On the menu today: We don’t know how or when the U.S.-Israeli war against the Iranian regime will end. But if the mullahs and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps remain in power when the shooting stops, they will not only let out a deep sigh of relief, they will have good reasons to believe that the U.S. will never attempt a comparable operation against them again. (Israel is another story, but Israel alone is a much lesser threat to the Iranian regime than Israel working alongside the U.S. military.)
The outcome of the midterm elections is likely to at least partially impede the Trump administration’s war-fighting capacity in the final two years of his second term, and almost all the potential GOP and Democratic successors to Trump are unlikely to have much appetite for a second attempt at a war to depose the ayatollahs. The outlook for the remaining mullahs can’t be all that great right now, with the U.S. having struck more than 12,300 targets. But if they can survive this threat to their reign, they will probably never face another military challenge as severe as the current one. Read on.
American Politics and the Iran War
This is not the apex of American military power in the Middle East for the foreseeable future. But this is likely the apex of America’s willingness to use military power in the Middle East for the foreseeable future.
If the regime is left standing when the U.S. ends its military operations, it doesn’t mean they’re guaranteed to stick around for many years. When the shooting stops, Iran is extremely likely to face a dire economic situation, even worse than the one that prompted Iranians to take to the streets in January. The Iranian currency is still worth almost nothing against other currencies, and year-to-year inflation for food has been 105 percent. The dire state of Iran’s postwar economy may well spur another popular uprising against the regime, one that finishes the job. (More on the postwar Iranian economy in a moment.)
But absent that scenario, the Iranian mullahs will have demonstrated that they can take the hardest pounding that the U.S. and Israeli militaries can dish out for 38 days and counting and still hold onto power. And a variety of factors suggest that when the U.S. ceases its strikes in this current operation, they will not restart for a long while, at least not on a major scale.
The Midterms
Hopefully this current war against Iran will be long over by the time voters go to the polls in the midterm elections, and when the new congress is sworn in on January 3, 2027. (Keep in mind, early voting for the general election starts September 18 in Minnesota, South Dakota, and Virginia.)
Right now, the U.S. House of Representatives has 217 Republicans, one Republican-aligned independent (Kevin Kiley of California), 214 Democrats, and three vacancies. In the coming midterms, as of this writing, 21 Democrats and 36 Republicans are not running for reelection.
The Kalshi markets currently give Democrats an 86 percent chance of winning the House. In a Punchbowl survey of K Street insiders, 91 percent believed Democrats would win back control of the House. Even my longtime friend Hugh Hewitt thinks Republicans will “lose the [U.S.] House for sure,” and Hugh is the kind of guy who can find the smallest silver lining in the darkest cloud.
A Democratic-controlled House would have some degree of power over the defense budget in 2027, as all appropriations bills begin in that chamber. Not every Democrat in the House is a dove or resolutely opposed to military action against Iran, but ones that have been willing to vocally support strikes against Iran are few and far between.
The defense spending fights of 2027 won’t focus solely on decisions about Iran. But a Democratic-controlled House would likely be more loudly opposed to taking additional strikes against the regime in 2027 and 2028, assuming the regime survives this current conflict, and they would have some degree of leverage through spending fights. If Democrats win control of the Senate, they will have even more influence over the federal budget, and even more ability to throw sand in the gears of a second military operation against Iran.
The 2028 Presidential Election
Publicly, Vice President JD Vance supports the ongoing military operations against Iran. Privately, Vance was much more wary, according to White House sources. The administration’s foreign policy and defense officials closest to Vance, such as Andy Baker and Elbridge Colby, are much more “restrainer” or non-interventionist in their foreign policy views.
As the vice-presidential nominee in 2024, Vance told podcast host Tim Dillon in an interview, “Our interest, I think, very much is in not going to war with Iran, right? It would be a huge distraction of resources. It would be massively expensive to our country.”
As the week begins, Vance’s focus is elsewhere than Iran; he is on his way to Hungary for a series of events with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán one week before Hungarians go to the polls. It is not-so-subtly a “Save Orbán” effort; pro-European challenger Péter Magyar is leading in the polls.
It’s not that Vance doesn’t look abroad and see dangerous threats, it’s just that he defines them very differently than most American leaders have in the past. As he said at the Munich Security Conference in 2025, “The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. And what I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values.”
If you’re vice president, you always have a shot at becoming the next president. If JD Vance takes the oath of office on January 20, 2029, and the Iranian regime is still in place, a war to finish the job of toppling the mullahs’ regime is extremely unlikely to be on his agenda. (If Iran were to do something extremely foolhardy, such as sponsor a mass-casualty terrorist attack on U.S. soil, the outlook would change dramatically.)
