The Longest Way Home

Sixteen days into the joint American-Israeli air campaign against Iran, the Islamic Republic’s missile arsenal is rubble. Its nuclear infrastructure has been set back a decade, its supreme leader is dead, and its navy sits at the bottom of the Persian Gulf. By every conventional measure of military success, this campaign has been decisive.

It is not enough.

Air power has never produced regime change on its own: not in Germany, Japan, Serbia, Iraq, or Libya. Bombs create a condition, not a conclusion. The condition now facing Iran is one of extraordinary fragility, opportunity, and danger.

The question confronting Washington and Jerusalem is not whether the air campaign succeeded—it did. The question is what comes next. There is no appetite in America for a ground invasion. Seventy-five percent of the public righty opposes it. A ground campaign would be America’s Sicily: the catastrophe that Thucydides immortalized as the inevitable consequence of democratic passion outrunning strategic judgment. Pericles counseled the Athenians to wait quietly, to pay attention to their navy, and to attempt no new conquests. They did the opposite, and it destroyed them.

The coalition does not need to invade Iran. It needs to do something harder and smarter: help the Iranian people finish what the bombs started.

Fourteen works of classical strategy, read together and applied with discipline, show how.

Clausewitz taught that the first and supreme act of strategic judgment is identifying the enemy’s center of gravity: the point where the forces converge, the hub of all power and movement. Strike it with enough force and the whole structure falls.

Most analysts look at Iran and see military targets: missile batteries, nuclear centrifuges, and IRGC command posts. The air campaign has destroyed these, but destroying them has not ended the regime because they were never the center of gravity.

Clausewitz was specific. In popular uprisings, the center of gravity lies “in the persons of the principal leaders and in public opinion.” The Islamic Republic’s center of gravity is its claim to divine political authority, vested in the institution of the Supreme Leader. That claim is now embodied by Mojtaba Khamenei: a man most Iranians have never heard speak, installed by IRGC coercion, whose inauguration featured a cardboard cutout because he cannot appear in public.

This is the strategic opportunity of a generation.

GAMAAN survey data show roughly 70 percent of Iranians oppose the Islamic Republic. Eighty-nine percent support democracy. The December 2025 uprising spread to all 31 provinces. Industrial workers walked out at South Pars, teachers issued political demands, truckers struck in 40 cities and students mobilized at 45 universities. Kurdish cities shut down entirely.

The regime’s center of gravity was cracked before the first bomb fell; the succession crisis has split it open.

Sun Tzu ranked the hierarchy of strategic action 25 centuries ago, and no one has improved on it since. The best approach is to attack the enemy’s strategy. Next, his alliances, then his army. Worst of all is to attack his cities.

The air campaign attacked the army and, to some extent, the cities. Phase two must attack the strategy and the alliances: the ideological coherence and institutional solidarity that hold the regime together.

B.H. Liddell Hart called this the indirect approach. Throughout history, effective results in war have rarely been attained unless the approach was indirect enough to ensure the opponent was unready to meet it. The direct assault almost always fails. The key is dislocation: psychological and physical, achieved through movement, surprise, and operating along the line of least expectation.

“In strategy,” Liddell Hart wrote, “the longest way round is often the shortest way home.”

The longest way round in Iran is not through the Zagros Mountains with the 82nd Airborne. It is through the information space, the economic arteries, the provincial civil society networks, and the fracture lines of a regime that handed supreme power to a man whose only qualification is his surname.

Andrew Mumford, writing in The Strategy Bridge, observed that contemporary proxy warfare is the latest iteration of Liddell Hart’s indirect approach: the fundamental re-routing of strategic activity through a third party. Britain prosecuted continental wars for three centuries by proxy—by the artful dodge of lending sovereigns to sovereigns, without sending an expeditionary force. The parallel is precise: the coalition’s task is not to invade Iran but to enable Iranians to liberate themselves.

Machiavelli spent his career analyzing the kind of succession crisis now unfolding in Tehran. The Prince is, at its core, a study of how new rulers acquire and consolidate power. Most fail.

