role
For unification to be a possibility, the nation’s multiple ethnic groups will need to cooperate. About 60% of the country is Persian, with the remaining 40% split between Baloch, Kurd, Azeri, Baha’i, Arab, Jewish, Turkmen, Lurs, Assyrian, Armenian, and Zoroastrian minorities.
Jose Lev, a U.S. Army and Israel Defense Forces special forces veteran, argues that the regime of deceased Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “never integrated” the geographically diverse ethnicities along Iran’s borders, but “contained” the regions using “repression and force.”
Lev sees Iran’s diverse minorities as a “multi-front system waiting for synchronization,” and says that the Islamic Republic “endures because those fronts remain disconnected.”
“What follows depends as much on these regions as on the regime itself,” Lev says. “Kurdish areas could potentially shape security outcomes, Khuzestan could anchor energy, Baluchistan could define connectivity and Azeri territories could enhance Iran’s position in the Caucasus.” Smaller minority groups, he says, “could prospectively shape legitimacy and reintegration.
“Ignore them and Iran fractures. Bring them together, and they can bring down the Islamist regime itself.”
Arming the Kurds
Presently, a single ethnic group among the mosaic has been the focus of media reporting. Around ten to 15 million Iranian Kurds reside in four of Iran’s northwestern provinces For months leading up to the Feb. 28 strikes on Iran, the CIA had reportedly been arming and training Kurdish forces in hopes of “fomenting a popular uprising in Iran,” CNN reported.
Those forces would reportedly be part of “a ground operation in Western Iran,” with one source telling CNN that the Kurdish elements would “take on the Iranian security forces and pin them down to make it easier for unarmed Iranians in the major cities to turn out without getting massacred again.”
Alex Plitsas, SOAA’s board director and a CNN National Security analyst, told CNN that the effort was part of an attempt “to jump-start” the overthrow of the Islamic Republic.” The Iranian people are generally unarmed as a whole and unless the security service collapses, it’ll be difficult for them to take over unless someone arms them,” he said.
There are concerns about empowering the Kurds. Ben Taleblu has warned against “arm[ing] an ethnic insurgency,” saying that it “could easily metastasize into a long, multifront civil war or, even worse, balkanization.”
Reviving the Monarchy
Alireza Hekmatshoar, director of a Persian radio station in southern California, discussed how the death of Khamenei had led to some divisions among the 700,000-strong Iranian community in his area. While many felt “happiness and joy” at Khamenei’s death,” others were concerned about the future of the people still inside a country thrust into chaos.
The greatest point of discord among Iranian expatriates, he said, is among whom Iranians desire to lead the nation. Hekmatshoar says that most Iranians in his area favor Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former Shah of Iran, to be the country’s new leader. “Iranians here don’t want to hear anything besides: ‘Prince Reza Pahlavi is going to go back to Iran,” he explained. “They had to leave everything in Iran with Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and come to the United States. Some left their families and the Islamic Republic executed them. But because of this violence and the anger inside them, they can’t see anything else, and they can’t tolerate anything else.”
Hekmatshoar says that while he finds Pahlavi “a great alternative,” the leader “doesn’t live in Iran. We are talking about needing someone who knows people inside of Iran.” He explained that tensions are so high at the moment that Pahlavi advocates “are ready to execute [him]” for having a difference of opinion about Iran’s future leader.
Stephen Kinzer, a senior fellow at the Watson School for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, says that “hope lies with [Pahlavi], in part, because there is no other galvanizing figure among Iranian expatriates and the brave civil society leaders in Iran.” But Pahlavi is also “an unserious candidate who has little understanding of today’s Iran,” Kinzer says.
Much like Pahlavi’s father lacked legitimacy in a population that felt he was “installed and propped up by foreigners,” Kinzer says that “anyone who comes to power in Iran now on the backs of American and Israeli military power will carry the same stigma.”
Future in Question
The president’s next steps in the campaign in Iran will undoubtedly play a role in determining who will retain power in a country marked by decades of repression and ethnic division, or whether that country will collapse and sow further chaos into the region.
