Author’s Note: This essay, which first appeared on the website for the Center for Israel Education, was completed only a week after the war started, on February 28, 2026. During such an event, outcomes are impossible to define with accuracy, but sufficient information exists to take preliminary stabs. Although I taught Middle Eastern history, political science, and Israel studies at Emory University for 47 years, I do not read Persian and am not an Iran specialist. Likewise, I am not one of at least half a dozen TV anchors and reporters who spout off as if they understand nuance, context, and foreign policy analysis. Observations are not conclusive because dozens of variables, personalities, political decisions, and secret understandings between politicians and governments are not known and perhaps won’t be known for a quarter-century, if ever.
The goal of this essay is to spark questions and generate context about motives for the United States and Israel to destroy, debilitate, or change the Iranian regime and about speculation on how the war ends.
Motives for the U.S. and Israel to go to war
The U.S. and Israel have a common motivation to change or end Iran’s hostile political behavior that has, for half a century, killed Americans and Israelis, undermined the stability of Arab states, disrupted gas and oil markets, and generally challenged an international order predicated on liberal principles of liberty, national sovereignty, political pluralism, and individual self-determination. From November 1979 to January 1981, Iranian students and the regime held American hostages for 444 days.
Since 1979, the Iranian regime has called the United States the “Great Satan” and Israel the “Little Satan.” In that period, the Islamic Republic and its proxies have killed at least 978 Americans, 2,089 Israelis, and 90 Jews outside the Middle East.
Other Middle Eastern states are virtually unanimous in their desire to defang or destroy Iran’s ability to destabilize them. Almost all of them have been hit by Iranian missiles and drones during the first week of the war, violating a regional principle not to endanger shipping through the Gulf. Notably, in the past three months, Arab editorial writers have labeled Iran’s government a “metastatic cancer” that has grown political tumors in multiple formats — insurgencies, local political parties, active militant groups — to undermine the status quo. Tehran implanted destabilizing clients in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, the West Bank, Gaza, Israel, Egypt, and other Persian Gulf countries and reached into Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas.
The U.S. and Israel, Middle Eastern states, and most countries in the world, with the exception of North Korea, Cuba, Russia, China, and a few other rogue countries, remain fearful that Iran will acquire nuclear weapons to ensure the continuity of the regime, blackmail neighbors, and potentially target Israel.
President Donald Trump on February 28 stated five objectives for the war: to deny Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon; to destroy its missile arsenal, including manufacturing and launchers; to end the Islamic Republic’s support for terrorism and such proxies as Hamas and Hezbollah; to weaken the regime, sometimes described as regime change or regime overhaul, by debilitating or destroying central institutions; and to encourage the Iranian people to take control of their own destiny. Goals not stated by Trump, but implicit, are to safeguard the territorial integrity and sovereignty of America’s Middle Eastern allies and to protect American military bases and personnel in the region.
Israel’s objectives, as stated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on February 28, are virtually identical: to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon; to destroy Iran’s ballistic missile and drone capabilities; to weaken Iran’s regional military reach; and to cripple, if not make inoperable for a prolonged period, Iran’s military command networks. In addition, Israel has and continues to decapitate Iranian military, scientific, political, and religious leaders and degrade the institutions that support the regime, such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and police forces that suppress the Iranian citizenry.
Israel has viewed Iran as an existential threat for almost five decades, a view held by 85% of the Israeli public. Perennially, Iranian leaders have called for wiping Israel off the map, engaged in the killing of Jews, with Tehran becoming a broadcast center promoting worldwide antisemitism. For Israel, Iran’s four decades-long financial and logistical support for Hamas and Hezbollah represented egregious and depraved tentacles of anti-Jewish hatred.
What failed in U.S.-Iranian negotiations before the war?
There were multiple reasons to attack Iran now. Among them found the Iranian regime under duress from an economy in stress, thousands of Iranians demonstrated against regime policies, the anticipated arrival of new weapons supply from China and Russia and the rebuilding of Iran’s missile arsenal, the American and Israel domestic calendar suggesting a 60 day war’s results, particularly if a less than positive outcome would dissipate by June, an unprecedented closeness of American and Israeli leaders, proven successful military collaboration between their militaries, a vast American military building up of assets in the Middle East, and failed diplomacy to prevent an all out conflict.
