The plan to topple Iran’s regime from the outside was always implausible because it depended on two prerequisites that did not exist: broad, sustained popular backing inside Iran and credible, reliable external support. The decisive reason both failed was a structural deficit of trust — trust in the United States and Israel as sponsors, and trust by those countries toward the populations they expected to mobilize. No event illustrates that deficit more clearly, or more consequentially, than the functional collapse of the Gaza Board of Peace.

Popular Backing as the Decisive Variable

Externally driven regime change requires more than elite dissent or episodic protests. It requires a clear, sustained willingness by a large portion of the population to accept existential risk. Ordinary people calculate survival, social order, and the reliability of outside patrons before they risk everything. When the promise of protection, sanctuary, or a viable post-regime plan is not believable, mass mobilization does not follow. Counting on rhetoric or short-lived demonstrations to substitute for that calculus was not a strategy — it was wishful thinking.

The question, then, is what destroyed the believability of American and Israeli support across the region. The answer runs directly through Gaza.

The Board of Peace: Promise, Failure, and What It Signaled

When Israel and Hamas reached a ceasefire in October 2025, the reconstruction of Gaza was priced at over $70 billion by the World Bank, UN, and European Union. The scale of destruction was almost incomprehensible: roughly 85 percent of buildings and infrastructure damaged or destroyed, some 70 million tonnes of rubble to be cleared, an economy that a UN trade report described as suffering the most severe crisis ever recorded. Against that backdrop, a credible, well-funded international mechanism for reconstruction would have represented something rare in this region — a demonstration that international promises could actually be kept.

The Gaza Board of Peace, authorized by UN Security Council Resolution 2803 in November 2025, was positioned as exactly that mechanism. When President Trump formally unveiled it at Davos in January 2026, he declared himself honored to be its chairman and called it potentially “one of the most consequential bodies ever created.” The ambition was real. The follow-through was not.

From the outset, the Board was structurally compromised.........

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