The Wishful Thinking of Surgical Strikes

‘T his is not a regime change war,” said Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, “but the regime has changed.” We can change Iran without changing it. It’s a magical form of surgical strikes. The hostile theocratic state remains what it is at the cellular level, but the violent application of force changes its comportment, its character, its geopolitical orientation — call it the trans-ing of Iran.

President Trump and military planners seem to have carried into Iran confidence born of their operation in Caracas earlier this year, in which special forces and a highly calibrated air assault led to the arrest and removal of Nicolás Maduro. In Venezuela, the U.S. government then worked with former Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, as acting president. Trump said the U.S. had identified a number of people who might lead Iran going forward but admitted they might have all been killed in the initial barrage of strikes.

All the commentators cheering Donald Trump for his decision to join Israel in this joint attack on Iran are of course correct that Trump never ran as a principled noninterventionist or proposed a Jeffersonian foreign policy. He was always publicly committed to preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. He has now accepted as a corollary of this that Iran must be denied a certain level of conventional missiles, which can strike Israel or U.S. forward bases in the Middle East to deter or punish the U.S. and Israel for attacking its nuclear program.

So far, administration officials have tried to stress that this will be a limited operation. They want the signals out there: This isn’t Iraq. Some officials have said it could be a few days. Others said four weeks. Still others said eight weeks. Trump has stoked desires for regime change — calling the Iranian people to rise up — even as he has disclaimed it as a direct U.S. war aim.

It is obvious that Trump and his administration don’t want to test the impatience of the American people. They don’t want a drawn-out conflict, and they are vowing no troops on the ground, unless it’s absolutely necessary, which they, uh, say it probably won’t be. As with his tariff policies, Trump seems to have launched this without one end point in mind, instead hoping to shake up the status quo and see what options become available to him.

Incidentally, this puts potential critics of the Iran intervention on the back foot; they can’t entirely know what they are criticizing. Is the president simply going to leave the Iranian army in place, and a functioning state, and hope that the players deeper on the bench are so cowed by this demonstration of force that they change the regime’s behavior in a fundamental way? Or is the president giving a weak regime a final push, hoping for the Iranian people to rise up, throw it down, and reconstruct a modern nonclerical state that simply joins the commercial rush of the rest of the region? Without the administration fully articulating the ends, it becomes almost impossible to judge whether the means are sufficient to get us there.

And yet, some of us remain skeptics. Trump had originally talked about his June 2025 strikes on Iran with an air of finality. Now, suddenly, the administration has thrown into doubt how much was accomplished. Further, while Trump has learned that Americans don’t want to make the commitments in blood and treasure for a major land invasion, occupation, and reconstruction of Iraq, has he forgotten the lessons learned prior to this?

After all, one reason we went into Iraq is that Bill Clinton’s foreign policy of bombing Iraq periodically and regularly, while maintaining a no-fly zone, had not really changed the character or orientation of the regime. Air power alone could perhaps keep the Iraqis boxed in, but it didn’t fundamentally weaken the government’s rule. Just as Trump is now, Clinton was trying to manage American public opinion, which only approves of military engagements it understands well and which had lashed out at him over dead troops in Somalia early in his administration.

We now seem to be going back to the 1990s, relying on air power and local proxies. Color me skeptical. As in Somalia, and Libya, we never seem satisfied with the results of just applying air power. As with other trans surgeries, I predict this operation will require many more in the future to prevent reversion or bleeding out.