President Trump has brought the United States to a critical moment with Iran. The Islamic Republic has weakened, reduced its military capabilities, and exposed its strategy of intimidation. The central question now is whether America will convert this momentum into a lasting strategic result, or allow Tehran to survive, regroup, and claim victory simply because the regime endured.
Iran’s violation of the ceasefire and its attacks on the United Arab Emirates should end any illusion that this regime can be managed through pauses, understandings, or diplomatic formulas. One such attack reveals the lesson: Tehran does not use ceasefires to make peace. It uses them to buy time.
Attacks through proxies
President Trump should not lose time negotiating with a regime whose method is deception, escalation, retreat, and renewed aggression. The Islamic Republic has spent decades perfecting this cycle. It attacks through proxies, threatens global commerce, represses its people, lies about its nuclear ambitions, and demands diplomacy only when pressure begins to work.
That cycle must end now.
The United States and Israel face the same strategic threat. Both countries possess extraordinary intelligence capabilities. They understand the regime’s command structure, missile and drone networks, proxy architecture, and financial lifelines. The issue is no longer whether the free world understands the nature of the threat. The issue is whether it has the political will to produce a result that Tehran cannot reverse.
The objective should not be another temporary reduction of Iran’s military capabilities. The objective should be the defeat of the regime’s capacity to threaten America, Israel, the Abraham Accords countries, Gulf partners, and the free flow of global energy.
That requires moving beyond crisis management. The pressure must reach the regime where it truly lives: its security apparatus, its money networks, its proxy empire, and its fear of its people.
At the center of the Islamic Republic stands the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The IRGC is not simply a military force. It is the engine of regime survival. It protects the ruling elite, represses the population, exports terrorism, controls strategic sectors of the economy, and directs Iran’s proxy wars across the region. Any serious strategy must weaken this engine decisively — not merely damage a few assets and allow the regime to rebuild for the next confrontation.
The same logic applies to money. Iran’s war machine does not operate on ideology alone. It is financed through oil revenues, smuggling networks, front companies, banks, ports, shipping channels, exchange houses, corrupt foundations, and privileged insiders who profit from repression. Washington should not limit itself to symbolic sanctions against individuals. It should go after the financial ecosystem that allows the regime to pay its fighters, arm its proxies, enrich its loyalists, and keep the Iranian people under control.
Iran’s proxy network must also lose the protection of deniability. For too long, Tehran has attacked through militias and terrorist groups while pretending to stand at a distance. That fiction must end. If an Iranian-backed force attacks American personnel, Israel, Gulf allies, or countries aligned with the Abraham Accords, the cost must reach the source of the order, the money, the weapons, and the training: Tehran itself.
The regime’s greatest fear
But the most important battlefield may be inside Iran.
The regime’s greatest fear is the Iranian people. They know the system is corrupt. They know their national wealth has been stolen. They know their country has been turned into a machine for executions, censorship, and fear. A government that fears its citizens is already vulnerable.
Senator Lindsey Graham rightly argues that we can no longer ignore the internal front. Washington should support dissidents, defections, secure communications, organized resistance, and every serious effort that weakens the regime from within. The Iranian people must know that America does not direct its pressure against them. The regime has stolen their country, and it is directed against them.
The Strait of Hormuz must also be viewed strategically. Reopening it is necessary, but it is not enough. The job is not finished when a few ships pass safely through the waterway. The job is finished when Iran can no longer use Hormuz as a weapon against the world.
If Iran continues to threaten Hormuz, President Trump should keep the Kharg Island option available. Kharg Island is not just a geographic point. It is the regime’s vital oil-export hub and one of its most important economic lifelines. Tehran understands oil, pressure, and power. It uses energy blackmail to intimidate the world. America should answer by making clear that closing Hormuz will place the regime’s own economic lifeline at risk.
This is the time to decide.
If America stops halfway, Iran will claim survival as victory. The regime will tell its people, its proxies, Russia, China, and the world that it absorbed American power and endured. That would be a strategic mistake of historic scale.
It would waste the momentum created by President Trump’s courageous decision to confront the regime. It would damage the credibility of an administration that took serious steps to reduce Iran’s military capabilities. It would allow Tehran to rebuild. And it would provide China and Russia a renewed opening to expand their influence across the Middle East.
The Islamic Republic must not be managed. It must not be rescued by endless diplomacy. It must be denied the ability to threaten the region again.
President Trump has already shown courage. Now he must show finality.
The bottom line is clear: finish the job.
Ahmed Charai is the publisher of the Jerusalem Strategic Tribune and serves on the boards of directors of the Atlantic Council, the International Crisis Group, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and the Center for the National Interest.
Source:
www.jpost.com
