The US needs a political endgame for Iran, not just more pressure - opinion

The United States does not lack leverage against the Islamic Republic of Iran. It lacks a political endgame.

Washington has employed nearly every instrument of national power: financial and oil sanctions, diplomatic isolation, intelligence operations, regional deterrence, direct military force, pressure on Tehran’s proxy networks, action against its shadow fleet, and negotiations backed by coercive power. 

These measures have weakened important elements of the regime’s nuclear, missile, maritime, and financial capabilities.

Yet the central problem remains intact: the political system that produces these threats – and rebuilds them after every setback – survives. Washington can punish the Islamic Republic, but punishment is not a strategy unless it leads somewhere.

That distinction should now define American policy.

Preventing an Iranian nuclear weapon, degrading missile capabilities, disrupting terrorist networks, and constraining the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are necessary objectives.

Still, they treat manifestations of the problem rather than its source.

The Islamic Republic has made terrorism, hostage-taking, proxy warfare, nuclear brinkmanship, domestic repression, and threats to maritime commerce instruments of regime survival.

Even a successful agreement may temporarily constrain some of these activities without changing the structure that repeatedly generates them. Pressure is an instrument, not an end state.

The strategic question is therefore no longer simply how to change the regime’s behavior, but how to create conditions in which Iranians can change the regime while preserving the Iranian state.

This does not require an American invasion, occupation, or externally imposed government. Nor should Washington decide whether Iran ultimately becomes a republic or a constitutional monarchy.

That choice belongs exclusively to the Iranian people.

The legitimate American interest is narrower but strategically consequential: an intact, secular, democratic, nonnuclear Iran at peace with the US, Israel, and its Arab neighbors.

Such an Iran would remove the principal state sponsor and logistical center of several regional terrorist networks, reduce threats to Israel and the Gulf states, strengthen maritime security, diminish Russian and Chinese influence, and reopen one of the Middle East’s largest societies and economies to international trade and investment. 

Preparing for such a transition is not nation-building. It is an investment in ending a crisis the United States has spent nearly half a century managing.

Credible strategy for change in Iran

The missing link is a credible Iranian strategy that can convert external pressure into internal political change.

Reza Pahlavi’s five-pillar strategy offers one such framework: maximum pressure on the Islamic Republic, maximum support for the Iranian people, maximum encouragement of defections from the regime, maximum organization of Iranian forces, and preparation for reconstruction through the Iran Prosperity Project.

Its significance lies less in any individual component than in the way the components connect.

Pressure is intended to weaken the regime’s coercive capacity; support enables civil resistance and communication; defections separate the professional state from the ideological core; organization reduces the danger of a power vacuum; and post-regime planning addresses the question that has long haunted Western policymakers: What comes the day after?

The Iran Prosperity Project’s Emergency Phase attempts to answer that question through a detailed plan for the first 180 days after the Islamic Republic.

Developed by over 70 Iranian specialists, it addresses political authority, law, security forces, foreign policy, banking, energy, essential government services, health, water, cybersecurity, education, and economic stabilization.

No transition blueprint can eliminate uncertainty, and such a plan will inevitably require revision as events unfold. But its existence changes the strategic equation.

The choice need not be between preserving the Islamic Republic and risking chaos. There is a third possibility: dismantling the ideological regime while maintaining the institutions necessary to keep Iran functioning.

That distinction – between regime collapse and state collapse – must become the organizing principle of transition planning. Iraq demonstrated the catastrophic consequences of confusing a dictatorship with the state beneath it.

Iran cannot afford wholesale purges of soldiers, civil servants, engineers, technicians, police officers, judges, energy workers, or administrators merely because they served under the existing system.

Criminal responsibility should be individual.

Those responsible for murder, torture, corruption, terrorism, and systematic repression must face due process, while professionals who did not participate in serious crimes should have a path to continued national service.

The IRGC, as an ideological and parallel power structure, can be dismantled without discarding every trained individual or technical asset within it. The objective must be surgical political transformation, not institutional demolition.

This is also why defections matter strategically. Washington should distinguish between the regime’s ideological and criminal leadership and the much larger body of Iranians employed by the state.

Senior officials, commanders, and financial networks responsible for repression and terrorism should understand that continued participation carries personal legal and financial consequences.

At the same time, military personnel, police officers, government employees, and technical managers should receive a different message: refuse orders to repress the population, protect national infrastructure, join a legitimate transition, and there can be a future for you in Iran.

A regime whose personnel believe they will all be destroyed with it will fight to the end. A regime whose professional backbone sees a viable exit can fracture.

Pahlavi’s potential role should be understood in the same transitional context. Washington need not anoint him as Iran’s future monarch or predetermine the constitutional order.

It should, however, recognize the difference between neutrality over Iran’s eventual form of government and indifference toward leadership during a dangerous transition.

Pahlavi is the most internationally recognizable opposition figure advocating simultaneously for pressure, national organization, regime defections, territorial integrity, and post-Islamic Republic planning.

His most consequential potential role is therefore not to predetermine Iran’s future, but to provide a national center of gravity during the interval between the collapse of the existing order and the establishment of elected institutions.

His transitional mandate should end when Iranians determine their constitutional system and transfer authority to an elected government.

Washington should begin preparing for that possibility before a crisis makes preparation impossible.

An interagency Iran transition planning group should examine scenarios involving nuclear-site security, continuity of energy and banking systems, protection of borders and critical infrastructure, humanitarian supply chains, prevention of foreign intervention, and the phased removal of sanctions.

Structured dialogue with Pahlavi, the Iran Prosperity Project, Iranian specialists, and regional allies should begin before – not after – a political rupture.

The Treasury Department should prepare a sanctions exit map so that a credible transitional government can rapidly restore humanitarian trade and, conditionally, regain access to frozen Iranian assets, banking networks, and energy markets.

Those assets belong to Iran and should be preserved for stabilization and reconstruction rather than treated as spoils.

The first hours of transition would be decisive. Hospitals must operate, electricity and water must flow, banks must function, ports and fuel depots must remain secure, and the armed forces must not fragment into competing centers of power.

America’s role should be supportive rather than administrative: deter neighboring states and armed proxies from exploiting instability, facilitate humanitarian flows, help secure nuclear materials through appropriate international mechanisms, defend Iran’s territorial integrity, and recognize a credible transitional authority once it demonstrates effective national responsibility.

No American occupation, proxy army, ethnic militia, or externally engineered partition should be part of this strategy. The Islamic Republic must end; Iran must remain.

The choice confronting Washington, therefore, is not simply between war and diplomacy. Both are instruments.

The deeper choice is between indefinitely managing the next manifestation of the Iranian crisis and developing a strategy to end the system that continually reproduces it. Sanctions can reduce revenue.

Military operations can destroy facilities. Intelligence operations can disrupt networks. Diplomacy can buy time. None, by itself, answers the political question.

A coherent strategy does. Pressure must connect to a political alternative; the alternative to national organization; organization to defections; defections to continuity of the state; and transition to democratic legitimacy.

America should not build Iran’s next government. It should help remove the obstacles that prevent Iranians from building it themselves.

The strategic formula is ultimately simple: Washington should stop treating the survival of the Islamic Republic as the necessary price of containing its behavior. It should prepare to help Iranians change the regime while preserving their country.

If American power can be aligned with Iranian national leadership, institutional continuity, and the legitimacy of the ballot box, the end of the Islamic Republic need not inaugurate another Middle Eastern catastrophe.

It could instead mark the end of one of the region’s longest-running strategic crises.

The writer is the senior news editor for Iran International.