By Noah Rothman
Thursday, February 19, 2026
The Americans and the Iranians are talking again, but
it’s not clear why.
Their backs against the wall, representatives of the
Iranian regime acceded in February to the Trump administration’s renewed
overtures for talks centered on the future of the Islamic Republic’s
nuclear-weapons program. But most of that program is now entombed beneath
hundreds of tons of lightly irradiated rubble. There are reportedly few signs
that Iran has either the resources or capabilities to recover it.
Tehran signaled its willingness to put its
ballistic-missile program and its support for terrorist proxies on the table,
but it will not abandon what it believes are two vital instruments of
statecraft. Nor does the Trump administration want to merely limit those
activities — not really. It wants to neutralize the threat posed by the regime,
not just the tools of war at Tehran’s disposal.
Trump’s goal, unlike Barack Obama’s, is not to mollify
and placate the Iranians but to hasten the regime’s inevitable collapse. And
the Iran that America is confronting today across the negotiating table is
measurably weaker than the one Obama not only failed to confront but, instead,
courted and bolstered.
Near the end of his administration, Obama himself
advocated something resembling a Richard Nixon–style détente with Iran. The
talks that culminated in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) did not
“bet on Iran changing,” he argued. After all, “we struck agreements with the
Soviet Union” — why should this deal be controversial? And yet, a modus
vivendi that would preserve the status quo was not all the Obama administration
was interested in.It set out to alter the status quo in Iran’s favor.
To facilitate the speedy withdrawal of U.S. forces from
Iraq, Obama and his subordinates set out to empower the region’s Shiite
militias, many of which were loyal to and supported by Iran. That project was
of such paramount importance that Obama felt compelled to ignore the Iranian
people’s demand for their own liberation, as he did when he refused to support
the 2009 Green Revolution inside Iran. “And in retrospect,” Obama admitted in a
rare moment of self-doubt 13 years later, “I think that was a mistake.”
At the time, however, Obama and his subordinates were
brimming with confidence as they set out to impose their vision on the Middle
East. That administration released prominent Shiite insurgents from military
custody in the pursuit of what Stars and Stripes described as a “larger
reconciliation” effort designed to facilitate a “peaceful integration” of those
elements into Iraqi society. In fact, the militias were expected to bolster
Iraqi security against the Sunni elements that formed the backbone of the anti-American
insurgency in Iraq. It was necessary, Obama and company concluded, to give Iran
a stronger hand in Iraq and look beyond the more than 600 U.S. troops killed as
a result of Iran’s support for the insurgents.
Ultimately, Obama’s skepticism toward the Iraqi Security
Forces proved prescient. In 2014, the ISF collapsed as Islamic State militants
poured over the border from Syria. But that only strengthened Obama’s
reliance on Iran’s proxies. Indeed, during one battle against ISIS forces in
Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit, Politico reported, “the U.S. halted
air strikes when it became clear that Iranian commanders were on the ground
directing the Shiite fighters.”
Obama’s short-term goal was to get the U.S. out of the
Middle East, but his long-term objective was to establish a durable balance of
power between Iran, together with the Shiite Muslims in its orbit, and the
region’s Sunni states. In the end, Iran could become a “very successful
regional power,” Obama told the New Yorker. He hoped to establish an
“equilibrium” in which “there’s competition, perhaps suspicion, but not active
or proxy warfare” in the Middle East.
In much the same way that Ronald Reagan and his acolytes
threw off the self-limiting orthodoxies that underwrote détente, Donald Trump
and his team entered office with a much different outlook toward the Islamic
Republic: What if the Iranian regime weren’t an established and permanent
feature of modern life? What if it could be not just contained but rolled back?
What if it didn’t have to exist at all?
***
In truth, by seeking accommodation with Iran, it was
Obama who deviated from America’s consistent posture toward the Iranian regime.
Trump restored the status quo ante with what he called a “maximum pressure”
campaign against Iran, which manifested primarily in a more comprehensive
sanctions regime targeting key sectors of the Iranian economy. But there was a
diplomatic component to it, too — one that would not have been possible had
Obama not tried to engineer a radical revision to the regional balance of power.
