The Hormuz Strait Drone Attack and the Folly of Negotiating with Iran

I ran’s drone attack Thursday on a cargo ship passing through the Strait of Hormuz illustrates the folly of the Trump administration’s current posture toward the Iranian regime. (For more on the strike, see Noah’s excellent post.)

For all the pollyannish blather of President Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and other administration officials, there has been no regime change in Iran. Many regime leaders were killed at the beginning of combat operations in late February, in combined American-Israeli operations. The dead include Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and many top commanders of the regime’s backbone, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It’s also possible that Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, the son and supposed successor of the former ruler, is no longer among the living; he is reported to have been severely wounded during the aerial attack that killed his father and has not publicly been seen alive since then, although written statements continue to be issued in his name. (Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the Senate in early June that he believes the younger Khamenei is probably alive and increasingly engaged in regime business, but there has been no visual corroboration of that assessment.)

Despite these severe setbacks, the regime as founded in 1979 by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini endures. Indeed, even though the IRGC holds the whip hand — it’s the regime’s main fighting force and controls about a third of the Iranian economy — it and other top regime figures moved rapidly to name Mojtaba Khamenei as his father’s successor, even though he has been in no condition to rule (if he’s alive). Now, there could be a host of strategic reasons for this; for example, Iran’s aggressive and deceptive negotiating ploys have been helped at times by seeming American uncertainty over who is actually calling the shots. But one undoubted reason for swiftly elevating Mojtaba, a longtime IRGC intimate, was to establish for all to see that the regime as originally designed remains in charge, even though it has sustained profound damage during the war.

The Khomeini regime’s intact survival is significant. It remains as conceived: an apocalyptic sharia-supremacist entity with aspirations to spread its Islamic revolution beyond its borders, throughout the Middle East, and ultimately throughout the world. The regime is inherently anti-American because it sees the United States as the chief obstacle to its hegemonic ambitions. “Death to America” is not a slogan; it is a foundational principle for the regime that came into being by attacking the American embassy in Tehran, holding U.S. hostages, and having the Hezbollah militia it established kill hundreds of Americans.

An unsurprising (at least to me) coalition of what is increasingly the mainstream Democratic Party (antisemitic progressives seamlessly aligned with Islamists for whom Jew-hatred is doctrinal) and an antisemitic fringe of Trump’s MAGA base would have us believe that the hostility between Iran and America is all about America doing Israel’s bidding. This is as objectively wayward as it is historically ignorant.

The Shiite Iranian regime’s dedication to the goal of annihilating Israel is scripturally based, sharia-supremacist doctrine (as it is for the Muslim Brotherhood and other Sunni Islamists who have habitually collaborated with Iran in this shared goal, despite the centuries-old Shiite/Sunni rivalry). The Iranian regime’s main enemy, however, is the United States as leader of the hated West. Yes, sharia supremacists abhor Israel, but they define themselves as anti-Western. Their obsession with governing their affairs under Islamic law, wherever in the world they form communities, is specifically intended to ward off what they see as the Judeo-Christian West’s inherent corruption. (As President Trump’s pal, Turkey’s sharia-supremacist emir Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has opined, the expectation that Muslims who choose to live in the West should assimilate is a “crime against humanity.”)

It is not for nothing that sharia supremacists refer to America as “the head of the snake” — the “great Satan” to Israel’s “little Satan.” When the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989 and then soon collapsed, jihadists convinced themselves that, in a world divided into two superpowers, they had toppled the more formidable one and should now set their sights on the other. Osama bin Laden took the jihad global against America; Israel was a subordinate issue. Al-Qaeda formed alliances with Iran and Hezbollah in the early 1990s and proceeded to conduct serial strikes against America. And if Israel disappeared tomorrow, Iran would still be crying “Death to America” — indeed, even more triumphally because Israel’s demise, just like the Soviet Union’s, would fortify them in the conceit that they will ultimately prevail.

Notwithstanding how “really cool” top administration officials may think it is to have face-to-face meetings with regime honchos, and how persuaded the vice president is that “deconfliction” will arrive if Iran would just “send somebody from the IRGC to go hang out in Doha [Qatar] with somebody from CENTCOM,” the Iranian regime remains rabidly anti-American. Moreover, entirely consistent with its 47-year history of domestic monstrousness, it has recently killed upwards of 40,000 Iranians, precisely to cling to power. This is not a regime with which the United States can make a stable deal — to say nothing of a pact that is so clearly in America’s interests that it could be approved by two-thirds of the Senate, as the Constitution mandates.

The Trump administration, like the Obama and Biden administrations whose lead it is increasingly following, can eschew a policy of regime change. (After the president beat his chest about regime change and encouraged Iranians to rise up, today’s evolved Trumpian position is “I never cared about regime change.”) But as long as the regime exists, regardless of our policy toward it, incorrigible hatred of the United States will remain its policy toward us.

That’s the fatal flaw in the “forever wars” demagogy peddled by the president and his base: The enemy gets a vote. If the enemy decides to keep fighting and sabotaging while you decide to walk away, you don’t end a forever war — you get your ass kicked. Not militarily, of course; generally, the politicians at the negotiating table give away the advantages hard-won by our far superior fighting forces.

That is to say, it’s self-defeating even to indulge the notion that we should be negotiating with an apocalyptic, America-hating regime that is despised by most of its more than 90 million subjects — to say nothing of the notion that we could make a stable deal with them that would serve American interests.

To repeat what many of us Iran hawks have said for decades, the realization that America’s objective must be regime change has never been a call for a military invasion and occupation of the country. To be sure, the use of force should never be taken off the table, and occasional military engagements will be necessary. President Trump’s limited strikes to set back Iran’s nuclear weapons program, after Israel dismantled the regime’s air defenses, strongly served our vital national interests; to cite another example, so did President Reagan’s sinking of most of Iran’s navy in the 1988 tanker war, when Iran tried to assert control of the Hormuz Strait. But it is essential to turn every lever of U.S. government power against the regime in an effort to make it a pariah and eventually break it.

The delusion that apocalyptic Iran can be dealt with as if it were governed by a normal regime that will come around any day now if just given the kind of incentives that move normal regimes may be modern history’s most predictable abject failure. It still is.