What is the actual endgame in the war with Iran? What type of regime will be in power? How strong will it be? Will it continue to control proxies in Iraq, Lebanon, the Gaza Strip, and Yemen, and to oppress its own people?
If the answer to that last question is yes, then I fear the Trump administration will have fallen into the Iran negotiation illusion that has beguiled many a previous administration.
Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates called this syndrome the decades-long quest for the “elusive Iranian moderate.”
As a dissident Iranian ayatollah, Mehdi Rouhani, once told me in Paris, less than a decade after the 1979 revolution, when the quest was still in its infancy, “the most moderate of them all is Ayatollah Khomeini.”
The Islamic Republic is a regime unlike any other. It does not want the same things for its children as we do. Its leaders do not want peace; they want war, because they believe that war will usher in the arrival of the Imam Mahdi and the Shiite Muslim End Times subjugation of the entire world.
In a televised interview on June 7, Vice President JD Vance said the administration was seeking a nuclear agreement that would last for generations, so that his grandchildren would not know a threat from Iran. But he has also said that the administration is only seeking a nuclear deal, not a change of regime.
The real question is, can the current regime abandon its nuclear weapons ambitions and remain in power? I think not, because if Iran actually abandons its nuclear weapons program in the way President Trump has publicly called for—no enrichment ever—then the regime will appear weak in the eyes of the Iranian people.
All of those years of development work, all that money, all the deaths of nuclear scientists—all of it, in vain.
Just to make the point, on June 9, the regime’s state television broadcast an artificial intelligence simulation of a nuclear weapon exploding over an unnamed city. The message was clear: this is our intention, this is our goal. We may say we will stop enriching for 10 years, 20 years, or more, but ultimately this is where we are headed.
President Trump is very mindful of the errors of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal negotiated by Secretary of State John Kerry and championed by President Obama, particularly its lack of a robust inspection regime. Talking to reporters in the White House on June 10, he said Obama’s deal “gave Iran a path to nuclear weapons,” whereas the deal his negotiators have framed “is a path against a nuclear weapon.”
To be clear, what that means–what that must mean–is that Iran abandons all nuclear technology in addition to its enriched uranium. (Just a reminder: Iran currently has 19,481 pounds of uranium enriched to 3.5 percent and 20 percent, in addition to the 992 pounds of 60 percent near weapons-grade material). It must also submit to surprise inspections and dual-use technology import controls.
There is ample justification for demanding that Iran abandon its nuclear aspirations. For starters, six United Nations Security Council resolutions between in the 2000s found that the regime was in violation of its commitments to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, the NPT.
The NPT is based on the simple proposition that non-nuclear-weapon states are guaranteed access to civilian nuclear technology in exchange for the absolute renunciation of nuclear weapons.
Starting in 2003, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) repeatedly found that Iran had violated the deal. It discovered multiple undeclared nuclear facilities designed to produce uranium hexafluoride and enrich it to weapons grade, as well as evidence that Iran had tested the non-nuclear components of nuclear weapons.
That meant that Iran was out of compliance with the NPT. And it has steadfastly refused to return to full compliance or to come clean on its nuclear weapons research and development.
So, under the NPT, Iran has forfeited its right to nuclear technology. Full stop. And that was before Israel’s Mossad spirited away tens of thousands of documents from Iran’s nuclear archive in 2018, arguably one of the most daring and most successful intelligence operations of all time. The archive revealed the actual bomb program IAEA inspections could never access, because Iran wouldn’t allow it.
If Trump continues to insist that Iran abandon its nuclear ambitions–and not just put them off for future discussions–he will find that the regime will refuse to sign the paper. Why? Because the regime wants the bomb. The 12th Imam has been whispering to Iran’s leaders for the past 30 years that only nuclear weapons can bring about his return.
Outgoing Mossad chief David Barnea said on June 1 that ending the regime must remain Israel’s goal, precisely because of the genocidal End Times aspirations of all the regime’s leaders.
Clearly, that is not President Trump’s goal, at least, not publicly.
The question is, can Trump achieve the limited but essential goal of getting rid of Iran’s nuclear weapons program without changing the regime or helping the people to topple it?
I doubt it. The regime will cheat on any negotiated deal, just as it has done now on the ceasefire. Iranian leaders will try to extend the deadlines and drag out negotiations into the midterms. In early June, Major General Mohsen Rezai, who should have retired 30 years ago, said the new Supreme Leader was now demanding $24 billion in sanctions relief as a sign of goodwill from the United States before he would negotiate anything.
