Regime Choke Before Regime Change: A New Iran Strategy

It appears increasingly likely that the United States will begin a military campaign against the Iranian regime, with diplomatic talks at an impasse.

What remains unknown is the objective of the Trump administration’s military actions, their scope, their targets, and their duration.

If diplomacy remains a priority amid military engagement, then the administration may be introducing a new kind of Iran strategy: regime choke -namely, apply all forms of pressure on the regime to deliver on our demands in and beyond the region, ideally before the regime completely loses its hold on power when it will be harder to get the results we need.

If this is indeed the approach, the administration may view military power in the context of Iran as serving two distinct functions, explained by Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling in his landmark book Arms and Influence: both as a tool of coercion—in this case to compel the regime’s behavior—and as a form of brute force to actually destroy the regime’s institutions, levers and even leadership of terror.

The approach may be well advised, given the uniqueness of the Iran “issue set,” which is perhaps the longest-standing threat to the American people in a century. From a policy standpoint, the regime’s governance of Iran is not the strategic challenge; rather, it is its record as the world’s oldest global terror network.

In this latter framing, Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs are front and center, but so are its terror networks around the world. Also to be watched are Iran’s active assassination threats against foreign officials, including President Trump, as well as soft targets, like Jewish community centers, its global influence operations (including driving the demonstrations on U.S. campuses), and its military support for Russia’s war effort and countless conflicts worldwide.

This context makes the two known aspects of the administration’s approach toward Iran clearer.

The first is that regime change has never been described as the objective, even though it is a scenario that the President has repeatedly touted as a positive development should it materialize.

The second is that given the range of U.S. interests at stake vis-à-vis Iran and Iran’s global footprint, the impact of whatever happens will necessarily be global in nature. This is likely an important dimension for the administration, particularly given how much Iran policy has defined prior administrations’ legacies.

As such, whatever happens next – and for however long it takes place – will not resemble anything we have seen previously.

It may also be the case, given the regime’s weakened state, that elements of it - or even the whole of it - collapse in the process. That is undoubtedly a factor of current planning. And, if the objective is preserving U.S. interests, the United States must have a series of diplomatic and military options ready to navigate those circumstances.

One certain element is that the President has a record of bold actions to protect the American people.

Military power to destroy the tools of terror is necessary, but it is not sufficient to achieve U.S. objectives around the world. Military power towards the Iranian regime must also be coercive and applied to affect change in conditions on the ground in the region and beyond it – whether to secure our hemisphere, to end Russia’s aggression, or to reinforce deterrence against China.

After President Trump’s historic decision to kill Iran’s top commander, Qasem Soleimani, he issued a tweet, “Iran never won a war, but never lost a negotiation.”

Six years later, Iran is clinging to the hope that the old model of negotiation will enable it to continue its winning streak.

In fact, what we are witnessing might be a negotiation style which it hasn’t yet experienced, and for which it has diminished leverage to affect.

Just as Iran’s wins in its bad-faith negotiations with prior administrations have led to destruction around the world, so too a loss in this round of negotiations would mean the longest forever war against the American people has finally come to an end.

Jacob Olidort, Ph.D., is Chief Research Officer of the America First Policy Institute and Director of the American Security program.