President Donald Trump’s announcement of a two-week cease-fire on Tuesday night has ended, at least temporarily, the fighting between the United States, Israel, and Iran. But it has done little to resolve the strategic incoherence at the heart of the U.S.-Israeli campaign that neither government has been willing to acknowledge publicly: the two partners have been fighting the same war for fundamentally different reasons. For Israel, the prospect of direct confrontation with the Islamic Republic has loomed large for decades. It has studied the regime with a granularity that Washington has rarely matched. Because Israel understands that regime survival is the Islamic Republic’s organizing principle, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has focused on leadership elimination and regime change as the campaign’s primary objectives.

The Trump administration, by contrast, entered the conflict under the assumption that a sufficiently credible demonstration of military force could coerce the regime’s leadership into making a deal. The same logic animated the first Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign on Tehran, as well as the second Trump administration’s decision to oust Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. U.S. strategic planning regarding Iran, in other words, has consistently prioritized tractable questions of missile counts and uranium enrichment levels with the goal of getting to a nuclear deal while treating as secondary Tehran’s genuine ideological commitment to regime preservation.

These two theories of the case are not complementary. They pull in opposite directions, and the tension between them has produced a campaign that is operationally coordinated but strategically adrift. Israel’s reading of the Islamic Republic—that regime survival is the master key to Iranian behavior—is the more accurate one, even if the conclusions Netanyahu draws from it have been strategically dubious. Israel’s systematic elimination of any credible Iranian interlocutor threatens to foreclose the diplomatic space that Trump’s dealmaking calculus requires, while Trump’s periodic signals of openness to a deal have undermined the pressure on which Israel’s theory of regime dissolution depends. Whether or not the cease-fire holds, a growing rift between the goals of Israel and the United States has been exposed and the Islamic Republic can claim confirmation of what its founders always argued: that survival, on whatever terms, remains tantamount to victory.

Shortly after the 1979 revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini broke with a long tradition of Shiite political quietism that held that no legitimate political authority could exist until the reemergence of the Twelfth Imam and that, until then, the clergy’s proper role was moral guidance, not governance. Khomeini inverted this position, arguing that the very absence of the Hidden Imam obligated the leading Islamic jurist to assume political authority and prepare conditions for the imam’s eventual return.

In January 1988, eight years into the Iran-Iraq War, Khomeini went further. Pressed by the contradictions between revolutionary idealism and the demands of wartime governance, he declared that the interests of the Islamic state—what he termed maslahat-e nezam—outranked even the key tenets of Islamic law, including prayer, fasting, and pilgrimage. The theological and the strategic fully collapsed into one another. The preservation of the Islamic Republic itself thus became the highest religious duty.

When Khomeini died in 1989, Iran’s constitution was amended, and one man’s charismatic authority was institutionalized into an architecture of overlapping power centers. Theological rank was separated from political authority—a concession to the reality that none of Khomeini’s disciples possessed the Islamic jurisprudential standing his original doctrine required—and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the Basij paramilitary force, the judiciary, the Assembly of Experts, the Guardian Council, and the Expediency Discernment Council were reshuffled and redesigned with deliberate redundancy. The goal was to ensure that the destruction of any single node could not bring the whole system down.

Israel’s assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in February was the most serious test of this design in the history of the Islamic Republic. The ensuing succession, carried out under sustained U.S.-Israeli aerial bombardment, provided........

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