We Need a Long-Term Strategy to Deal With Iran

No diplomatic agreement is going to end the war between Washington and Tehran. This conflict began decades ago, with the birth of a revolutionary Iranian movement whose teleology is defined by combating American influence, both real and perceived, at home and abroad. A formal deal may shift tensions temporarily from hot to cold, but this will only exacerbate and prolong a war that truly ends only once the Islamic Republic disappears.

Seeking to avoid this ultimate fate, Iran’s leaders are refusing any meaningful or binding concessions to the United States. After surviving the worst their mortal enemies could throw at them—and gaining a new feel for deterrence and leverage in the process—the country’s new leaders act even more emboldened and defiant than their predecessors.

The corresponding challenge for President Trump is to ignore his dealmaking instincts and buck the general trend in American statecraft that impulsively pursues grand, even transformative bargains with Tehran. He rightly excoriates the 2015 JCPOA nuclear accord but, in vowing something far better, misses an even bigger takeaway. Even if Iran’s recent shootdown of a U.S. military helicopter triggers punishing U.S. strikes, the odds are effectively zero of wrenching serious arms-control commitments out of the regime and, in the president’s words, forging “a more professional and productive” relationship going forward. At best, any scrap of paper inked by the two sides that proclaims peace for our time will merely delay this realization.

Indeed, a good agreement has been off the table ever since the JCPOA was clinched more than a decade ago. For Iran, this was the deal—full stop. In exchange for limited, brief, and reversible constraints on its atomic ambitions, it secured official blessing for its self-proclaimed “right” to unlimited nuclear infrastructure, the formal dismantling of sanctions, and an end to inquiries into its illegal bombmaking program. In so doing, it compelled the Obama team to abandon red lines that would permanently prohibit enrichment, shutter underground facilities, limit missile arsenals, and open secret sites to inspectors. Five subsequent rounds of talks with the Biden and Trump administrations, and two bouts of major conflict, have not persuaded Iran to put any of these gains up for renegotiation.

Recent talks underscore this continuity. Following the U.S. strikes on its nuclear facilities in June 2025 and the broader campaign that started in March, Tehran’s path to nuclear weapons capability is damaged but not destroyed. Thus, once again, it is angling for major sanctions relief in exchange for cosmetic concessions that do not prejudice its capacity to make nuclear fuel on its home soil. Even if the Trump administration gets everything it claims Iran has agreed to, including a long-term enrichment suspension and all known stocks of highly enriched uranium (HEU), the regime will emerge from an existential conflict with the presumptive ability to covertly produce every component of a bomb. Its covert enrichment-related facilities at “Pickaxe Mountain” and Isfahan are likely too deep for even the strongest U.S. bunker busters, and neutralizing them with ground troops was prohibitively risky for President Trump. Furthermore, international inspectors have warned for years they cannot account for all of Iran’s atomic enterprise.

Similar to the nuclear file, Tehran seems willing to fudge the official particulars of a transit regime for the Strait of Hormuz—referring to “navigational services” instead of tolls, for example—so long as a deal upholds its claim of a “right” to control access through the waterway. But the consequences of conceding this point would be more immediate than anything under discussion on the nuclear front. Iran’s pursuit of the bomb has always been a long-term play in its overarching goal to replace the United States as the dominant Middle East power. Therefore, it is something whose progress can be modulated in response to economic and military pressure. By contrast, Iran’s sudden attainment of de facto authority over a global shipping and energy chokepoint could fast-track its longstanding designs for reordering the region. With or without an agreement, Tehran currently believes that reopening the strait to normal traffic is ultimately its decision and, thus, so is any future decision to reclose it.

If it remains unchallenged, Tehran’s control over Hormuz gravely undermines the decades-old U.S.-led regional security order premised on freedom of navigation upheld by American naval supremacy. Serious as it was and could be once again, the threat to shipping from Iran’s Houthi proxies during the Israel-Hamas war was not nearly so dire. More global trade passes through Hormuz than either end of the Red Sea, and the world’s seaborne economy has alternative, if costlier, routes around the Cape of Good Hope beyond range of Houthi weapons. But Iran can cinch closed the cul-de-sac that is the Gulf and, as seen in the recent war, reliably strike pipelines bypassing the strait. Plus, a U.S.-led coalition actually fought for the Red Sea chokepoint, Bab el Mandeb.

Even with mixed results, this campaign against the Houthis still compares favorably to the decision to target Iran’s conventional navy, which was not responsible for the strait, while overlooking its “mosquito” navy and other antiship capabilities that successfully paralyzed Hormuz. In treating the destruction of Iran’s warships as an end in itself, as the administration did in making explicit parallels to World War II victories, rather than as part of a larger campaign to hold the sea, this time around the United States effectively ceded a core regional security interest to its enemy.

