Section VII: The Modern War on Iran

The good news is this: in 2026, the regime is weaker than at any point since the revolution. The Axis of Resistance is degraded. The economy is collapsing. The population has rejected the ideology. And the United States — under a second Trump administration committed to maximum pressure — has the leverage to finish the job, provided we understand that the goal is not war with Iran but the liberation of Iran by Iranians from the regime that has held the country hostage for 47 years.

Maximum Pressure 45 and the Biden Pause

The first Trump administration's "Maximum Pressure" campaign (2018-2021) was the most coherent strategy any U.S. president has executed against the Islamic Republic. It rested on four pillars: withdrawal from the JCPOA on May 8, 2018, with reimposition of all U.S. nuclear-related sanctions; designation of the IRGC as a Foreign Terrorist Organization on April 8, 2019, the first time the United States had designated another country's official military as an FTO (U.S. Department of State, 2019); a collapse of Iranian oil exports from approximately 2.5 million barrels per day in mid-2018 to under 300,000 by mid-2020; and the Soleimani strike on January 3, 2020 — the assassination of the architect of the proxy network and the most powerful general in the Iranian state, demonstrating that the regime's senior leadership were not invulnerable.

The campaign was working. The regime's foreign-currency reserves collapsed, the rial lost approximately 80 percent of its value, and the IRGC's external operations budget was demonstrably constrained.

The Biden administration (2021-2025) effectively suspended Maximum Pressure, declining to enforce oil sanctions against Chinese refineries that purchased Iranian crude through obfuscated "ghost fleet" tankers. Iranian oil exports recovered to over 1.5 million barrels per day by 2023, with revenue funding the rebuild of the proxy network, the acceleration of enrichment to 60 percent, and the missile and drone arsenal used against Israel in April and October 2024. The strategic lesson is unambiguous: sanctions work when they are enforced and fail when they are not.

The Abraham Accords and the Sunni-Israeli-American Axis

The Abraham Accords, announced in August 2020 and signed at the White House on September 15, 2020, normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, followed by Sudan and Morocco (Abraham Accords, Wikipedia, n.d.). For the first time since the 1948 founding of Israel, a coalition of Sunni Arab states publicly recognized that the strategic threat to the region was Iran, not the Jewish state. The Accords realigned the Middle East along a Sunni-Israeli-American axis against Iran. Saudi-Israeli normalization was, by October 2023, in advanced negotiation; the October 7 attack was in significant part a Hamas (and, by extension, Iranian) attempt to derail it.

The Axis of Resistance Collapses, 2023-2024

Beginning in October 2023 and accelerating through 2024, the Iranian proxy network sustained the most devastating sequence of operational losses in its history. Hamas's military structure was destroyed in Gaza; senior leadership including Mohammed Deif (military commander) and Yahya Sinwar (overall leader, killed October 16, 2024) was eliminated.

Hezbollah was decapitated. The September 17-18, 2024 simultaneous detonation of approximately 5,000 booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies distributed through Hezbollah's procurement network killed at least 37 and wounded approximately 3,000 — the largest single operational success against a non-state actor in the history of intelligence work. Nine days later, on September 27, 2024, an Israeli F-15I strike destroyed Hezbollah's underground headquarters in Beirut's Dahieh suburb, killing Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, Southern Front commander Ali Karaki, and visiting IRGC deputy commander Abbas Nilforoushan (2024 Hezbollah headquarters strike, Wikipedia, n.d.).

The Assad regime collapsed. On December 8, 2024, twelve days after Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and allied factions launched an offensive from Idlib, Damascus fell. Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia. Iran's land bridge through Syria to Hezbollah — the supply corridor that had sustained the proxy network for forty years — was severed. The IRGC evacuated its facilities (Fall of the Assad regime, Wikipedia, n.d.).

Iran's air defenses were crippled. Israeli strikes on October 26, 2024, destroyed the S-300 air-defense systems guarding Iran's most sensitive nuclear and military facilities, leaving the country exposed to follow-on operations. The Ring of Fire is broken. The regime that built it spent forty years arming and funding it and watched it disintegrate in fourteen months.

Economic Collapse

Even before the proxy losses, Iran's domestic economy was in free fall. Inflation has run above 40 percent annually since 2022. The rial, which traded at approximately 32,000 to the dollar in 2017, traded above 700,000 to the dollar by early 2025 — a more than 95 percent collapse in purchasing power. Youth unemployment exceeds 25 percent. Capital flight is estimated in the tens of billions annually. The regime now subsidizes basic foodstuffs from a treasury increasingly emptied by the cost of sustaining a now-degraded proxy network and an enrichment program that produces no electricity.

The Iranian People Have Already Voted with Their Streets

The Iranian people have not consented to this regime. The historical record of their rejection is unbroken. In 2009, the Green Movement saw millions protest the fraudulent re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; the regime killed dozens and imprisoned thousands. In 2017-2018, economic protests that began in Mashhad spread to over 80 cities, with chants explicitly targeting Khamenei and the IRGC. In November 2019 — "Bloody November" — protests triggered by a fuel-price hike spread to over 100 cities. Reuters reported, based on three anonymous Iranian Interior Ministry sources, that approximately 1,500 protesters were killed in a single week; Amnesty International documented 321 deaths by name (Amnesty International, 2020; Axios, 2019). The regime imposed a near-total nationwide internet shutdown to conceal the killings.

