Opinion by Nick Berg
Bombs alone won’t produce a Western-aligned Tehran. But a precise combination of military pressure, economic incentives, and Iranian agency just might.
The temptation in Washington right now is to measure success in Iran by the crater count. Thousands of strikes. A supreme leader dead. A navy sunk. An air force grounded. By any conventional metric of military power, Operation Epic Fury has delivered results that would have seemed implausible eighteen months ago. And yet, as the ceasefire negotiations drag on and the Islamic Republic’s flag still flies over Tehran, a harder truth is forcing itself into view: the United States can win every battle in Iran and still lose the war that matters.
The war that matters is not the one being fought in Iranian airspace. It is the race for artificial intelligence supremacy, for semiconductor supply chain control, for the alignment of the Gulf’s $2 trillion in sovereign capital, and for the strategic geography of the most consequential energy corridor on earth. A Western-aligned Iran — genuinely integrated into the US-led technological and economic order — would be among the most transformative geopolitical outcomes since the end of the Cold War. It would deprive China of its most reliable discounted oil partner, close the Strait of Hormuz as a weapon against the West, and permanently reshape the AI investment landscape of the Middle East.
But here is what Washington’s hawks are getting dangerously wrong: the path to that outcome runs through Iranian agency, not American firepower. Every credible scenario that produces a stable, Western-aligned Tehran requires Iranians to be the authors of their own transformation. The moment this looks like an American installation project, it becomes an American occupation problem — and that problem, as Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrated at a combined cost of $4.2 trillion, has no good ending.
Sources:
RAND Corporation: “Paths to Victory: Lessons from Modern Insurgencies”
RAND Corporation: “Victory Has a Thousand Fathers: Sources of Success in Counterinsurgency”
Brown University Watson Institute: Costs of War Project
Freedom House: Freedom in the World Reports
McKinsey & Company: Global AI Investment Trends
U.S. Energy Information Administration: World Oil Transit Chokepoints
Engelsberg Ideas : Lessons in the limits of airpower
SPECIAL INSPECTOR GENERAL: Learning from Iraq
Modern War Institute: The SIGAR Project
ResearchGate: Assessing war: The challenge of measuring success and failure
Notizie Geopolitiche: Basic Geopolitics of Artificial Intelligence: Digital Sovereignty and New Power Balances in the 21st Century
CFG: Securing chip access through strategic indispensability
War on the Rocks: The Burn and the Choke: Why Semiconductor Controls Will Outlast China’s Rare Earth Weapon
The Paradox the Bombs Created
Before the first Tomahawk struck Tehran on February 28, the Islamic Republic was closer to natural collapse than at any point since its founding. The protests that swept all 31 Iranian provinces in January 2026 had crossed every social boundary the regime depended on to divide and conquer: Persian and Kurd, merchant and laborer, secular and religious. According to Jack Goldstone of George Mason University, a follow-on revolution was “likely within a matter of months.” The currency had collapsed twenty-thousand-fold since 1979. Annual inflation exceeded 40 percent. The IRGC’s proxy network — Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis — had been systematically dismantled by two years of Israeli strikes.
Then the bombs started, and the dynamic reversed. Nothing unifies a fractured population like a foreign attack. The security forces that were wavering found their purpose. The elite fractures that were widening closed shut. The opposition, which had been gaining momentum, was left without a safe space to organize or a credible leader to rally behind. The US-Israeli campaign — designed to accelerate regime change — may have postponed it by months or years. This is not an argument against military action. It is an argument for understanding what military action can and cannot accomplish.
Sources:
ACLED: Iran conflict events
International Crisisgroup: Iran
RLI: Iran’s Protests: Drivers, Actors, Consequences, and External Dimensions
ResearchGate: Revolutions: A very short introduction
Oxford Academic: What causes revolutions?
