President Donald Trump did what three predecessors refused to do. He hit the Islamic Republic with everything America had, and he meant it. Operation Epic Fury shattered Iran’s war machine, killed its supreme leader, and forced a regime that spent four decades exporting terror to beg for a ceasefire. Give the president his due: He showed grit, he put fire where his words were, and on the battlefield he won.
Now read the deal he won, because the kinetic phase is over and the document tells a different story.
[The agreement] defers everything that matters to a sixty-day negotiation: the enriched uranium, the missiles, the proxies, the inspections.
The agreement ends the shooting and reopens the oil flow today. It defers everything that matters to a sixty-day negotiation: the enriched uranium, the missiles, the proxies, the inspections. Washington calls the Strait of Hormuz “permanently toll-free.” Iran never charged a toll before the war, so the president takes a victory lap for restoring a status quo we already held. On uranium enrichment, the whole ballgame, the deal does not end the program. It pauses it, fifteen or twenty years, then promises more talks. Iran’s missiles stay. Its proxies (Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Iraqi militias) stay off the agenda. Israel, which fought the war, never won a seat at the table.
The money flows the wrong way, too. The text unfreezes $24 billion, half of it before the nuclear talks begin. That is cash to a regime that just lost its supreme leader, fights over his succession, and watches its own people fill the streets against their negotiators. We have run this experiment before. In 1981 we handed Tehran billions of dollars and a non-intervention pledge. In 2015 we handed it $100 billion and watched the limits sunset. In 2023 we wired $6 billion and called it diplomacy. Every time, the relief held and the constraints expired. This deal front-loads everything Iran wanted.
Here is the truth no signing ceremony changes, and it carries no insult to the campaign: no agreement, not this one and not a better one, can permanently guarantee that Iran never builds a bomb. You cannot verify your way out of a regime whose entire purpose is the bomb, the proxies, and a chokehold on the Gulf. The International Atomic Energy Agency’s own director calls an unverified deal an “illusion.” Paper buys time. It does not buy a guarantee.
So the conclusion writes itself. The military chapter closed this week, and Trump closed it. Only a different government in Tehran permanently defangs Iran. Say it plainly: Regime change is the recipe of the day.
The decisive weapon already exists, and we have barely used it: the Iranian people. This regime sits weaker than at any point since 1979. Its economy collapses, rivals scramble for its throne, and its citizens have shown the world, twice in four years, that they want it gone. They rose in 2022 over a murdered young woman, and a generation since has rejected the clerics who rule it. The blockade and the strikes cracked the structure open. The job now is to finish it, not to rescue the regime from its own population with a wire transfer.
The instruments now are the Iranian people, a coordinated regional strategy, and the oldest tools of statecraft.
This next phase belongs to the region, not to Washington. The bombs did their work; the permanent work is political. America keeps its interest, but the lead passes to Jerusalem. Israel and its regional allies should reach out to every faction, inside Iran and across the Gulf, that shares the single goal of a free Iran and wage that campaign with influence, information, and patience. Fund the strikers and the unions, the satellite channels and the students. Strangle the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ finances and drag its front companies into the daylight where sanctions can find them. No more bombing runs. The instruments now are the Iranian people, a coordinated regional strategy, and the oldest tools of statecraft.
Trump put fire where his words were and broke the Iranian military. That was the hard part, and he delivered it. He should not now spend that victory underwriting the survival of the men he just beat. Hold the relief until Tehran earns it, keep the Strait open on American terms, and back the Iranians who want what we want.
Wars end with a verified outcome, not a roadmap and a wire transfer. This one is not over. It has passed to the people best positioned to win it, and to the region that must help them.
