After a week of bombing, the White House is calling for the “unconditional surrender” of the Islamic Republic. It’s far from clear that’s going to happen.
On Friday evening, Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, announced a decision to halt attacks on Iran’s Gulf neighbours. Yet on Saturday, the Iranian armed forces launched 16 missiles and 121 drones against the UAE alone.
The action raised the prospect that the armed forces is now operating independently of the government. This would make sense, given numerous killings of the political leadership.
US Secretary of War Peter Hegseth has implied that Iran’s missile capabilities are severely degraded or destroyed. Yet footage shows some Iranian missile launch sites are completely invisible from the air. Missiles literally appear to launch directly from out of the desert sand.
American international relations professor John Mearsheimer, known for his “realist” positions, points out there is no way to know what Iran’s remaining missile capabilities are. The Iranian government will have been in a constant state of readiness for this conflict, particularly after the US-Israeli strikes last year.
The UAE, meanwhile, said on 4 March that it will have exhausted its supplies of anti-missile defence “interceptor” missiles within a week. This raises the prospect that Iran could knock out Gulf desalination plants, causing chaos for these countries, and/or Gulf refineries, causing havoc for the world economy.
As we wrote a fortnight ago, Turkey dismissed the possibility of regime change from aerial bombardment. Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz was asked by media, after meeting with White House officals, if he thought the US has a coherent strategy for regime change. His answer: “No.”
There were signs of overexuberance in the White House administration. Among these is the brash treatment of its AI partner in the preceding days. Hegseth’s statements centre more on the quantity and size of the explosions than strategic objectives and progress.
Trump and/or Hegseth may even have pushed for the bombing to begin on the date it did: 9/11 in the Muslim calendar. Such an act would fit an administration that has actively trolled its opponents.
If the Iranian armed forces do not stand down, Mearsheimer argues the White House cannot force them to.
The US’s next step of escalation is arming and instigating militants among the Kurdish and Azerbaijani populations, who together make up 30% of Iran’s population.
In fact, this could already be happening, given calls for Iranians to “rise up” against the government. But pursuing this strategy fully and backing these groups’ independence would raise the prospect of a regional conflagration involving Azerbaijan, Iraq and Turkey.
Mearsheimer’s read is thus that this is more about the US-Israel “hitting” Iran while they can, that is, while Russia is engaged in Ukraine and China’s blue-water navy is still under construction. The talk of toppling an evil government and freeing Iranians is cover.
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