In a curious inversion of history, this means Tehran is now the one insisting that any agreement address regional issues. Prior to Epic Fury, Obama, Biden, and Trump (twice) each tried and failed to get Iran’s missiles and proxies on the trading block. Since the ceasefire, American officials seem to have dropped all mention of such requirements while Iran, with its new leverage over the strait, makes counterdemands that would entrench its wartime gains and alter its balance of power with the United States more fundamentally and permanently. Its official end state envisions U.S. troops leaving the region, and Israel ending operations in Lebanon as part of a blanke U.N.-endorsed guarantee of nonaggression against Iran and its Middle Eastern proxies.

Any version of this overall agreement will be far from the best option still available to the United States. Its nuclear provisions would not differ meaningfully from the 2015 JCPOA. And in handing Tehran the keys to lock up the region without a fight, Trump would become the first American president to sign away his country’s right to ply international waters freely. Throwing in the towel like this, and permitting Iran to hold Lebanon and the rest of the region hostage to its demands, would enable the regime to challenge U.S. forces, allies, and other interests at every turn.

Trump’s reluctance to be compared with President Obama has at times induced a salutary hesitance in his hunt for a deal. This stands in contrast to his eager spree of ceasefire proclamations in Gaza, South and Southeast Asia, the Caucasus, Central Africa, the Balkans—and between Israel and Iran last summer. He also should ponder the cautionary tales of Obama’s empty Syria red line and Biden’s pell-mell Afghanistan departure, both of which devalued U.S. credibility and encouraged our adversaries to launch major wars that will forever be etched into their legacies as commanders in chief.

For even greater perspective, it is helpful to ask what America’s place in the world would be, and how history would remember them, had FDR not fought to hold open the sea lanes to Britain and Australia in the dark and uncertain early days of World War II? If Truman did not launch the Berlin airlift to break Stalin’s blockade, uphold U.S. access rights to the city, and shore up the credibility of American commitments in the nascent Cold War? If he or Eisenhower signed an armistice with North Korea that evicted U.S. forces from all of East Asia?

Hopefully, the president is signaling that he has such history in mind and is not desperate for diplomacy when he downplays the war and its uncertain outcome as “not a big thing” and vows to “wipe everybody out” if Iran keeps refusing to play ball. But avoiding a bad deal and aimlessly threatening escalation are not substitutes for long-term strategy. The United States clearly needs an effective and sustainable plan to reopen Hormuz without Tehran’s sufferance, defend against aggression from a more militarized and risk-tolerant Iranian regime, and foster the conditions to collapse an Islamic Republic whose claims of recent victory do not negate its profound, enduring, and irreparable internal weaknesses.

By themselves, the U.S. blockade and other passive economic countermeasures will not achieve these goals. To be sure, the expected dangers of actively clearing the strait and its surrounding waters are not negligible. Yet this cold arithmetic also must weigh the current costs and future risks of Tehran maintaining its chokehold on vital outflows of raw materials, flouting the basic principle of free navigation, and cowing the rest of the region at its whim. The war’s revelations about U.S.-Israeli operational excellence and intelligence fusion, but also Iran’s precision strike complex, should accelerate efforts to build more resilient and integrated regional defenses under U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM).

Countering Iran over the long term will entail new thinking on U.S. regional basing options, missile defense, arms procurement and production, and combined operations in ways that share burdens more evenly among partners and enable Washington to address other pressing challenges. Though they may seem exceedingly ambitious, each of these initiatives builds on recent progress that itself seemed unimaginable not long ago. Key examples include deploying U.S. combat and refueling aircraft in Israel, away from Iran’s short-range missiles and drones, and Israel sending air defenses to the beleaguered United Arab Emirates. The United States also should redouble its productive intelligence coordination with Israel and Europe to monitor Iran’s clandestine nuclear activities, and make clear that resuming work on a bomb will once again trigger swift and intensive military action. The harder part will be summoning steady U.S. leadership to get regional and global allies, and Congress and the American public, to buy into this bold but ultimately more sustainable approach.

These measures will amount to running in place, however, without a complementary plan to hasten the downfall of a regime whose visions for America’s role in the world, the Middle East’s future, and the Iranian people’s self-determination are innately antithetical to ours. Hands-on regime change a la Iraq, and hands-off regime management a la Venezuela, are equally unviable. A middle path has never been tried, even as unprecedentedly large protests earlier this year showed how the corrupt, incompetent, and brutal Iranian regime is profoundly unable and unwilling to address its citizens’ most basic grievances. This middle path should combine U.S.-led political, economic, and psychological warfare against the regime’s internal coercive apparatus with covert, but concerted, support for resistance networks inside the country. Disintegration within sclerotic and brutal authoritarian systems is usually gradual until it’s sudden, with telltale signs often surfacing in hindsight.

Fortunately, for all its external resolve, Iran’s regime already displays fatal internal weaknesses that, if properly exploited, can finally end its perpetual war against America.