In the early hours of February 28, American and Israeli forces began a large-scale offensive against Iran. Immediately there was confusion on the nature of “Operation Epic Fury.” Was it a limited military operation meant to further degrade the Iranian missile and nuclear program, or was it a much more ambitious gamble on regime change?

　　The administration’s messaging has been confusing. In his recorded speech informing Americans of the attack, Trump emphasized the more narrow military goals of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, crippling its ballistic missile program, and halting its support of regional proxies. It seemed at first glance that this would be a muscled-up version of last June’s Midnight Hammer. But near the end of the speech, he also seemed to call for regime change. Addressing Iranians directly, he declared, “The hour of your freedom is at hand,” and implored them to “take your government. It will be yours to take. … This will be, probably, your only chance for generations.” That regime change was a main objective of Epic Fury seemed confirmed when he later told the Washington Post that “all I want is freedom for the people,” and still later, when he said the war would continue “until the enemy is totally and decisively defeated.” Early military targets (e.g., striking senior leadership and internal security institutions) also seemed to corroborate a regime change strategy.

　　Nevertheless, neither Trump nor other members of the administration have insisted on regime change as a condition for victory. They have never maintained with any consistency that the Islamic Republic must collapse or give way to a new form of government. Secretary Hegseth, for his part, was adamant: “The mission of Operation Epic Fury is laser-focused. … This is not a so-called regime change war.” Trump later seemed to signal that favorable leadership transition would suffice, telling TIME that “we have to be able to deal with sane and rational people.” He did not qualify the statement to suggest these sane, rational people needed to come from or create a different political system. The objective seemed to shift from regime change to leadership change.

　　Whatever the ultimate objective, we ought not expect simply to bomb away and hope that the regime will collapse in the face of a popular revolt or coup. That would violate a core lesson of foreign attempts to impose regime change: political will and determination matter as much as having boots on the ground. In Iran, we have neither. Instead of regime change, we will likely see the Islamic Republic endure, bruised and more brutal than before.

　　Regime Change’s Tricky Legacy

　　Before examining the Iran case, it’s worth considering the United States’ disquieting record with militarily imposed regime change, both to contextualize the current operation and to shed light on the factors most conducive to its success. The scholarship on the subject is highly contested, but if there is any consensus, it is that regime change is a herculean task that seldom goes well. Especially when led by foreign militaries, efforts to install new governments rarely produce stable, friendlier regimes, to say nothing of democratic ones. It is more likely, in fact, to create political vacuums, civil war, and general political instability. This was our experience in Somalia, Haiti, Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan in recent memory. Still, the project is not as doomed to failure as the post-GWOT popular imagination suggests.

　　There are famous examples of success, including the classic cases of Japan and West Germany (the gold standards of regime change), and later examples like Bosnia, Kosovo, Panama, and Grenada. The policy takeaways from these successful cases were best distilled in a 2003 book-length RAND report, America’s Role in Nation Building: From Germany to Iraq. Importantly, this report explicitly used democratization as a measure of success. Still, its focus on “post-conflict” transitions and “political transformation” are relevant axis for any broader discussion of regime change, and its findings are supported by more recent studies.

　　Broadly, the authors found that successful transitions require sustained troop presence, extensive economic aid, and clarity of focus. Success depended, in a word, on “the level of effort that United States and the international community” invested in each case. Large-scale, sustained troop presence to ensure stability was particularly important. As the authors noted, “ there appears to be an inverse correlation between the size of the stabilization force and the level of risk.” On the time factor, they were more forthright: “staying long does not ensure success, but leaving early ensures failure.”

　　Critically, the authors also point to the decisive defeat of the enemy as conducive to success. This factor may be more necessary than previously thought; in all successful cases save perhaps for Korea, we succeeded in building new regimes only after the decisive victory over enemy forces. In Germany, Japan, Panama, and Grenada, decisive defeat followed by sustained troop presence yielded both stable and democratic transitions.

　　Only fools and lucky bastards bet on the existence of black swans.

