Outside the Beltway

Iran War Roundup

Preliminary thoughts from several columnists.

James Joyner · Saturday, February 28, 2026 · 9 comments

In the original tradition of web-logging, I’m excerpting some of the columns I’m reading on the war below. Not only will they provide varying perspectives, but a record of what people were saying at the outset.

Writing this morning:

Tom Nichols, The Atlantic (“Trump’s Enormous Gamble on Regime Change in Iran“):

This is not a preemptive war. It is a war of choice, a discretionary war. It is a war for regime change. Many of Iran’s 92 million people want the regime removed. But it is far from certain that this will be the outcome.

[…]

“[S]uccess” is not impossible—if by “success” we mean the fall of the ayatollahs and the rise of a better, more humane, pro-Western government that does not seek to destabilize the Middle East; dominate Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen; and eradicate Israel. But the path to that success is exceedingly narrow and mined with significant hazards. Destroying the regime’s capabilities is relatively easy, but nothing permanent—as Americans learned in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan—is achieved by bouncing rubble and piling up bodies. Destroying the regime itself is a far trickier business; dictatorships have a high pain tolerance, especially when the hapless citizens, not the leaders, bear the brunt of that pain.

[…]

America twice had its hands full in Iraq, a nation of 37 million, even with the assistance of several countries. The U.S., France, and Britain managed to subdue tiny Libya, a nation of 7.5 million, and left its dictator to be raped and beaten in the streets. This time, conditions are different and more challenging: The target is two and a half times the size of Iraq, America has exactly one openly declared ally in this enterprise, no serious armed rebel force exists in Iran, and no coalition of nations is assembling to march into Tehran.

[…]

Here’s one way, however, all of this can go right: The air campaign is so well designed, so precise, and so thorough that it strips the regime of its major military formations and its security police. Some of the top leaders are killed in at least a partial decapitation, and other forces begin to defect to the side of the people en masse. Rebel groups form quickly and efficiently to seize weapons and set up alternative ruling councils across the country. They cooperate with one another, rather than bicker or actually fight. Outside powers in the region stay away and let the Iranian people sort out their destiny. Peace, of a sort, comes to Iran.

Unfortunately, the ways that all of this can go wrong are more numerous and more likely. 

Karim Sadjadpour, The Atlantic (“The Epic Miscalculations of Trump and Khamenei“):

“On the eve of each war at least one of the nations miscalculated its bargaining power,” wrote the historian Geoffrey Blainey in his book The Causes of War. “In that sense every war comes from a misunderstanding. And in that sense every war is an accident.”

[…]

Trump has long approached high-stakes geopolitics with an amateur’s certainty. According to a 2016 account in The New Yorker, as far back as 1990, Trump offered a U.S. nuclear negotiator unsolicited advice on how to handle the Soviets: Arrive late, stand over the counterpart, stick a finger in his chest, and say, “Fuck you!”

Trump saw the complexities of enriched uranium and ballistic missiles as secondary to the theater of dominance. And in that arena, he believes he has the upper hand against Iran—a view reinforced by his experience, including his 2018 withdrawal from President Obama’s nuclear deal, his 2020 killing of Iran’s top general, and his 2025 bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites, all gambits that cost him little.

[…]

Hard power alone can depose a regime, but it is notoriously incapable of cultivating a better successor. Trump’s simple admonition to the Iranian people on the night of the strikes reflected this gap between destructive capacity and strategic vision. “When we are finished,” he told them,  “take over your government. It will be yours to take.”

The immediate trigger for this crisis was the massacre of tens of thousands of Iranians whom Trump incited, and then abandoned, and now has called upon to rise up. He has chosen military action with an unclear endgame, relegating the U.S. military, regional partners, and 92 million Iranians to serve as anxious participants in an unscripted geopolitical drama. That is the ultimate hubris: a president more focused on the spectacle of power than its consequences, facing off against a martyrdom-obsessed theocrat who is more prepared to see his nation burn than his own power extinguished.