Throughout the Obama years, the Middle East’s Sunni
powers — primarily Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates —
feared the power that America was granting to Iran via its terrorist proxies.
In February 2017, reporting by the Wall Street Journal’s Maria Abi-Habib
indicated that these Sunni states had been cultivating secret
military-to-military and intelligence-sharing relations with Israel in
observance of their mutual interest in containing a resurgent Iran. The Trump
administration fostered those links until they flowered into the Abraham
Accords.
All the while, Trump and company put the screws to Iran’s
terrorist armies, both covertly and kinetically. He executed air strikes on
Iran’s Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria. He degraded the chemical warfare
capabilities of Iran’s ally, Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime, contributing to
its ultimately fatal decline. He green-lit the operation that took out Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps Commander Qasem Soleimani on Iraqi soil.
Throughout this campaign, the Trump administration
observed remarkable restraint. The White House would have been justified in
exacting a greater price from Iran for its provocations.
In the final years of Trump’s first term, Iran waged a
region-wide campaign of provocations that seemed designed to draw the
U.S. into a broader conflict. It pirated foreign-flagged vessels in the Strait
of Hormuz. It conducted what its victims called “sophisticated and coordinated”
special-forces strikes on oil tankers. It took down a multimillion-dollar
American surveillance drone in international waters. It sponsored dozens of
rocket and mortar attacks on U.S. positions in Iraq. And, in the most brazen
assault of all, it mounted a drone attack on the Aramco petroleum-processing
facility inside Saudi Arabia.
Through this series of provocations, the administration
maintained a determined patience. After all, its strategic approach to Iran was
working.
In the winter of 2017–18, Iran was crippled by paralyzing
protests against the regime, many of which were fueled by the economic
hardships that were the direct and desired result of Western sanctions. Iran
was crippled by similar protests in the winter of 2019–20, when anti-government
demonstrators clashed with security forces and set over 700 government-owned
banks alight. In 2022, now out of office, Trump officials watched helplessly as
Joe Biden and his administration reprised Obama’s indifference toward Iranian
protesters who lashed out at their government over the murder of a young woman
at the hands of Iran’s morality police. At least the Iranian people still had
an appetite for their own liberation.
The Biden years were a contradictory period for the
Iranian regime. Biden backed away from Trump’s maximum-pressure campaign and
did his utmost to revive the JCPOA that Trump had scuttled. But the regime also
behaved as though it understood that its time was short.
In the Biden administration’s own estimation, the regime
intensified its efforts to break out with a fissionable nuclear device. Tehran
deepened its support for hostile actors abroad, and its proxies accelerated the
pace of their attacks on U.S. and Israeli targets throughout 2022 and 2023.
“Iranian security officials helped plan Hamas’s Saturday surprise attack on
Israel,” the Wall Street Journal reported within hours of the October 7
massacre. That revelation explains why each of Iran’s terrorist projects —
Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthis, and the region’s various Shiite militias — all but
simultaneously joined the fight that Hamas started.
***
That might have been one of the worst military blunders
in modern history. Over the next two years, Israel dramatically degraded Iran’s
capacity to export terrorism across its borders.
The Jewish state dismantled Hamas in Gaza. It devastated
Hezbollah from the air and hobbled its fighters with booby-trapped pagers and
walkie-talkies. It decimated the Houthi militia’s leadership in ways Western
forces could not or would not, despite their fighting an ongoing naval battle
against this ragtag group of bandits that was as intense as anything American
sailors had experienced since World War II. Finally, over the course of several
direct engagements between Iranian forces and their Israeli counterparts, the
Israeli military destroyed dozens of Iranian ballistic-missile launchers and
much of its layered air-defense network. That groundwork set the foundation for
Operation Midnight Hammer, the “largest B-2 operational strike in U.S.
history,” in which the Iranian nuclear program was reduced to dust.
It seemed then that, in its nearly 50-year history, the
Iranian regime had never been weaker. But we were soon to learn that it could
be made weaker still.