　　It is now common wisdom that the United States often fails to heed these lessons, most famously in the Middle East. Four failures are worth remembering: Somalia (1991–93), Afghanistan (2001–21), Iraq (2003–11), and Libya (2011). In Somalia (covered in the RAND report), Americans were unclear about the mission, oscillating uncomfortably between “peacekeeping” and nation-building. We pulled most of our forces in 1993, and the country never quite stabilized. In Libya, we helped topple the Qaddafi regime from the air with no follow-up ground presence beyond the indigenous rebel factions; the country never quite learned how to walk again. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the stories are trickier, and the causes are more hotly contested. In both, we (eventually) had sustained, large-scale troop presences. But in Afghanistan, we never defeated the Taliban, and in Iraq, while we swiftly defeated Saddam Hussein’s forces, we were slow to recognize a full-scale insurgency. After a horrible civil war, Iraq emerged as a stable, semi-democratic country today; after a twenty-year insurgency, Afghanistan is now back under Taliban control. Whatever the matrix of causes, the two countries are cautionary examples of how lots of troops for many years are not always sufficient. The bottom line: Regime change is hard and requires resources and commitments that most Americans are seldom willing to sustain.

　　Iran

　　These lessons do not bode well for attempted regime change in Iran. Far from resembling the classic success stories, the current operation seems specially designed to repeat all our missteps of the past thirty years. If regime change is the goal, Epic Fury would seem to be following the Libya model: regime change from the sky with no evident ground component beyond vague rumors of arming Kurds (itself a dubious prospect). Like all of our failed cases, the political objective is ill-defined. What then comes next?

　　The likeliest scenario is that the regime endures in some way. As I’ve written before, the Islamic Republic benefits from high institutionalization, a founding ideology that makes easy fall unlikely, and elite economic entrenchment. Authoritarian regimes are hard to bring down; the Islamic Republic is especially resilient. Moreover, the United States and Israel suffer from major strategic disadvantages. Chief among these is that the regime knows this is a temporary operation. Trump may insist on total victory, but he and other officials have also said this will be a short operation—weeks, not months, and not years. Relatedly, the administration has poor domestic support for the operation. This support is likely to fall further as energy costs spike. The Iranians know this. And they know the conclusion: all they have to do is hang on.

　　This would be a disappointing outcome. It’s impossible to tell what the new institutional configuration will be following the death of Ali Khamenei, but it will likely be even more hardline and repressive. This at least was the political trajectory before the attacks. After Khamenei’s rise to power in 1989, the country was governed by an alliance between traditional conservative factions including the Supreme Leader, prominent clerics, and the IRGC. The power of the latter grew over the next forty years, especially as the regime pushed out liberal and reformist elements and regularly crushed protests. Moreover, by surviving a direct assault from both Israel and the US, the ideologues’ guiding narrative of resistance against an imperialist West will have been validated. Add to the mix the symbolism of Ali Khamenei’s martyrdom (or hubristic miscalculation—the jury is still out) and the fact that much of the new Supreme Leader’s family was killed during this operation, and all signs suggest that whatever endures will be even more difficult to manage than what we killed.

　　Another scenario is that the regime collapses, but neither the United States nor Israel would be prepared to oversee a power transition. Civil war is a distinct possibility. The Iranian people have a democratic tradition and a shared sense of Iran-ness, but the country is also ethnically heterogeneous, has three generations’ worth of pent-up grievances, a historical precedent of political fragmentation, and finds itself in an unfortunate position where two different militaries have all the guns. The past generation of conflict in the region and its second and third-order ramifications should give everyone pause at this prospect. Things can get worse than the status quo.

　　Finally, it’s possible that the Trump administration makes history. We don’t yet know what pre-made plans may be in store following the end of the bombing campaign. It is perfectly plausible for a sufficiently strong faction in Iran’s security forces to defect, quickly smash the other regime elements, and declare an end to the Islamic Republic. If this happens, the administration will have done the world a service in removing a fanatical regime that has been a thorn in the side of the United States and our partners for half a century. If the defectors took the next step and instituted elections, all the better. We would have genuinely liberated a people and removed the major strategic challenge in the region. But this is an unlikely dream scenario. There is no historic precedent for successful regime change driven by air power alone, and signs suggest the regime will not go down so easily.

　　Only fools and lucky bastards bet on the existence of black swans. At this point, we may have no choice but to hope we’re the latter.