There are few useful precedents to help chart the path forward. Trump may hope for a similar outcome to what followed Maduro’s extraordinary rendition from Venezuela, with the once hostile regime in Caracas reconfiguring itself, under acting President Delcy Rodríguez, into a quasi-clientelistic arrangement with Washington. But, as Vakil told me, “there are no Delcy-like figures in Iran.”
The air campaign over Iran also recalls the NATO-led intervention into Libya in 2011, which led to the ouster and killing of the long-ruling dictator Muammar Qaddafi. But, unlike in Libya, there’s no major rebellion under way inside Iran, nor even a coherent opposition and, absent mass defections from the security forces, little prospect of an armed challenge to the regime gaining significant ground on its own. And then there’s the legacy of the calamity that followed in Libya, with Qaddafi’s ouster paving the way for more than a decade of failed governance and prolonged civil strife.
Outside Iran, some of the diaspora and opposition groups have coalesced around Reza Pahlavi, the son of the Shah dethroned by the 1979 revolution. Pahlavi has cast himself as a figure of unity who can shepherd Iran’s political transition. But he is already a divisive character outside the country and has minimal influence within. As Ervand Abrahamian, a historian of Iran and professor emeritus at the City University of New York, noted in a recent conversation that we had, history offers few happy examples of monarchical restorations after a long revolutionary interlude. The most recent example, he suggested, could date as far back as the Bourbons being installed in Paris after Napoleon’s defeat in 1815—but that required the deployment of hundreds of thousands of Prussian, Russian, and other Allied troops to buttress the royalist return. Neither Trump nor Netanyahu nor any Middle Eastern leader would want to participate in such an occupation.
For now, with Iran’s regime backed into a shrinking corner, the potential for a destabilizing conflagration is real. “There is a danger of a regional war in which Iran attempts to destroy the positive things that have been built in the Gulf and to go after oil installations to spike the price of oil,” Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said in an interview with Foreign Affairs. “Israel is better equipped to defend itself because of its military prowess and its distance from Iran, but those Gulf countries are more vulnerable.”
The scenes of chaos in expat-clogged places like Doha and Dubai represent a kind of worst-case scenario for leaders of the Gulf monarchies, who want the world to see their glittering kingdoms as oases of stability and prosperity, Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a Middle East expert at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, told me. It also complicates the Trump Administration’s own significant dealings with wealthy Arab royals, which include major rounds of investment in U.S. tech companies and some of Trump’s own family enterprises. A prolonged conflict has “consequences for U.S. credibility as a mediator, as a negotiator,” Ulrichsen said. “We saw after the Iraq invasion in 2003 how credibility takes a long time to be restored when something of this magnitude happens.”
Until the weekend, it seemed there was an off-ramp. Oman’s Foreign Minister, Badr Albusaidi, conducted a last-ditch mission to Washington, meeting with Vice-President J. D. Vance and appearing Friday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” where he said that a substantive agreement between Iran and the United States was “within our reach.” He suggested that Israeli and American fears over a potential Iranian nuclear weapon would be assuaged, that Iran’s stockpiles of enriched uranium could be secured, and the parties in dispute could settle terms “peacefully and permanently.”
The indirect talks staged between Trump’s envoys and Iranian counterparts now seem something of a smoke screen for what was already in motion: a concerted U.S.-Israeli plan to hit Iran, not dissimilar from the strikes in June that also happened during ongoing negotiations with Tehran. Amid the fog of war, Albusaidi recognized that the diplomatic track he had been trying to furrow as an intermediary had come to an end.
