Iranian regime’s dangerous strategy: Outlast Trump, return stronger

A triumphant, wealthier, and eventually nuclear-armed Iran would go on a full-scale campaign of revenge against Americans, Israelis, and Iranian opposition figures.

By Majid Rafizadeh, Gatestone Institute

For decades, the Iranian regime has guarded its strategic intentions behind ambiguity, denials, and carefully calibrated statements.

Its current strategy has now become unusually explicit.

Recent comments attributed to Majid Shakeri, an adviser to Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, suggest that Tehran believes its path to victory is not necessarily through defeating the United States militarily but through managing the confrontation until President Donald Trump’s term ends in January 2029.

Shakeri described the approach as maintaining a state of neither war nor peace and exercising “strategic patience” and “getting along with him [President Trump] until his term ends.”

It is a strategy that Washington and its allies should take seriously.

The original American and Israeli war aim was the regime’s unconditional surrender and strategic defeat—crippling its military capacity, eliminating key leadership layers, and forcing genuine surrender on nuclear, missile, and regional aggression issues.

Tehran has since redirected the fight to the Strait of Hormuz.

For the remaining time of Trump’s presidency, the regime plans to play a familiar game of opening and closing the waterway, dangling intermittent negotiations, employing intermediaries, walking up to the table and then walking away.

Before anyone notices, two years will have passed.

This is a regime that prolonged its war with Iraq for eight grisly years; it knows how to extend conflict.

Because Iran’s leaders do not care about the suffering of their own people—evident in ongoing executions, suppression of protests, and indifference to economic pain—it will absorb sanctions, oil revenue losses, and hardship that would collapse most governments.

Selling oil or not selling oil is secondary. The only priority is surviving Trump.

Control of the Strait—through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s traded oil normally passes—has become Iran’s “golden weapon,” eclipsing even the nuclear file as the central bargaining chip.

Iranian officials have repeatedly stated that the waterway will not return to its pre-war status as an open international passage. Iran’s regime evidently plans to control who passes, under what conditions, and to impose fees or “navigational services” the minute Trump leaves office.

Negotiations open and close; memoranda of understanding are signed and then violated; attacks on shipping resume when leverage needs refreshing.

The regime has turned a military confrontation aimed at its own survival into a prolonged contest over a global energy chokepoint.

It took nearly five decades for a U.S. president to emerge who was willing to take decisive military action against the Islamic Republic.

Tehran calculates—correctly—that another leader with the determination of President Trump is unlikely to appear soon again.

Perhaps the regime counts on the possibility of a Democrat-controlled Congress after the midterm elections this November, which the regime seems to want to have no political appetite for sustained pressure.

The wealth that Iran would obtain by extorting global energy markets would reinvigorate its support for proxy militias and terrorist groups and, above all — with continuing help from China, Russia, and North Korea — the regime’s ultimate insurance policy: its nuclear program, which is now reportedly tucked under Pickaxe Mountain.

Are free nations prepared to accept an expansionist revolutionary theocracy that wholly rejects Western norms and violates freedom of navigation as the permanent gatekeeper of a key maritime shipping chokepoint? Probably.

Iran could eventually arm its proxies with nuclear capabilities and proliferate the regime’s long-standing practice of targeted assassinations—since 1979, littered with the elimination of dissidents, political opponents, and foreigners. Even family members and close associates have not been spared.

A triumphant, wealthier, and eventually nuclear-armed Iran would go on a full-scale campaign of revenge against Americans, Israelis, and Iranian opposition figures.

That is the peril of leaving the job half-finished. Trump’s campaign has already inflicted severe damage.

Allowing the regime to stay in place to continue developing nuclear weapons and asserting control over the Strait of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab at the mouth of the Red Sea would squander that advantage.

The necessary objective is unconditional surrender, not some bogus deal.

This outcome will likely require systematically removing successive layers of hardline leadership until the structure collapses.

New hardliners installed in the military and security apparatus who seek revenge need to be neutralized. The regime cannot be permitted to recover.

The global order of freedom of navigation that has underpinned Western democracies and open commerce would be permanently altered.

The only responsible response is to deny the regime the opportunity.

Continue the economic pressure, resume the military pressure, remove every layer of leadership, support those inside and outside Iran ready to end the theocracy’s rule, and refuse any outcome short of complete unconditional surrender.

With anything less, Trump will go down in history as having ushered in a far more dangerous world.

Iranian regimeNuclear weaponsTrump administration