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How does the Iran war end?

Regime change isn’t likely. Here’s what is.

The United States went to war with Iran for reasons that remain unclear.

At various points, the president and his allies have argued that this was a war of preemptive self-defense, an effort to prevent Iran from rebuilding its nuclear program, and even an attempt at regime change. The justification seems to change based on who is speaking and who they are speaking to, making it difficult to divine what the president seeks to get out of all of this — or if he even has a coherent end goal in mind.

Given this mess, is there any way to predict how it might end?

America’s war in Iran was started for unclear reasons, but could end in a number of ways — some more likely and predictable than others.

President Donald Trump’s oft-stated hope that the Iranian people will rise up against the regime in protest is very unlikely; there is no historical precedent for such an event, and the regime is too well entrenched for it to seem plausible in this case.

There is a real-but-remote possibility that the war does escalate to something closer to the 2003 Iraq war, but the most likely scenarios involve more modest outcomes.

To find out, we spoke with eight leading experts on Iran, the Middle East, and US military policy. The clear consensus is that the best-case scenario offered by the Trump administration — that US bombs inspire Iranian people to rise up and topple the regime — is extremely unlikely. Nothing like that has happened in the history of air warfare, and Iran experts do not think this will be the exception to the rule.

“It’s a fantasy to think that aerial bombardment is going to open such a gap that there will be a new regime,” says Hussein Banai, a professor at the University of Indiana-Bloomington who studies Iranian politics.

If this analysis is right, there are two broad categories: some kind of settlement, where the US stops short of its maximalist aims, or escalation.

Of the two, the former is generally seen as more likely. A settlement could follow something like the “Venezuela model,” where President Donald Trump receives some policy concessions in exchange for leaving the regime broadly intact, or the US simply declaring victory based on some lesser accomplishment (say, doing more damage to nuclear program sites).

But either way, the war ends without the regime change that many in the White House (and Israel) desperately want.

In the second scenario, the US gets dragged deeper into a conflict — moving beyond bombing into some kind of ground campaign to topple the regime. This is widely seen as unlikely; most observers believe Trump is eager to avoid his presidency becoming defined by an Iraq-style disaster.

But unlikely is not impossible. And given the opaque goals of this war, and the nature of the many stakeholders involved, the range of possible outcomes is wider than perhaps anyone is able to predict — including the top decision-makers in Washington.

“No world leader has ever launched a military operation expecting a quagmire,” says Caitlin Talmadge, a........

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