Mojtaba Khamenei is the archetype of Machiavelli’s weakest category: the prince who acquires power through the arms and fortune of others rather than through his own competence. His appointment was not earned: it was engineered by Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) intelligence operatives and imposed through what analysts described as sustained psychological and political pressure on Assembly of Experts members. Machiavelli warned that the prince who has relied least on fortune is established the strongest. Mojtaba has relied on nothing else. The fortune of birth, of his father’s killing creating a vacancy, and of IRGC muscle replacing institutional process.

The revolution that promised to end monarchy has produced a monarchy. This is not Western propaganda, but the lived contradiction that Iranian protesters have articulated since 2009, when they chanted “wish you death Mojtaba, so you would never be the next leader!” His is a succession without legitimacy, popular mandate, or even the pretense of clerical consensus.

Carnegie analysts have identified the core problem: Mojtaba lacks the religious credentials, public record, or institutional standing of his father. His authority derives entirely from coercion and lineage. In Machiavellian terms, he has “others’ arms” rather than his own.

Then there is the matter of his physical condition. He has not appeared in public. Euronews reported that his status remains unknown following coalition strikes against regime leadership targets. Whether injured or in hiding, the effect is the same: a supreme leader who cannot show his face cannot command a nation at war.

Miyamoto Musashi understood the strategic implications of this kind of fragility. In A Book of Five Rings, Musashi wrote that everything can collapse: “Houses, bodies, and enemies collapse when their rhythm becomes deranged.” When the enemy starts to collapse, pursue him without letting the chance go. Fail to exploit it and he may recover.

The Islamic Republic’s rhythm is deranged. The task is to deny it the time to find a new one.

General Sir Rupert Smith demolished the illusion that military victory and political victory are the same thing. In an ICRC interview discussing The Utility of Force, he described the shift from interstate industrial war to “war amongst the people,” where the objective is not to seize territory but to create a condition—to change intentions so that the opponent adopts the desired outcome. You can win every engagement and lose the war. The Americans and British never lost a fight in Iraq, but they could not aggregate those wins into a victory because their military successes were dislocated from any political purpose.

Smith’s framework identifies the Iranian people as simultaneously the battlefield, the objective, and the prize. The purpose of any use of force is to differentiate between the enemy and the people and to win the latter to your side.

Martin van Creveld reached a complementary conclusion. In The Transformation of War, he argued that since 1945, low-intensity conflicts driven by non-state actors and popular movements have been incomparably more significant than conventional wars. His concept of non-trinitarian warfare describes precisely the phase the coalition must now navigate: supporting a popular movement against a weakened regime through means outside the framework of conventional strategy.

Van Creveld also identified the paradox of the strong fighting the weak. If you are strong and you kill your opponent, you are a scoundrel, but if he kills you, you are an idiot. This paradox argues powerfully against a ground invasion and in favor of indirect methods that keep the locus of action with the Iranian people.

Mao Zedong’s On Guerrilla Warfare provides the template, inverted. Mao’s foundational insight was that insurgency is fundamentally political, not military. The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea. Thomas Marks at West Point identified Mao’s five lines of effort: political content, domestic allies, violence, non-violence and political warfare, and international efforts. Turned inside out, this framework reveals how an external power can support a population’s resistance against its own authoritarian regime.

The inversion works as follows. Mao held that political mobilization must precede and enable military operations. Here, external military operations have already occurred and have shattered the regime’s hard power. The task now is to help the population build the political infrastructure to displace the regime from within. The U.S. Army Special Operations Command’s Resistance Operating Concept operationalizes exactly this logic: building the capacity of populations to mount effective resistance by enabling political mobilization through security provision. The air campaign provided the security provision. The question is whether the coalition will now provide the enablement.

The most instructive precedent is not Iraq 2003 or Libya 2011, but Poland 1981 to 1989.

After martial law crushed Solidarity’s public activities, the movement survived underground for eight years. Western support was deliberately indirect. CIA funding of roughly $2 million per year was channeled through third parties, with officers barred from meeting Solidarity leaders directly. The AFL-CIO raised money from union members, while the Vatican provided moral and material assistance. Radio Free Europe (RFE) maintainedinformation flow. As Arch Puddington documented in Broadcasting Freedom, RFE operated as a surrogate home radio service: not conveying American propaganda but reporting on conditions inside listeners’ own countries. Western diplomatic and economic leverage denied the regime international legitimacy.