If the next president is a Republican who has a more hawkish worldview, such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, that’s a different story. But at this point, Vance is the man most likely to be the GOP nominee in 2028.
The Democratic Nominee
We don’t know who the 2028 Democratic presidential nominee is going to be. But we know today’s Democratic Party is much more opposed to Israel than in previous cycles. The mid-March NBC News survey asked respondents, “In the Middle East situation, are your sympathies more with the Israelis or more with the Palestinians?” Self-identified Democrats answered 67 percent for the Palestinians, just 17 percent for the Israelis. Among self-identified Democrats, 57 percent have a negative view of Israel, 30 percent neutral, and just 13 percent positive.
There is no market for a pro-Israel Democratic presidential candidate. And while opposition to Israel doesn’t always directly translate to a position that is soft on the Iranian regime . . . you don’t see a lot of anti-Israel Iran hawks.
Traditionally, the Democrats have been the more dovish party, and if not outright isolationist, are generally not that interested in foreign policy compared to domestic issues.
Democratic activist groups are already running ads against Wisconsin GOP Representative Derrick Van Orden, declaring, “We’re paying the cost every damn day of this war in Iran. But for Congressman Van Orden, we’re not paying enough.”
Unless the war ends with the mullahs driven from power, the Democratic message on the Iran war will be that it was a waste of time, money, ordnance, and U.S. servicemen’s lives. Today’s Democrats, shaped by the war on terror and Iraq, are extremely familiar with the playbook of accusing a Republican president of being a reckless warmonger, and/or a pawn of Israel, getting America into a quagmire in the Middle East at the behest of sinister conspiracies and oil companies. This time, Democrats have a Republican president who explicitly states the U.S. will “TAKE THE OIL, & MAKE A FORTUNE.”
Most Democrats thought the Obama-era Iran deal was just fine and dandy, and opposed withdrawing from it in 2018. You could fairly argue that the Biden administration didn’t have much of an Iran policy besides attempting to cajole the mullahs into reinstating the Iran deal, and yet there wasn’t much consternation about that among Democrats. As late as February 2024, 62 percent of Democrats approved of how Biden was handling foreign affairs. When a Democrat is in the Oval Office, the typical Democratic voter just assumes that the issue of Iran and its nuclear ambitions are being taken care of, and they don’t have to worry about it.
The primary objective of the mullahs and Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has always been survival. To do this, they are willing to do just about anything; the current campaign to recruit children as young as twelve to volunteer to become “homeland defending combatants” is part of the regime’s long-standing use of child soldiers.
During a war, both sides do their best to hide the size and status of their weapons stockpiles. For what it is worth, CNN reported April 2 that recent U.S. intelligence assessments have determined “roughly half of Iran’s missile launchers are still intact and thousands of one-way attack drones remain in Iran’s arsenal.”
If the Iranian regime survives the current onslaught from the U.S. and Israel, they will probably never face a comparable military threat again. This may not be the last chance for opponents of the regime to drive the mullahs from power, but it is probably the best chance.
As mentioned at the start of this newsletter, the Iranian economy is a catastrophic mess. It was a mess before the war started, and a lot of bombs landing on key sites in your country only makes things worse. In addition to the destruction of a considerable portion of its military and weapons production sites, the U.S. and Israel have bombed Iran’s two largest steel production plants, the Tabriz Petrochemical Complex, one of Iran’s largest pharmaceutical companies, the country’s largest bridge, and reportedly several university buildings involved in military research.
But the regime still has some cards to play. The Iranian government is reportedly charging up to $2 million per ship to pass through the Strait of Hormuz safely, and wants to institute that new “toll” as part of the postwar order. Overall, that is a drop in the bucket of a country of 93 million people and a $356 billion economy. But it does give the regime a much-needed economic lifeline.
The Economist quotes a source “with knowledge of Iran’s oil accounting,” contending that Iran is now earning nearly twice as much from oil sales each day as it did before the war started:
A source with knowledge of Iran’s oil accounting, who spoke to The Economist on condition of anonymity, confirms the country is currently exporting 2.4 million to 2.8 million barrels of oil and petroleum products per day, including 1.5 million to 1.8 million barrels per day of crude. That is the same, if not more, than it did on average last year. It also sells at much higher prices.
Moreover, Iran’s oil machine has adapted in ways that make it more resilient to strikes and sanctions. Most of the proceeds are now going to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the regime’s elite fighting force. And China is playing an active role in allowing the money to flow. Iran’s war chest is buried deep in Asia, safe from Israeli ordnance.
The oil-for-money exchanges between Iran and China will be exceptionally hard to disrupt.
ADDENDUM: Thanks to Noah Rothman and Audrey Fahlberg for filling in while I was away.