America’s attack on Iran turns a taboo into a method

AMERICA’S LONG-RUNNING quarrel with the Islamic Republic has become a war. On February 28th the United States and Israel launched co-ordinated strikes across Iran; the regime in Tehran responded with missiles across the region; and President Donald Trump urged Iranians to “take over” their government—nudging the declared aim from nuclear restraint towards regime change. Yet the real threshold had been crossed earlier. In June last year Operation Midnight Hammer sent B-2 bombers and Tomahawk missiles into Iran’s main nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan, ending half a century of American reluctance to strike directly at Iran’s strategic core. That campaign broke a taboo that had been in effect for decades despite bloody Iranian-sponsored attacks against Americans in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. This one has turned a broken taboo into a method for a new era.

For decades Washington fought Iran indirectly—through sanctions, covert action, cyber operations and armed proxies—and even traded blows at sea. But it avoided striking the homeland. That restraint had a logic: fear of Iranian retaliation, the risk of oil shocks and an awareness that escalation is easier to start than to stop. A number of strategic shifts made the leap easier to justify, and harder to avoid.

The first concerns the nuclear file. The problem shifted from capability to uncertainty. The International Atomic Energy Agency now says it cannot verify whether Iran has suspended uranium enrichment, nor determine the location and size of key stockpiles, having reported 440.9 kilograms enriched to 60% (a relatively short step from weapons-grade levels) before losing access. Mr Trump insists Iran’s nuclear sites were “obliterated” last year, whereas his negotiator warns Iran could assemble a bomb within a week. Once monitoring collapses, however, the epistemological burden falls unevenly: hawks need no proof, while doves must prove a negative. Ambiguity, in other words, is a resource—and the Trump administration has been content to let it accumulate.

The second shift concerns Iran’s deterrent posture. For years the calculation held that attacking Iran on its own soil was too costly. After a year of regional conflict that degraded Iranian proxy networks and reduced its air defences, the calculation changed. Midnight Hammer showed that an American administration could strike and survive the response. The fear of retaliation receded further with each subsequent deployment and warning. By early 2026 coercion looked less like a last resort than a default setting.

The third shift concerns alliance dynamics. The familiar story—Israel strikes, America worries about being dragged along, then joins reluctantly to “steer”—does not fit the current episode. There is little sign of reluctant rescue. A better explanation is convergence of preference. The White House wanted a confrontation, found it politically convenient and co-ordinated with Israel from the start. The trap, if there is one, is self-entrapment, not entrapment by a junior partner.

None of this was driven by public demand. An Economist/YouGov poll conducted in late February found 49% of Americans opposed to using military force against Iran, with 27% in support. Congress was not pushing for hostilities either. Mr Trump is, in this respect, remarkably unconstrained. That freedom has shaped the kind of war his administration is selling: decapitation rather than occupation, bombing ground rather than taking it. Air power has always appealed to American strategists because, as a critic of Bill Clinton’s reliance on it once observed, it promises gratification without commitment—like romance, in a certain era.

But the strategic logic behind the campaign rests on a distinction that matters enormously: the difference between deterrence and compellence. Deterrence tries to stop an adversary from starting something; compellence tries to make it stop or undo something already under way. Compellence is the harder task. The target can wait while the demandeur must keep acting until something moves. And the logical response to compellence, usually tagged the “reverse Munich syndrome”, is intensified resistance, not compliance. Mr Trump’s greater ambitions are therefore linked to a strategy that is unlikely to deliver them.

The slide from compellence to regime change illustrates how quickly the logic escalates. In June Mr Trump did not formally declare regime change as the objective, though he floated it publicly, asking why there would not be regime change if the regime could not “Make Iran Great Again”. Now the language is more explicit. The problem is that air power is a blunt instrument for political transformation. Regimes fall when security forces fracture, elites defect, the street mobilises at scale or outsiders occupy territory and install successors. Bombing can catalyse these dynamics, but it can also suppress them.

At this early moment, three pathways to regime collapse are conceivable; each has significant obstacles. Decapitation might trigger elite fracture if succession turns chaotic. But the Islamic Republic has spent decades building redundancy into its command structures, and an ideological guard designed to hold the system together precisely under external pressure. Mass protests have been large and impassioned, but there is little evidence of the organisation necessary to translate popular anger into a serious challenge to the regime. And war has a way of triggering rallying effects—not always in favour of the government, but often enough to suppress rather than accelerate revolt. In Iran’s case, hunkering down seems more likely than rising up, and hunkered populations do not make revolutions.

A negotiated internal transition—a bargain in which the state is preserved by sacrificing its leaders—sometimes becomes possible when war, sanctions and unrest converge. But it requires a credible off-ramp: assurances of personal safety, a deal rather than a tribunal. The rhetoric of regime change kills such assurances. If insiders believe that surrender leads to exile or prosecution, they will fight rather than bargain. And if Iranians do revolt, and the revolt is crushed, or the country fractures into civil war, America will likely have moved on. Its rhetorical goals declared achieved, the consequences will be left to others.

If coercion does produce a deal, the regime might return to indirect talks and accept constraints—limits on enrichment, inspections, stockpile-handling—in exchange for sanctions relief and a pause in strikes. But agreements extracted under duress are easily framed domestically as capitulation at gunpoint. The regime will hedge, and look for the first opportunity to unwind them. The deeper question is not whether bombs can force signatures. It is whether a coerced bargain can be transformed into a stable equilibrium once the pain stops. Without monitoring continuity, credible sequencing and penalties for backsliding, “success” becomes a pause before the next crisis.

Midnight Hammer crossed a line. The latest military campaign turns that crossing into a method. If the regime falls, it will almost certainly be because its internal coercive structures fractured—not because foreign air power caused it. If it survives, Mr Trump must decide whether to define victory narrowly and declare success, or pursue a moralised objective that ends in either escalation or abandonment.

The old rhythm—indirect pressure, negotiated pauses, managed rivalry—has been replaced by a harder question: how long can compellence last before it becomes the new normal? ■