President Donald Trump launched this war with regime change as the explicit goal. He called on Iranians to rise up against the mullahs. He wanted the security forces to turn on their commanders. He hoped for a Venezuela 2.0 scenario (as I wrote four weeks ago): remove the dictator, find a cooperative insider willing to work with Washington, declare victory, and go home. He chose to act now, not because Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States – it didn't, contrary to the administration's shifting and largely debunked justifications – but because he concluded that years of economic mismanagement, sanctions, repression, and military degradation had left Iran weaker than at any point since the revolution. Yet five days later, the Iranian regime is still standing, still retaliating, and has given no indication it intends to capitulate anytime soon.
Trump was right about Iranian weakness, and he had reason for confidence. Twice he’d hit Iran hard before and paid no meaningful price. Where he erred was in reading weakness as political pliability – and in assuming that America’s unchecked military power guarantees the ability to dictate outcomes.
As it turns out, you can’t overthrow governments from 30,000 feet, no matter how many bunker-busting bombs you drop on them. Regime change requires boots on the ground and/or an organized opposition ready to seize power. Trump has no appetite for the first, Iran lacks the second. The protesters who took to the streets in January – whom the regime massacred in the tens of thousands – are unarmed, unorganized, and face an internal security apparatus that remains largely intact. Iran's capacity and willingness to repress its own population far exceed its remaining ability to project military power externally.
The Islamic Republic is forty-five years old, forged in revolution and hardened by eight years of total war with Iraq (a war in which, notably, external assault consolidated the regime rather than fragmenting it). It’s neither a personalist dictatorship built on loyalty to a strongman nor a kleptocracy held together by narrow economic interests. It’s a strongly institutionalized, layered architecture of deeply entrenched institutions: the Supreme Leader's office, the Assembly of Experts, the IRGC, parallel clerical networks, and repressive organs. Killing Khamenei doesn't dissolve that any more than a US president dying in office would upend the constitutional order.
There’s no Iranian Delcy Rodriguez to be found in this system; Trump has admitted as much already. Anyone with enough standing inside the regime to seize control will be bound by the same institutional logic and constraints that defined the regime under Khamenei. This includes Iran’s red lines on missiles and nuclear enrichment, which reflect less Khamenei’s personal policy preferences than the Islamic Republic's existential insurance – its consensus answer to the question of how you avoid becoming the next Iraq or Libya. No successor to Khamenei, operating within this system, will formally concede on either.
Which means the White House's downgraded objectives – degrading Iran's nuclear program, eliminating its ballistic missile threat, ending support for regional proxies – don't resolve its underlying dilemma: it can’t durably achieve any of them while this regime remains in power, and it can’t remove this regime with the tools it’s willing to use.
And yet Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth keep promising that much larger military operations are coming. Additional American casualties are likely, they’ve warned. The administration is clearly planning something beyond the air campaign that has already decimated Iran's military leadership and infrastructure.
If not regime change, what then? The answer may be staring at us from a small island in the northern Persian Gulf.
Kharg Island handles 80-90% of Iran's oil exports. It's where the supertankers dock – the one place connecting Iranian crude to world markets. Iran has other export terminals but none that can handle supertankers. While Iran could pivot exports to several smaller terminals or to rail, it would not be able to replace the volumes Kharg handles. Control it, and you control the regime's revenue lifeline: its ability to rebuild its military, reconstitute its nuclear program, fund proxies, and survive as a regional power. The island itself is less than half the size of Manhattan, isn't extensively fortified, and sits isolated enough that US destroyers and close-in air defense systems could establish a credible defensive perimeter well offshore. Iran's degraded air and naval defenses create a unique window to strike, and the US already has substantial naval assets in the region, including ships equipped to handle mines and drone attacks.
