There Is No Winning in Iran

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, April 24, 2026

 

There is no victory coming in Iran. There are better and worse possible outcomes.

 

There is no victory coming in Iran because it is an illegal war that will leave our constitutional mechanism, already running rough, further out of balance for a generation, with the presidential warmaking power now entirely untethered from Congress.

 

There is no upside to that. Repairing the damage would take a generation of work by better men and women than we currently have in Washington.

 

On top of this, the Trump administration has effectively conceded sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz to Iran, a privilege Iran did not previously enjoy regarding the international strait, which is partly in the territorial waters of Oman. The Trump administration has set up opening the strait as a prominent—at times, it seems the only—goal of negotiations with Tehran. But the strait is not Tehran’s to open or close—or it wasn’t, until five minutes ago. In this war, the United States will lose no battles, but Iran has, in effect, gained territory.

 

Wishful thinking is the alchemy that turns fools’ gold into silver linings. But what would the better outcomes look like in Iran?

 

Regime change by means of a popular domestic uprising would be among the best imaginable outcomes. But it is not a likely outcome. And a popular domestic uprising would not necessarily ensure an improvement. A popular movement could very well throw up something as bad or worse than what Iranians suffer under today. One of the ironies of this conflict is that the ayatollahs’ regime and the Trump administration are political cousins: Both the revolutionary government in Iran and the modern Republican Party in the United States rely disproportionately on support from ignorant religious fanatics living in socially and economically backward rural enclaves and find their domestic enemies principally among the urban elites. Just as American populists found their way from George Wallace to Donald Trump, their Iranian cousins could very well find their way from Ruhollah Khomeini to someone more modern and much worse, difficult as the latter qualifier may be to believe.

 

For similar reasons, a more likely outcome—that of a regime change via factional coup, should the pressure of the war open the already visible existing fissures within the regime into fractures—might very well produce something no better than what Iran went into the war with. Factional warfare in such regimes rarely results in the victory of liberal democrats or even of more moderate Islamists, though there are precedents in the Muslim world for a more secular autocracy, as in 20^th century Turkey, or a more pro-Western military-backed junta with some liberal trappings, as in Pakistan under Benazir Bhutto. But it is worth noting that both Turkey and Pakistan have moved in a more Islamist direction since those periods, not in a more liberal direction or even a more responsible one. In Iran, it would be reasonable to expect the most vicious faction to rise to the top over the more humane factions, if there are more humane factions even in the running, about which American intelligence seems a bit fuzzy.

 

Donald Trump has many problems—moral, intellectual, possibly psychiatric—and one of them is that nobody apparently ever has gotten around to telling him that he is a … weak man, I will write, the truly appropriate Germanic vernacular being inappropriate to this forum. Trying to run a strongman foreign policy with a weak man at the center of it does not work. Trump has been begging—“like a dog,” as he would put it—the Iranians to back off the Strait of Hormuz and allow international shipping to return to normal. (It is not clear that it could return to normal.) Because Trump is a weak man surrounded by sycophants, you can be confident that when the Trump administration insists that there will be no “toll booth” by which Tehran can enrich itself thanks to its effective (effectively granted by the White House) sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, that such a financial mechanism is very likely what the administration ultimately is getting itself ready to swallow.

 

As usual, the Trump administration lacks a vigorous strategy for achieving its goals because it lacks goals—it may have preferences, but verifiable goals that can be objectively evaluated are something about which this administration remains very vague when it comes to Iran, and almost everything else. The psychology there is clear enough: Nobody can call you a loser if winning is never defined.

 

What we have is some dead Americans and diesel approaching $6 a gallon. I do not see how you hang a “Mission Accomplished” banner on that, but there is no point in trying to talk sense to people who are prevented from hearing it by disabilities that run the gamut from the political to the cognitive.