No one invaded Poland. Solidarity, sustained by external support and internal courage, outlasted the regime and, in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell.

The parallel to Iran is precise. The opposition infrastructure is broader and more resilient than casual observers recognize. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies documented that labor activism has become part of a shared political struggle rather than isolated workplace disputes. The Coordinating Council of Iranian Teachers’ Trade Associations operates in multiple provinces. The Free Workers’ Union of Iran, the Tehran Bus Workers’ Syndicate, and the Haft Tappeh Sugarcane Workers’ Syndicate have all aligned with the protest movement.

Iran’s ethnic minorities constitute roughly 40 percent of the population and represent a strategic factor of the first order. The New Lines Institute has documented growing fissures among these communities. The Kurdish movement maintains organizational infrastructure in Iraqi Kurdistan and called a general strike in January 2026 that shuttered nearly every Kurdish city. The Baluch resistance has demonstrated mobilization capacity in Iran’s poorest province. The Congress of Nationalities for a Federal Iran provides a framework for common demands across ethnic lines.

The diaspora, too, has demonstrated unprecedented coordination. During the December 2025 protests, Iranian exile communities staged the largest demonstrations in their history: 250,000 in Munich, 350,000 in Toronto, 350,000 in Los Angeles. This is not a movement waiting to be created, but a movement waiting to be enabled.

The strategic canon yields a clear operational framework. Five pillars.

First: communications. The regime’s first move in every crisis is to kill the internet. In January 2026, it imposed a near-total blackout. The countermeasure already exists: the estimated 50,000 to 100,000 Starlink terminals inside Iran are described by activists as the only way to get information out. SpaceX activated free service and pushed software updates to counter military-grade jamming. The Iranian parliament criminalized Starlink possession with penalties up to ten years, but it does not matter, because the network cannot be fully suppressed. It must instead be expanded and hardened. Shortwave radio, which the regime cannot effectively jam, must complement digital channels. Mesh networking technologies allowing peer-to-peer data relay independent of ISPs should be funded and distributed. The defunding of Radio Farda, the Radio Free Europe affiliate covering Iran, must be reversed immediately. Gutting Persian-language broadcasting at the moment it is most strategically critical is an unforced error of the first order.

Second: sustained economic pressure through naval dominance. Alfred Thayer Mahan established in The Influence of Sea Power Upon History that whoever achieves maritime preponderance will prevail. The effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20 percent of the world’s traded oil normally transits, has achieved Mahanian economic warfare on a historic scale. Tanker traffic has collapsed from approximately 150 vessels per day to single digits. The regime’s ability to fund the IRGC, pay the Basij who enforce domestic repression, and sustain its patronage networks depends entirely on oil revenue. Severing that revenue requires notground soldiers, but sustained naval presence and continued air superiority over the Gulf. The coalition has both.

Third, direct support for opposition civil society. Provincial-level mapping across all 31 provinces, identifying local leaders, professional associations, women’s organizations, labor networks, student movements, and ethnic minority structures must inform a targeted enablement program. As FDD has documented, U.S. aid to Iran’s civil society has historically fallen short, concentrating on Tehran at the expense of provincial dynamics. The revolution will be won not in north Tehran, but in Zahedan, Sanandaj, Tabriz, Ahvaz, and the industrial towns where workers and minorities have nothing left to lose. Freedom House has called for Congress to surge Farsi-language broadcasting and democracy support. Diaspora coordination must evolve from solidarity demonstrations into operational planning connecting external resources with internal networks.

Fourth, exploitation of regime fractures. The IRGC is not monolithic. Analysts identify multiple factions: ultra-hardliners who view Mojtaba as necessary for maintaining a war footing, and pragmatists who may quietly seek a negotiated exit. Information operations should target the seams between them by documenting IRGC corruption, amplifying internal dissent, and offering implicit guarantees to officers who break ranks. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has warned that decapitation alone will not solve the problem; more than 40 percent of states that experience foreign-imposed regime change descend into civil war within a decade. The objective is to accelerate the regime’s internal decomposition while supporting an indigenous alternative.