This type of thing will continue, and Iranian state media will continue to claim that the regime has won the war and is negotiating from a position of strength.
But take heart. President Trump is a cat playing with a mouse. As long as the mouse stays alive, he thinks he is winning–until the cat gobbles him up.
Only Act III
I see this war as a five-act Shakespearean drama. As I write in mid-June, we remain stuck in a seemingly endless Act III. As the president revealed on June 10, this has allowed the United States to quietly escort 200 ships through the Strait of Hormuz, bringing 100 million barrels of non-Iranian oil to markets, thus reducing the impact of Iran’s attempt to squeeze world oil prices.
The ceasefire has also allowed the United States to replenish our Aegis-class ships with fresh missiles and to deploy new anti-drone technology to the battlespace.
But at some point, the Iranians will cross a line–it is their nature!—and commit a provocation that the United States cannot allow to stand. And then we will transition to Act IV, which is the resumption of kinetic operations.
This round of the war will be tremendously violent, if brief, and will shut down the entire country of Iran. It may be bridges and power plants, or something else entirely. The goal will be to convince the Iranian people that the regime cannot possibly survive the US onslaught.
Mehdi Kharatian, an Iranian state TV pundit, recently admitted that the regime was on the verge of collapse during the December 2025-January 2026 protests.
“Around 100 cities in Iran were on the verge of falling, or had already fallen during the protests,” he said. That included protesters taking over many local government offices.
The regime understood that it needed to exert extreme violence to regain control, which is why it called in non-Iranian thugs to supplement state security forces in the massacre of more than 45,000 Iranians.
Without that bloodshed, Kharatian said, the regime was “rapidly losing control, and a revolution appeared to be within reach.”
To me, a renewed national uprising with US and Israel protection will be Act V of this Shakespearean drama.
President Trump has repeatedly shown himself to be sympathetic to the Iranian people. Even before word of the January 8-10 massacres came out, he was encouraging protesters and said the United States would be there with them.
Those were well-intentioned but idle words, and they had tragic consequences. When the United States later provided weapons to one of the Iranian Kurdish factions with bases in northern Iraq, the group sold the weapons either to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or on the black market, but never sent them into Iran.
Our intelligence community should have known then what remains true today: the weapons are already there. The IRGC and the Basij stockpile weapons in armories all across the country. With a little help from the US and Israel, Iranian insurgents can seize control of those armories and turn them against the IRGC.The Israelis have demonstrated that they have thoroughly penetrated the Iranian leadership and security apparatus through strategic assassinations and bombings. But they have also used drones to take out Basij checkpoints in major cities. These are priceless capabilities once Act V begins.
The violence will unfold under US and Israeli overwatch, which means that whenever we see an IRGC or Basij mobilization that threatens the uprising, we can take them out. I would imagine we would also take down the Iranian regime’s broadcasting networks or hack them and turn them over to the insurgents.
The Brits did as much in 1943-1944 with their Special Operations Executive, which served as the organizing tool for much of the resistance movement in France, and we learned from them at the time. Indeed, some of the most renowned resistance organizers working in Nazi-Occupied France were Americans, such as the intrepid (and one-legged) Victoria Hall.
The president has said he wants the Saudis, the Omanis, the Kuwaitis, and the Qataris to join the Abraham Accords once the war is over. Almost jokingly, he added, “I think they owe it to us…In fact, maybe I won’t do the deal if they don’t.”
If Act V is as successful as I believe it will be, and the Iranian regime falls to a popular uprising, there will be no more roadblocks to expanding the Abraham Accords.
The Islamic regime in Iran has been the source of violence and terror for 47 years, not just in the Middle East but around the world. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum called them “terrorists with an oil field.”
We humans are trouble-makers by nature. Just read the Hebrew Bible.
But a world without Islamic Revolutionary Iran could become one of those periods you read about in a single sentence in the Bible. “And for forty years, Israel knew peace.”
That is a goal–a generational goal, as the president likes to say–that is worth the effort.
Kenneth R. Timmerman is a senior fellow at the America First Policy Institute and author of The Iran House: Tales of Revolution, Persecution, War, and Intrigue. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on Iran by former Swedish deputy premier Per Ahlmark.
