Good Tactics Do Not Add Up to a Strategy on Iran

My take on Operation Epic Fury.

Photo by mdreza jalali on Unsplash

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has not had a lot of normal weekends over the past six months. This past one was supposed to be an exception, but that is apparently not how 2026 works.

Donald Trump decided to join Israel in launching a decapitation strike on Iran. The decapitation part has been successful, in a manner that echoes what happened before the attack on Venezuela — with superior intelligence and tactics on display in the initial wave of airstrikes.

The thing is, the United States and Israel are being super-vague about what happens next. And that indicates some piss-poor strategic thinking on the part of the Trump administration.

Consider, for example, what Trump told the New York Times late on Sunday night:

The president offered a variety of often inconsistent visions of how a new government could take shape after the targeted killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who ruled the country for more than three decades until he was killed by an airstrike on Saturday.

When pressed on his plans for a transition of power, Mr. Trump said he hoped Iran’s elite military forces — including hardened officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who have held substantial influence and profited from the existing regime — would simply turn over their weapons to the Iranian populace.

“They would really surrender to the people, if you think about it,” he said.

It was those same security forces — in particular, the Basij, which organizes local militia — that opened fire on street protesters in January and killed thousands.

Then he offered a very different model of what the transition of power in Iran might look like, referring repeatedly to his experience in Venezuela after he ordered a Delta Force team to seize Mr. Maduro.

“What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario,” Mr. Trump said.

His answer implied that what worked in Venezuela would work in Iran, a nation with about three times the population and a military and clerical leadership that has ruled with increasing repression since the 1979 revolution. Over the past several weeks, Mr. Trump has repeatedly brought up Venezuela as the model of a successful operation and hoped to replicate aspects of it in Iran, identifying leadership that would be more cooperative and friendly to the United States.

But he has been told by his advisers that the vast differences in cultures and history made it virtually impossible to apply the strategy used in Venezuela — in which the existing government was kept in place, after it agreed to take instructions from Washington — and try to replicate it in Tehran.

Nonetheless, Mr. Trump appears enamored of using a Venezuela-like model in Iran.

To put it bluntly, this is analogical reasoning at its dumbest.

Iran is not Venezuela in a variety of ways. Iran has more potent military capabilities, allowing the regime to strike back and kill U.S. soldiers. Trump might claim that the U.S. and Israel can maintain an air assault for 4-5 weeks, but reporting suggests that both countries have limited stockpiles of missile interceptors, and Iran has a stockpile of missiles and drones to fire.

Also, Iran’s state apparatus is cruel and repressive but has also been institutionalized for more than four decades. This makes it harder for decapitation to work as a strategy. As Reuters reported this weekend, “the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency assessed that even if Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in the operation, he could be replaced by hardline figures from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps “ Trump might want to replicate his Venezuela model, but — to repeat a theme — Iran is not Venezuela. Heck, even Marco Rubio acknowledged in January Senate testimony that regime change in Iran would be '“far more complex” than Venezuela.

Trump’s remarks also put the lie to the notion that Trump really wants to foment democratic regime change in Iran. As the Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum explains, whatever words Trump says to that effect is belied by his actions and non-actions over the past year:

The second Trump administration has gone much further in the opposite direction, actually dismantling tools that could have helped promote civic engagement and build a united opposition in Iran. The administration has taken money away from Iranian-human-rights-monitoring groups and defunded media projects. Under the leadership of the former Arizona political candidate Kari Lake, the U.S. Agency for Global Media has prevented Radio Farda, the Farsi-language channel of the U.S. broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, from using American transmission equipment.

Voice of America, the U.S. government’s other Persian-language channel, cut back coverage and lost credibility by producing partisan broadcasts…. VOA lost ground to the Saudi-funded channel Iran International. Lake also cut funding for another agency, the Open Technology Fund, dedicated to providing virtual private networks and satellite access to Iranians, among others. That decision might also help keep Iranians inside the country isolated from the large dissident movement in the diaspora.

As the Financial Times’ Gideon Rachmam notes, “The US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003 underlined the dangers of ‘regime change’ wars. But those operations look meticulously planned, compared to the current US and Israeli assault on Iran…. The hope seems to be that the decapitation of the Iranian leadership, and the destruction of the regime’s military might, will lead to some kind of organic and spontaneous transition to a new political system — without the need for further US intervention. But there is little reason to believe that will work.”

So where does this leave Operation Epic Fury? It could still work out in the short run. Iran has been weakened, and as dubious as I am about the likelihood of decapitation working, Khamenei was the last of Iran’s revolutionary founders. Iran’s retaliatory strikes across the region has made it easier for the Gulf states to support the U.S. and Israeli attacks. Trump has been lucky.

Trump might say he is willing to go on a four-week bomb bender but that seems politically unlikely. Trump is engaging in a war of choice without bothering to explain to the American public why it is necessary. His administration’s efforts to justify the preventive attack do not include, you know, actual evidence. As I have written previously, Trump might not lose his MAGA base with this attack but his overall polling on this attack is pretty awful and will only trend in one direction — particularly if energy prices start to spike, more American troops die and the war spreads across the region.

The question to ask is how Trump responds if things get messier.