Seizing and holding Kharg could give Trump leverage over whatever regime emerges in Tehran without boots on the ground in Iranian cities, without a years-long occupation, and without a Delcy he won’t be able to find. You don't need to control the government if you control its main revenue source. Sanctions have tried and failed to choke off this cash flow for decades: the US tightens enforcement, then relaxes it to stabilize oil markets and lower prices, and Iran finds workarounds to adapt. Kharg would offer something sanctions never could: direct, physical control over the point where Iranian crude reaches the world. The US could let whatever government exists in Tehran run the country while it keeps the oil flowing and decides how the proceeds get spent. China, which buys roughly 80% of Iran’s crude exports, would prefer that to a protracted war that disrupts supply and pushes Brent above $100. So would the American public. All in all, a pretty attractive option for a president who desperately needs gas prices low ahead of the midterms and can’t afford to let anything derail his summit with Xi Jinping in April.
The operation itself is also one Trump could actually sell domestically. The initial strikes have been unpopular from the start and have seen no “rally” effect since, with MAGA skepticism of another open-ended Middle East commitment adding to the usual partisan split. Long-term regime change is a political non-starter. But a pivot to seizing and holding a strategic chokepoint? That's a decisive, limited action that fits his brand and gives him something concrete to point to.
The entire strategy, however, rests on the assumption that the Iranians would rather accept American control over Kharg than destroy the terminal themselves. The logic is that Iran needs that revenue to survive, so it won't blow up its own export capacity. That assumption may prove mistaken.
Iran's leadership has just watched its Supreme Leader assassinated and dozens of senior officials killed. The scope and intensity of its response – over 500 ballistic missiles and 1,000 drones in the first 48 hours, striking civilian targets across the Gulf in countries that weren't even belligerents, hitting a US embassy, killing American soldiers – has exceeded US expectations. This is a regime that sees compromising core principles – its missile deterrent, its right to enrich, resistance to American coercion – as more dangerous to its long-term survival than short-term devastation. The Islamic Republic has endured brutal sanctions, eight years of total war with Iraq, and decades of economic isolation. Further deprivation is seen as survivable. What is not is capitulation to Washington, which would delegitimize the entire revolutionary project.
If the choice is between letting America coerce it indefinitely or destroying the terminal and denying Trump his leverage, which do you think this regime would choose? The Iranians lose control over the revenue either way. Blowing up Kharg themselves before American boots hit the island would send oil to $120 and impose massive costs on the US, Gulf allies, and global markets, signaling that their pain tolerance is higher than Washington’s without sacrificing the regime’s ideological foundation. That's not necessarily an irrational choice from Tehran's perspective.
Especially when you consider that the US is by no means guaranteed to succeed. Iran still has thousands of short-range missiles and drones that can’t be taken out. They've shown they can hit ships and down aircraft. An operation to seize Kharg requires massing American forces in contested waters against an adversary with home-field advantage and nothing left to lose. Even degraded Iranian command and control can coordinate enough to turn an amphibious assault into a bloodbath Trump wouldn’t be able to tolerate politically.
And seizing it is only half the battle. Say the US takes Kharg cleanly and holds it. Now you're stuck occupying critical infrastructure in the middle of the Persian Gulf indefinitely, defending against a hostile state with every incentive to take it back through drones, mines, sabotage, proxy attacks, terrorism, and slow attrition that bleeds you for years. And the leverage the US gets in exchange could turn out to be less than meets the eye. Iran can survive on dramatically reduced revenue. They'll impose austerity, crack down on dissent, blame America for economic suffering, and rally nationalist sentiment around resisting occupation. Tehran might calculate that enduring deprivation beats accepting American terms that amount to regime suicide.
I don't know if Trump is seriously considering this. But if he’s looking for a way to gain durable leverage without regime change, without finding a cooperative Iranian partner he doesn't have, and without the “forever war” his base won't accept, Kharg is one of the few options that makes strategic sense. It's the middle path between declaring a hollow victory and committing to something he can't sustain.
It's also a massive gamble. Trump started this war by mistaking military weakness for political pliability. He may be ending it by assuming that economic necessity will force the regime to accept terms it views as a worse form of death. Based on everything we've seen this week about what Iran values and how it optimizes for regime survival, it's not a bet I'd take. But it may be the only one Trump has left.