Nancy Youssef and Jonathan Lemire, The Atlantic (“War With Iran Has Begun. Where Does It End?“):

The strikes were welcomed by Iranians so fed up with the regime that they took to the streets in unprecedented numbers late last year and early this one. Many believed that their push for regime change could not happen with protests alone. The Iranian government crushed the movement with merciless force, leaving tens of thousands of people estimated dead. Despite the lethal risks protesters face, Trump—standing against a black backdrop at Mar-a-Lago while wearing a white USA hat and no tie in his early-morning address—urged the people to seize control. Left unclear was how that might happen. The regime, which has been entrenched since the 1979 revolution that overthrew the Shah, controls every lever of government and national security. Before the war, experts had said that if the regime fell, it could as easily be replaced by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or other government factions as by democracy-minded Iranian civilians.

[…]

Over his two terms, Trump has developed a taste for flexing U.S. military muscle, with strikes over the past year in Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Somalia, Nigeria, and on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean. He appears to have concluded that as long as U.S. military intervention doesn’t involve thousands of ground troops or protracted strikes over years, it can be politically beneficial and send a message of military might to China and Russia.

[…]

“Iran is ready for a generational event that is going to decide the future of the country,” Vali Nasr, a professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, told us. “The U.S. is not ready psychologically for anything that is more than a 24-hour news cycle.”

Writing before the attacks:

Fareed Zakaria, WaPo (“‘Bomb and hope’ is not a strategy“):

Even if the U.S. unleashes a devastating set of strikes that kill many top Iranian officials, including the supreme leader, the most likely result is that the Iranian military will take greater control of the society. In a war, soldiers rule. The mullahs may be pushed aside and Iran’s current hybrid regime — part clerical, part military — might give way to a more conventional officer-led government. That is an unlikely path to liberal democracy. But if democratizing Iran is the objective of the Trump administration, it should state it clearly, plan for it, help encourage an opposition, search for leaders and provide them with assistance. Bomb and hope is not a strategy.

The greatest theorist of war, Carl von Clausewitz, insisted that military might must be directed by a clear political objective. Fighting without that clarity, he explained, risks turning war into aimless violence whose results are decided by chance. Washington’s policymakers must pause and answer a simple question: What exact end-state are we seeking, and how will military action achieve it? Vague goals — “degrade,” “deter,” “change behavior” — invite mission creep. If the aim is to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, then the goal is a deal with inspections to ensure that conditions are being met. (Yes, just like the one Trump pulled out of.) If the aim is regime change, then Washington needs to prepare for a full-spectrum strategy that accepts political responsibility for the aftermath. Anything less is a gamble with American troops and millions of people’s futures.

The Economist (“Iranians’ angry defiance is growing once again“):

If Iran’s rulers thought that their critics would be silenced by January’s carnage, they have miscalculated.

[…]

As in the shah’s final months, when his troops killed protesters, albeit in smaller numbers, grief has curdled into angry defiance. At memorials marking the 40th day after the slaughter of demonstrators, mothers led mourners in chants against “the dictator”. Most speak not of martyrs, the regime’s term, but of “mutilated flowers”. It is Ramadan, Muslims’ holy month of fasting, but some Iranians denounce not only the theocracy that terrorises them but the religion in whose name it rules.

After the killing of thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—some Iranians wonder if violence, whether inflicted by America or improvised at home, could save them. Years of economic impoverishment and state repression and months of worries about impending war have fuelled a yearning to see the regime gone at any cost. To prepare for the next slaughter, some are buying weapons. Bootleggers running home-delivery of alcohol now also peddle guns. “It is the most perilous moment in the Islamic Republic’s history,” says a cleric with ties to the family of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

[…]

Iran’s leaders do not believe air strikes could destroy their sprawling, decentralised regime, even if they could take out individuals. After all, Israel failed to unseat Hamas definitively with two years of pulverising little Gaza flat. Iran is 4,500 times larger, strewn with mountain hideouts and far more heavily armed. America’s dispatch of two carrier strike groups to its shores has unnerved some within the regime, but some generals almost sound flattered. When America and Israel staged military exercises in the Red Sea, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (irgc), Mr Khamenei’s praetorian guard, sent its navy to briefly close the Strait of Hormuz and conduct war games with Russia. Hoping, perhaps, to embroil America in another war, Russia is apparently providing Iran with laser-guided shoulder-borne missiles.