PHILADELPHIA – March 16, 2026 – As the joint U.S.-Israel military campaign against Iran enters its third week, the Middle East Forum (MEF) today released three major policy papers by executive director Gregg Roman constituting a coordinated strategic framework for the coalition’s next phase. The trilogy —“The Longest Way Home,” “The Shortest Way Through,” and “Breaking the Gate”—addresses the three defining challenges now facing Washington and Jerusalem: how to translate air-campaign success into political transformation, how to operationalize Iran’s popular resistance movement, and how to reopen the Strait of Hormuz without a ground invasion.
Commercial transit through the Strait of Hormuz has fallen to effectively zero. Over 300 ships are stranded in the Gulf, and oil has risen above $100 a barrel.
Sixteen days into the campaign, Iran’s missile arsenal has been destroyed, its nuclear infrastructure set back a decade, its navy sunk, and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei killed. Mojtaba Khamenei—installed under Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps coercion and unable to appear in public—now nominally leads a state in advanced institutional collapse. Commercial transit through the Strait of Hormuz has fallen to effectively zero. Over 300 ships are stranded in the Gulf, and oil has risen above $100 a barrel. Seventy percent of Iranians oppose the Islamic Republic. The conditions for strategic transformation have never been more favorable.
Yet the coalition has no comprehensive framework for exploiting them. Roman’s three papers provide one.
“The Longest Way Home” establishes why air power alone cannot produce regime change—not in Germany, Iraq, or Libya—and identifies the Islamic Republic’s true center of gravity: not its missile batteries or nuclear centrifuges, but the regime’s claim to divine political authority, now embodied by a man most Iranians have never heard speak. The paper argues that the coalition’s strategic imperative is to help the Iranian people finish what the bombs began, through a disciplined indirect approach that avoids both the catastrophe of a ground invasion and the strategic failure of premature disengagement.
“The Shortest Way Through” translates that external strategy into internal operational doctrine. It details how Iran’s popular resistance—which reached all 31 provinces and over 200 cities in December 2025—can mount a hybrid campaign combining disciplined mass action with targeted economic sabotage designed not to shatter the IRGC but to induce it to defect. The paper argues that the infrastructure for such a campaign already exists, but requires direction, outside support, and a doctrine.
“Breaking the Gate” addresses the immediate economic crisis. Roman identifies the Hormuz closure for what it is—not a conventional naval blockade, but an insurance-driven shutdown achieved by a handful of drone strikes that caused war-risk underwriters to pull commercial shipping coverage. The paper presents five simultaneous lines of effort using Fifth Fleet assets, coalition special operations forces, and diplomatic pressure on global insurers to restore commercial transit without a single American soldier setting foot on Iranian soil.
The coalition now faces a narrow window in which the conditions for genuine political transformation in Iran are more favorable than at any point since 1979.
“The air campaign has achieved something historic. Iran’s military capacity has been broken, its supreme leader killed, its succession thrown into crisis,” said Roman. “But military success and strategic victory are not the same thing, and the distance between them is closing fast. The coalition now faces a narrow window in which the conditions for genuine political transformation in Iran are more favorable than at any point since 1979. These three papers lay out exactly how to use that window—to support the resistance, accelerate the succession crisis, and reopen Hormuz—before it shuts. A policy vacuum at this moment is not neutral. It is a decision to accept a worse outcome.”
The three papers build on a sustained body of MEF research on Iran.
In January 2026, MEF published a comprehensive assessment of the Iranian opposition ecosystem and a proposed National Reconciliation Council framework for interim governance. In November 2025, MEF released “The Thirst of a Nation,” documenting Iran’s accelerating trajectory toward state failure driven by a catastrophic water crisis and regime mismanagement. MEF has also published detailed analyses of Iran’s military buildup and U.S. force posture in the region, Tehran’s espionage offensive against Israel, and the IRGC’s military infrastructure across the Middle East. Taken together, MEF’s Iran portfolio represents the most comprehensive operational and analytical record of the Islamic Republic’s institutional collapse—and of the strategic choices available to the United States and Israel as that collapse accelerates.
About the Middle East Forum
The Middle East Forum, a nonprofit research center, promotes American interests in the Middle East and protects Western civilization from Islamism. It does so through its publications, research, policy initiatives, and public education programs. Subscribe to the MEF mailing list here.
For more information, visit www.meforum.org.
For immediate release
For more information, contact:
Gregg Roman
Roman@MEForum.org
+1 (215) 546 5406
@GreggRoman - Twitter