The New Humanitarian: How economic collapse set the stage for Iran’s deadly protests
Trading Economics: Iran inflation rate
The Soufan Center: Iran Taps Its Axis of Resistance for Reinforcement
Strategy International: Crisis and cohesion: Understanding the rally-around-the-flag effect through the Israeli experience
IFES: Understanding And Interrupting Authoritarian Collaboration
Sage Journals: A Loyal Base: Support for Authoritarian Regimes in Times of Crisis
Amnesty International: A WEB OF IMPUNITY
The killings Iran’s internet shutdown hide
BelferCenter: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Is Rarely a Path to Democracy
Foreign Affairs: How Iran Sees the War
External Escalation, Internal Consolidation
The Scenario That Actually Works: The Ceasefire Window
The most realistic pathway to a Western-aligned Iran is also the most counterintuitive one: stop the bombing before the regime collapses militarily, and then let economics, politics, and time finish the job.
The Hudson Institute assessed before the war that “there is no scenario in which the Islamic Republic survives 2026 with its power intact.” That structural reality has not changed. The war has severely degraded the IRGC’s military capabilities. Iran’s proxy network is largely destroyed. The economy is in freefall. The legitimacy crisis that produced January’s protests has not been resolved — it has been temporarily suppressed by the rally-around-the-flag effect of US strikes. When that effect fades, as it always does, the underlying conditions will reassert themselves with even greater force against a regime that has spent its remaining military assets and political capital.
The US strategy in this window should be precise: agree to a ceasefire that the Iranian regime needs for its short-term survival, but use the negotiating leverage to extract structural commitments — verified nuclear disarmament, cessation of proxy funding, genuine political opening. Offer just enough sanctions relief to let ordinary Iranians breathe, but maintain the economic pressure that makes the current system unsustainable. Simultaneously, invest seriously in building a credible Iranian opposition coalition — not Reza Pahlavi as symbolic figurehead, but a genuinely unified national council with broad representation across Iran’s ethnic, religious, and professional communities.
Then make the offer that no Iranian government has ever been made in good faith: full reintegration into the global economy, massive reconstruction investment from Gulf sovereign wealth funds, removal of all sanctions, and a security guarantee. Not the 1953 playbook of covert manipulation. A genuine offer of the future, made publicly, in Persian, to the Iranian people.
Sources:
Hudson Institute: Iran
Hudson Institute: The Ayatollah’s Regime Is Crumbling
Opinio Juris: When War Bets on Protest: Iran’s Civilians in a Double Bind
AFPC: Iran’s Crisis of Legitimacy Comes into View
Schwab: Truce in Iran: Relief but Not Resolution
Brookings: Can Iran’s regime survive the war?
Foreign Affairs: How to Save the Iran Nuclear Deal
ICT: From Missiles to Minds: Iran’s Influence-Driven War Strategy
Modern Diplomacy: Iran and the Limits of Maximum Pressure
IMF: Islamic Republic of Iran
Belfer Center: The Degradation of Iran’s Proxy Model
Atlas Institute for International Affairs: Internal Crisis, External Pressure: Navigating the Risk of Regime Change in Iran
The Elite Defection Scenario: The Egypt Model
The second viable scenario requires a specific thing to happen inside Iran’s military establishment: the professional Iranian Armed Forces, which are institutionally separate from the IRGC, must decide that the regime is no longer worth dying for.
This is the Egypt 2011 model. Mubarak did not fall because protesters won militarily — he fell because the Egyptian Army concluded that protecting him was no longer consistent with the institution’s interests. A similar calculation is at least theoretically possible in Iran if US strikes can drive a sufficient wedge between the ideologically-motivated IRGC and the professional military. The key is targeting: strikes against IRGC leadership, assets, and financing — not civilian infrastructure — that degrade the theocratic enforcement apparatus while leaving the professional military’s institutional dignity intact.
For this to produce a Western-aligned government rather than a military junta, it requires — again — a credible civilian opposition figure that defecting officers can transfer power to. This is the single most critical and most neglected variable in Washington’s Iran strategy. The US has spent enormous resources on military planning and almost nothing on building a viable political alternative. That is an investment that needs to start immediately, in coordination with the Iranian diaspora, Gulf partners, and European allies.