For more than two decades, the United States and European powers have negotiated to limit Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The 2015 the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, signed by the United States and five other world powers, restricted but did not end the nuclear program. Gradually, Iran cheated on the JCPOA’s limitations, and Trump, in his first administration, withdrew the United States from the agreement because it did not permanently end Iran’s nuclear capabilities, did not address Iran’s ballistic missiles, and failed to curb Iran’s regional activities through Hezbollah and other proxies. The administration described the deal as giving Iran sanctions relief while allowing key nuclear restrictions to expire in 10 to 15 years.
By the mid-2020s, Iran’s nuclear program had expanded far beyond the restrictions negotiated in 2015, leaving diplomacy and sanctions again at the center of international efforts to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. The JCPOA was a delay, not a solution. The Obama administration allowed Iran to keep open a long-term option for a nuclear weapon, and the Iranians continued to pour money, scientists, and expertise into weapons development. The United States responded by seeking to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons program and stockpiles in June 2025 and again in February 2026.
The attack in 2026 came after almost a month of U.S. negotiations to have Iran declare it would terminate its nuclear program. Trump’s policy on Iran’s nuclear program differed from previous presidents because he wanted it to end, period, rather than limit it or slow it down.
Possible Outcomes
The war has the potential for polar-opposite outcomes that could prove consequential regionally and even globally, or that could hardly change Iranian behavior and could require another war to rein in Iran. Endless permutations between those conjectural extremes are possible.
A transformative outcome would require a complete overhaul of the entrenched Iranian political infrastructure, and the United States and Israel would have to keep fighting until achieving their complete objectives. The result might look similar to the end of World War II, when Germany and Japan were physically rebuilt and turned fully away from fascism. The odds of that happening are not high.
On the other hand, the end of the war might not be easily defined as a victory. Iran might be ideologically sullied, militarily stifled, and governmentally debilitated but not defeated. Iran’s leaders might promise to curb their nefarious behavior, only to resort in a year or 18 months to what they have known best for half a century: autocratic, brutal rule at home while projecting anti-Jewish, anti-Western, anti-democratic behavior abroad.
The war’s perceived success or failure could affect elections in the United States and Israel in the fall. How closely tied will be the narratives that Trump and Netanyahu promote before those elections? U.S. voters have focused on pocketbook issues, and Israeli voters have sought to assess accountability for the failures associated with the October 2023 Hamas attack. But if Trump finds himself in a foreign military quagmire on Labor Day, immigration, tariffs, health care, and other issues might prove secondary in his bid to retain Republican control of both houses of Congress.
When and how will the war end, and how will success, failure, or something in between be defined?
Any outcome could set the stage for another conflict. Should Iran surrender unconditionally but violate the terms of the war’s end, might another iteration of the war unfold? If Iran suffers a severe setback or defeat, will the results satisfy both Israel and the United States? If the war concludes through a ceasefire, negotiated settlement, or surrender, will Iran’s role in the Middle East be embedded within a regional outcome carrying international ramifications?
Will the degradation of Iran’s military capabilities undermine a leadership structure designed to be resilient and resistant to change? If so, what is the breaking point at which Iranian decision-making or national priorities begin to shift? Can prudence and pragmatism infiltrate a radical Islamic ideology that has long appeared immovable? If so, how might those tendencies manifest? Will the military destruction reduce the Iranian leadership’s willingness to impose fear on its own population? For how long?
Iran’s economic behavior- disruptions of oil flows through the Straits of Hormuz
How might additional disruptions in domestic production alter Iranian budget allocations? The Obama administration incorrectly told Americans that when Iran signed an agreement to slow its nuclear program, funds would be redirected to domestic needs. If the regime remains in power, how will the war affect expenditures to extend domestic brutality and spread toxic ideologies across the region? Will any Iranian regime entwined in anti-Western and radical Islamic ideology relinquish its nuclear aspirations, knowing that possessing such a weapon would provide regional influence and leverage similar to what North Korea enjoys in Southeast Asia?