In 2022-2023, the "Woman, Life, Freedom" uprising followed the September 16, 2022 death in police custody of 22-year-old Mahsa (Zhina) Amini, arrested by the morality police for "improper" hijab. Nationwide protests demanded the abolition of mandatory hijab, the morality police, and the regime itself. Rights groups documented at least 551 killed, including 68 children; thousands were imprisoned and at least nine protesters executed (Mahsa Amini protests, Wikipedia, n.d.; Amnesty International, 2023).

The slogan Zan, Zendegi, Azadi — Woman, Life, Freedom — is, in plain terms, the political program of an Iranian population that has had enough. More than 70 percent of Iran's population is under 35 years old. They have known nothing but the Islamic Republic and they have decisively rejected it.

A Strategy for Victory — Six Pillars

Victory is achievable. It does not require an American invasion of Iran. It requires the United States to enable the Iranian people to do what they are already trying to do.

First, ruthless sanctions enforcement. Iranian oil revenue is the regime's lifeline. The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) must aggressively sanction the Chinese refineries — primarily small "teapot" refineries in Shandong — that purchase 90 percent of Iranian oil exports, and the "ghost fleet" tankers that transport it. Secondary sanctions on Chinese banks that finance the trade are the tested lever; Executive Orders 13599 and 13902 provide the authority.

Second, targeted military pressure on the nuclear program. Iran's enrichment capacity is concentrated at Natanz (above-ground centrifuge halls and an underground enrichment hall) and Fordow (a hardened mountain facility). The U.S. GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator is the only conventional weapon that can credibly destroy Fordow. The credible threat — and, if necessary, the use — of this capability against the enrichment program, coordinated with Israeli operations, is the only thing that has demonstrably constrained Iranian behavior.

Third, cyber operations. Stuxnet (deployed and discovered in 2010) destroyed approximately 1,000 IR-1 centrifuges at Natanz and set the Iranian program back by an estimated two years (Stuxnet, Wikipedia, n.d.; IEEE Spectrum, n.d.). It was the first demonstration that a cyber operation could produce a kinetic strategic effect. The follow-on offensive cyber posture against Iranian command-and-control, financial systems, and nuclear infrastructure remains the lowest-risk, highest-leverage tool in the American arsenal.

Fourth, support for Iranian opposition voices. The regime's most paralyzing fear is the loss of monopoly over the Iranian information environment. Restoring funding for the U.S. Agency for Global Media (Voice of America Persian, Radio Farda), supporting Persian-language exile broadcasters, and providing satellite-internet infrastructure (Starlink terminals smuggled into Iran) to defeat regime internet shutdowns are documented force multipliers for domestic protest movements. Reza Pahlavi, the exiled Crown Prince and son of the last Shah, has emerged as the most recognizable opposition figure with cross-ideological appeal inside Iran.

Fifth, disrupt the proxy networks. The 2024 sequence demonstrated that Iran's proxies are not invincible. Sustained pressure on Iraqi Shia militias (which still occasionally attack U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria), Houthi maritime capabilities (which still close the Red Sea), and Hezbollah's reconstruction (which Iran is attempting through Iraqi land routes following Syria's loss) prevents the rebuild.

Sixth, diplomatic isolation. Every diplomatic and economic relationship the regime maintains with a non-aligned state is a source of survival. Sustained American pressure on European banks, on third-country normalization of relations, and on multilateral institutions (the IAEA, UN human-rights mechanisms) constrains the regime's room to maneuver.

The Lessons of the Soviet Collapse

The Soviet Union did not collapse because Ronald Reagan invaded Moscow. It collapsed because of three reinforcing pressures: a fundamentally non-functional command economy, a generational loss of belief in the ruling ideology, and sustained external strategic and economic pressure that the Soviet system could not match. The combination produced an internal collapse that the West neither caused alone nor could have produced alone.

The Iranian regime presents the same three vulnerabilities in 2026, and they are even more acute than the Soviet case. The economy is in collapse, not merely stagnant. The generational rejection is overt and active, not merely cynical. And the external pressure — sanctions, proxy degradation, military deterrence, information operations — is finally being applied in a coordinated way for the first time since 2020.

Regime Change Without War — Returning the Civilization to the Iranians

The strategic objective is regime change in Iran — but not by American invasion. The objective is the conditions under which the Iranian people themselves can do what the Czechs did in 1989, what the East Germans did at the Berlin Wall, what the Romanians did to Ceaușescu, and what the Iranians themselves attempted in 1979 before their revolution was hijacked by Khomeini. The role of the United States is not to choose the next Iranian government. It is to make the current Iranian regime untenable so that the next Iranian government — chosen by Iranians — can be born.

Iran is a civilization 2,500 years older than the Islamic Republic that holds it captive. The Iranian people are the heirs of Cyrus the Great, who liberated the Jews from Babylonian captivity and whose Cylinder is read at the United Nations as one of the first declarations of human rights. They are the descendants of Ferdowsi, who saved the Persian language from extinction. They are the inventors of the qanat, the chahar bagh, and modern algebra. They are not the regime. The regime is a 47-year aberration imposed on a 2,500-year civilization. The American task is to help the civilization recover itself.

That is the path to victory. And it is closer than it has been at any point since November 4, 1979.