If Tehran Survives

Three weeks into Operation Epic Fury, it becomes clearer the campaign has been devastating by any historical standard of sustained air operations: more than seventy percent of Iran’s ballistic missile launchers neutralized, the enrichment infrastructure at Natanz further degraded and Fordow rendered inoperable, the naval capacity to threaten commercial shipping functionally eliminated, and the defense industrial base targeted with a systematic thoroughness designed to impose years-long reconstitution timelines. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is dead, and the upper tier of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) command—the defense minister, the IRGC commander, and the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council among them—has been killed in the same campaign. What Epic Fury has not, yet, accomplished is regime collapse.

The Islamic Republic has not fallen, and it is important to consider the possible consequences of an enduring, if severely degraded, one. Partial military success is unlikely to result in either any sort of agreement with the United States, either a Venezuela-like implicit understanding or an overt Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)-like deal. Instead, it will likely yield an IRGC-dominated, humiliation-driven republic whose survival logic points toward nuclear reconstitution. This would produce a more structurally dangerous regional order with costs that distribute unevenly across the region: an accelerated Saudi proliferation timeline accelerated; an Emirati stability premium repriced in ways that the United Arab Emirates’ (U.A.E.) economy cannot fully absorb; a Qatari liquefied natural gas (LNG) risk environment whose fragility European buyers have not priced into their long-term supply assumptions; and a deepening of Chinese diplomatic leverage that inconclusive American military action will have produced the conditions for.