Fifth, the strategic narrative. Lawrence Freedman, in Strategy: A History, argued that strategy is fundamentally narrative: a compelling storyline that explains events convincingly and must be constructed from the ideas already current among the audience. The coalition must support, not impose, a narrative connecting the air campaign, the succession crisis, and the opposition’s aspirations into a coherent story of Iranian self-liberation. The opposition’s existing slogans—“Woman, Life, Freedom,” “Death to the oppressor, whether Shah or Supreme Leader,” and “No monarchy, no supreme leadership, democracy, equality”—are more powerful than anything Washington could draft. The coalition’s role is amplification, not authorship.

John Keegan, in The Mask of Command, traced the evolution of military leadership from Alexander’s heroic personal combat through Wellington’s cool discipline and Grant’s technocratic management to what he called the post-heroic age: leadership that is modest, prudent, rational, and silent. The Bush administration’s “Mission Accomplished” banner was Keegan’s false heroic in action: spectacular gestures substituting for strategic judgment.

The Iran campaign demands the opposite. The air war is not the war. It is the precondition for the war that matters: the political contest for the future of Iran, conducted among the Iranian people, by the Iranian people, for the Iranian people. Premature declarations of victory will undermine the political campaign before it begins.

Samuel Huntington, in The Soldier and the State, prescribed that civilian leaders define political objectives, while military professionals determine means. Eliot Cohen’s rejoinder in Supreme Command is more useful here: the great wartime leaders engaged in what he called an “unequal dialogue,” actively probing and sometimes overriding military advice to keep operations tethered to political purpose. Cohen’s case study of David Ben-Gurion, who molded the IDF while ruthlessly managing the civil-military relationship, offers a template for ensuring that kinetic operations serve the broader political campaign in a coalition context.

The Peter Paret anthology Makers of Modern Strategy traces this tension across centuries. Its central theme—that strategy must serve political ends and never the reverse—is the organizing discipline for everything that follows the air campaign. The chapters on revolutionary warfare demonstrate that these conflicts are fundamentally political contests in which military force is one instrument among many. The chapters on limited war theory establish the framework within which calibrated force, economic pressure, and proxy enablement operate as alternatives to total war.

Thucydides’ deeper warning must be heeded. The Melian Dialogue is typically read as a statement of raw power. Thucydides intended it as a tragedy. Athens’ brutality at Melos reflected the corruption of strategic judgment by imperial hubris, the same hubris that produced the Sicilian disaster. Overwhelming military power does not confer unlimited political license. The coalition must accept outcomes that are good enough rather than perfect: a federal, democratic Iran that preserves territorial integrity while granting genuine autonomy to its minorities, rather than an American-designed utopia imposed by force.

Musashi wrote of “crossing at a ford”: committing fully at the decisive moment when conditions align. He compared it to a sea captain who sets sail knowing the route, the soundness of his ship, and the favor of the day. Half measures, Musashi warned, mean death.

The conditions have aligned. The regime’s military is broken, its leader invisible, its economy severed from its lifeline. Its population has risen in every province. Forty percent of its people belong to ethnic minorities who have organized and mobilized. Its succession lacks legitimacy, institutional backing, or popular consent.

Foreign Affairs has asked what the endgame is in Iran. The strategic canon answers. Clausewitz identifies the center of gravity as political legitimacy; Sun Tzu prescribes attacking the enemy’s strategy before his army. Liddell Hart provides the operational logic of dislocation over destruction, while Mao’s framework, inverted, shows how external military action creates conditions for internal political mobilization. Machiavelli and Musashi illuminate why the succession crisis must be exploited before the regime finds its footing. Smith and van Creveld explain why this conflict must be waged among the people, not against them, and why conventional military power is necessary but radically insufficient. Freedman provides the mechanism of strategic narrative, Mahan provides the instrument of economic strangulation, while Keegan and Huntington provide the command framework of restraint. Thucydides and Paret provide the discipline against overreach.

The coalition need not invade Iran. But it must ensure the Iranian people have the tools, information, economic breathing room, and international support to complete the revolution they have already begun.

The longest way round is the shortest way home.