Sources:
Defense Intelligence Agency: Iran Military Power
Praeger Security International: Iran’s Military Forces and Warfighting Capabilities
Princeton University Press: How Armies Respond to Revolutions and Why
HFG: When Militaries Turn Against Authoritarians: Lessons from Tunisia and the Arab Spring
Brookings: The Real Loser in Egypt’s Uprising
RAND: Limited Intervention Evaluating the Effectiveness of Limited Stabilization, Limited Strike, and Containment Operations
Council on Foreign Relations: After Khamenei: Planning for Iran’s Leadership Transition
OpenEdition Journals: From dictatorship to democracy: the institutional transitions. Transitions from above?
RAND: Understanding Deterrence
RFI: Iran’s exiled opposition fractures amid climate of fear online
ResearchGate: Czechoslovakia in 1989 – A case of successful transition
The Negotiated Transition: The Japan Model
The most historically durable model for converting a defeated adversary into a Western-aligned partner is Japan after 1945. MacArthur’s genius was not in imposing American institutions wholesale but in working with Japanese elites to build a new constitutional order that preserved national dignity while integrating Japan permanently into the Western economic and security architecture. The result was not a puppet state but a genuine partner that has sustained its alignment for 80 years.
A version of this is achievable in Iran if — and this is a large if — a moderate faction of the Iranian establishment can be peeled away from the hardliners with a sufficiently attractive offer. Iran has a substantial technocratic class, a significant reformist political tradition, and a population that is among the most pro-Western in the Middle East in its cultural orientation. The regime’s ideological rigidity is real, but it is not uniform. Former President Rouhani’s wing of Iranian politics has never entirely disappeared; it has been suppressed.
The offer would need to be substantial and credible: full sanctions removal, security guarantees against future military action, reconstruction financing through Gulf sovereign wealth funds and Western development banks, and fast-track integration into global trade networks. The quid pro quo would be verified nuclear disarmament, formal severance of proxy relationships, and a genuine political transition timeline. This is essentially what happened with Libya in the early 2000s when Gaddafi traded his weapons of mass destruction for economic normalization. The difference is that Iran’s economic prize — 90 million people, vast oil reserves, a sophisticated manufacturing base — is incomparably larger.
Sources:
JSTOR: Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II
Council on Foreign Relations: The U.S.-Japan Alliance
Internet Archive: Hirohito and the making of modern Japan
Clingendael: Fifty shades of hardliners: Intra-elite dynamics in Iran
Belfer Center: Factionalism, Privatization, and the Political Economy of Regime Transformation
Council on Foreign Relations: The Shia Revival
How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future
Clingendael: The limit of Iran’s industrial resilience
INSS: Iran’s Reformists: From Failure to Sobering Realization
Middle East Council on Global Affairs: Iran’s “Look East” Strategy: Continuity and Change under Raisi
The Wall Street Journal: Iran Blocks Moderates From Running in June Election
ICS: The U.S. and Iran Can Still Avoid a War
Carnegie: America and Iran: Is a New Chapter Possible?
EPC: Stepping into the driver’s seat: The EU should double down on US–Iran diplomacy
U.S.Government Publishing Office: IRAN’S POLITICAL/NUCLEAR AMBITIONS
Al Habtoor Research Centre: The Hormuz Inflection: Oil Markets After the Iran Strikes
Iran International: Trump wants deal but his patience is running thin
What Will Guarantee Failure
Two paths guarantee failure. The first is a full ground invasion and occupation. Iran has 93 million people, four times Iraq’s land mass, and mountain terrain that neutralizes American technological advantages while maximizing the effectiveness of guerrilla warfare. A ground occupation of Iran would require 400,000 to 600,000 troops, cost $300 billion or more per year, and produce the same outcome that Iraq and Afghanistan produced: an eventual withdrawal with no lasting political settlement. More critically for American strategic interests, it would hand China an uncontested runway of years in which to advance its AI capabilities, dominate global technology diffusion, and position itself for a move on Taiwan while US forces are stretched across a country they cannot hold.
The second failure path is destroying the regime without building its successor. Libya after Gaddafi. Iraq after Saddam. The pattern is consistent and catastrophic: decapitate the existing order, fail to invest in political alternatives, and watch the country fragment into competing militias and civil war. In Iran’s case, that fragmentation would leave oil infrastructure in chaos, the Strait of Hormuz permanently unstable, and a power vacuum that China and Russia would rush to fill — the opposite of every strategic objective the US entered this conflict with.