As 2025 drew to a close, the Iranian street once again
descended into chaos. But from the start, this round of civil unrest looked
different. It began with the bazaaris — middle-class merchants on whom
the regime had previously relied for support. They rose up to protest the
collapsing value of the Iranian rial, which, amid spiraling inflation, was all
but worthless. Power outages became common. Public services broke down. A
water-shortage crisis compelled Iranian officials to discuss permanently
relocating the government from Tehran. The situation was dire, and every
Iranian citizen knew it.
The students soon joined the protests, as did industrial
and white-collar workers. Government officials, including Iranian President
Masoud Pezeshkian, began chastising the mullahs for failing their people.
Western media outlets were replete with reports that regime officials were
moving money out of the country and even seeking out comfortable destinations
for exile. The Islamic Republic seemed to be coming apart.
The regime faced an existential crisis. Ultimately, the
clerisy at the top of the Iranian hierarchy met it with unspeakable violence.
Estimates of the number of Iranian civilians who were
slaughtered by security forces vary. The Iranian regime acknowledges that
thousands were killed. Dissident networks and human rights groups put the
number of dead in the tens of thousands.
Trump did not ignore the slaughter. “I have let them know
that if they start killing people,” Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt on
January 8, “we’re going to hit them very hard.” This was no errant thought.
Trump subsequently urged Iranian civilians to “keep protesting” and “take over
your institutions” because “help is on the way.”
But help wasn’t on the way — not with the alacrity the
moment demanded. Whether he knew it or not, Trump did not have the naval assets
in place in the Persian Gulf region to make good on his threat. America’s
deployed carrier groups were tied up either deterring Chinese aggression in the
Western Pacific or squeezing and, ultimately, decapitating Venezuela’s Chavista
regime in the Caribbean.
All of a sudden, Trump changed his tune. The president
insisted that the Iranian regime had heeded his calls for circumspection and
nonviolence, even as regime officials insisted that they had not. Trump
pivoted, dispatching his preferred envoys, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, to
resume diplomatic negotiations with the theocracy’s representatives.
Now, however, the deficit of forward-deployed assets to
the Persian Gulf that bedeviled Trump in January is no longer a problem. As of
this writing, there is more than enough firepower in the region to execute what
Reuters reporters claim is Trump’s ultimate goal: a “sustained, weeks-long”
operation against the Islamic Republic. That operation would consist of air
strikes on “Iranian state and security facilities” in what the Journal previously
reported was Trump’s desire for a “decisive” showdown with the regime.
***
That brings us to where we are today: on the precipice.
Trump has taken his administration’s policies to their logical conclusion. The
sanctions regime was designed to weaken the regime’s hold on its people, and it
has. The U.S. and Israeli operations targeting Iran’s terrorist proxies were
supposed to degrade their capabilities and sap them of their resolve, and
that’s what they achieved. The strikes on the Iranian nuclear program — a
symptom, not the cause, of the regime’s suicidally millenarian outlook — could
only mitigate the Iranian threat. So long as the Islamic Republic exists, it
will wage the war against the West that it has prosecuted since its inception.
On many fronts, the Trump administration’s approach to
geopolitics has been inconsistent. When it comes to Iran, however, Trump’s
posture has not fluctuated. His administration deserves credit for logically
concluding that the characterological changes we seek in the Iranian regime
will come about only through its implosion. We are approaching a climax.
Trump has a choice now. He can act on his convictions and
deliver the final blow to a regime that is one of the most, if not the most,
malignant on earth — a geopolitical entity that has sacrificed whatever
legitimacy it had — or he can shrink from that fraught but portentous project.
Whatever he decides, Trump’s legacy hangs in the balance.
Will posterity remember him as just another president who
missed one of many opportunities to rid ourselves of this blight on the global
landscape, or as one who acted boldly in ways his predecessors would not?
Trump spent a decade bending the arc of history toward
this point. He stands on the threshold of a new era. If the past is prologue,
he will cross it.
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