The national defense implications for Israel are uncertain. Jerusalem greatly prefers not to go to war against Iran every eight to 12 months. Will Israel need self-assurance that it has unimpeded control over Iranian airspace far into the future? As in the multifront fighting during its war with Hamas, Israel has created and is monitoring areas of military control beyond its sovereign territory. Might Israel state that its war is over in two or three weeks, and thus free Arab countries attacked by Iran to take up the conflict as U.S. allies without the political complications of fighting alongside Israel? Would other countries, maybe some from NATO, also join the fight?
Almost all military analysts have said airpower alone cannot change a regime. Would that logic mean that in the next phase, an unknown number of fighters from undisclosed countries will undertake a calculated invasion of Iran to seize Tehran, the religious city of Qom, oil-producing and transshipping facilities, other key cities, and strategic assets? Would special forces go into Iran to capture Iranian nuclear material? Who would govern Iran during a transition that bleeds into something more permanent? If the Iranian leadership is tamed or transformed, what might be the global repercussions? It is not uncommon for major political transitions to take 2-3 years to shakeout.
How might the war be seen in decades to come?
When historians teach this war, they will likely link it directly to the 2023-2025 Hamas-Israel war. Without that conflict, Israel and Iran might not have engaged in direct fighting three times in 2024 and 2025, which allowed Israel to free the skies over Iran for subsequent attacks. If the Hamas leaders who were so cocky in October 2023 could have foreseen this outcome, would they have made the same decision to overrun 20 Israeli villages, settlements, kill 1200 Israelis, and take 251 hostages? That war demonstrated Israel’s vulnerability and massive decision-making flaws in its political and military echelons. Israel’s resilient response was to take the Hamas challenge and turn it into an opportunity by restoring military deterrence and more. Israel debilitated and decapitated Hamas, Hezbollah, and elements of Iran’s scientific, bureaucratic, theological, and military leaderships. Moreover, it proved that it had, as it has in March 2026, penetrated intelligence operatives into Iran while keeping the skies open to limitless attacks. Of course, these military successes may not translate into the desired political changes in Iran that Israel, the U.S and others are seeking.
In May 2025, six months before the Hamas-Israel ceasefire, the Trump administration was constructing a regional strategic architecture through bilateral relations with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar. These linchpins initially appeared as transactional economic ties. By the end of 2025, the United States was mediating Israel’s bilateral relations with Lebanon, Syria, and the Palestinians.
If the present war results in a defanged Iran, an emerging alliance architecture could stabilize the region for a long time. All the countries in the Middle East have an interest in a prolonged non-conflict that benefits national economic development. Each country has fierce bilateral disagreements with others. Yet a weakened Iran is in all their interests. In the war’s aftermath, monitoring mechanisms need to be established to enforce Iranian behavior.
A changed Iran, like a changed Germany and Japan, would mean the war was enormously successful. In the Middle East, profound changes in political behavior rarely occur or endure for long periods. Middle Eastern political cultures have been dominated by autocrats, dictators, oligarchs, coercive political systems, entrenched patron-client networks, and kleptocracies oppressing the vast majority of the population. For Iran, the most optimistic scenario could include transformed governance that broadens civil rights and political freedoms, redirects oil revenues toward domestic and infrastructure development, reduces the power of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and invites oversight from neighboring states.
(Credit Moshe Milner, Israel Government Press Office)
Should such an outcome emerge, the war might be remembered as a turning point in Middle Eastern history comparable to such transformative moments as the end of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of states in the 1920s, the establishment of Israel and the emergence of Palestinian refugees, Anwar Sadat’s 1977 visit to Jerusalem, and the fall of the Shah and the rise of the Islamic Republic in 1979. In a more tranquil Middle Eastern political landscape, the United States could significantly influence the flow and price of oil. Such influence might deal a severe blow to Iran’s export revenues, reduce Chinese imports, hurt Russian oil values, and diminish Russia’s geopolitical energy leverage over Europe and Asia.
This essay first appeared on the website for the Center for Israel Education.