Sources:
World Bank: Population, total – Iran, Islamic Rep.
RAND: Occupying Iraq A History of the Coalition Provisional Authority
The Watson School: Costs of War
Council on Foreign Relations: The U.S. War in Afghanistan
RAND: Full Stack China’s Evolving Industrial Policy for AI
Taiwan Center for Security Studies: The Ramifications of Increasing Global Technology Competition
National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence: Final Report
Center for Preventive Action: Civil Conflict in Libya
ICG: Libya
CFR: The Iraq War
Brookings: After Saddam: Assessing the Reconstruction of Iraq
RAND: Nation Building
EIA: Amid regional conflict, the Strait of Hormuz remains critical oil chokepoint
Eurasia Review: Energy Security And Military Logistics: Russia’s Emerging Opportunities Amidst Middle East Instability
The Washington Institute: Great Power Spillover from the Iran War: Implications for China, Russia, Turkey, and Europe
Why This Matters for the AI Race
American strategists need to hold two realities in their heads simultaneously. The first is that the Iran war is a real and present crisis demanding immediate military and diplomatic attention. The second is that it is a sideshow to the contest that will determine the shape of the 21st century: the race between the United States and China for dominance of artificial intelligence, semiconductor supply chains, and the global technology infrastructure that will underpin every dimension of national power for the next fifty years.
A Western-aligned Iran, achieved through the scenarios described above, would deliver decisive advantages in that race. China loses its most reliable discounted oil supply — a direct hit to the energy economics of its AI compute buildout. The Strait of Hormuz, through which a third of China’s oil currently flows, comes permanently under the security umbrella of a US-aligned regional order. The Gulf’s $2 trillion AI investment commitment, currently wobbling under wartime uncertainty, snaps back with renewed confidence. And Iran’s 90 million people, historically among the most educated and tech-forward in the Middle East, become a market and talent pool for the Western AI ecosystem rather than a client state of Chinese infrastructure projects.
But all of that requires the US to execute the political strategy with the same precision it has applied to the military one. Every bomb that falls without a corresponding investment in Iranian political alternatives makes the prize harder to claim. Every month of protracted conflict gives China more time to accelerate, adapt, and advance in the race that actually determines which country writes the rules of the coming century.
Sources:
U.S. Department of Defense: National Defense Strategy
CNAS: Artificial Intelligence and International Security
Financial Post: Iran War Chokepoints Begin to Cast Doubt on Global Chip Supply
NIST: CHIPS-for-America-Strategy
Atlantic Council: GeoTech Center Shaping the future of technology and data to advance society.
OECD: Digital public infrastructure for digital governments
CGCI: U.S.-China Competition: The Battle for Global Technological Leadership
EIA: Iran
Atlantic Council: How the Iran war could shift energy policies around the world
INSS: “We Will Export Data Instead of Oil”: The Rise of the Gulf States as Artificial Intelligence Powers and Its Geopolitical Implications
WorldData: Level of education in Iran
Gulf International Forum: How Iran’s Expatriates Are Powering Its Tech Sector
West Asia Watch: China’s Expanding Role in the Middle East: A Comprehensive Overview
The Window Is Open — But Not Forever
The conditions for a Western-aligned Iran are more present today than at any point in the past 47 years. The regime is militarily degraded, economically desperate, and politically illegitimate in the eyes of a significant portion of its own population. The US has demonstrated both the willingness and the capability to impose severe military costs. The Gulf states are more aligned with Washington’s strategic objectives than they have been in a generation. China is watching but not intervening at scale.
This window will not stay open indefinitely. Regime survival instincts are powerful. Economic pain radicalizes as often as it liberalizes. And every day of continued bombing makes the subsequent political task harder by deepening Iranian nationalism and depleting the goodwill of the very population whose agency is essential to any sustainable outcome.
The narrow path exists. It runs through a ceasefire that maintains strategic pressure, a serious investment in Iranian political alternatives, a credible economic offer that makes Western alignment more attractive than continued isolation, and the patience to let Iranian agency drive the final act. It requires Washington to resist the temptation of the maximalist solution — the ground invasion, the imposed government, the occupation — that would transform a strategic opportunity into a generational catastrophe.
