Strategic decapitation doesn’t automatically produce political moderation or collapse. You’d be a fool to believe this. In some cases it does, but in others it doesn’t. Sometimes it makes it harder for a regime to survive; other times, the surviving regime becomes less suspicious and more willing to compromise. It’s a balancing act, usually on their end, since they’re the receiving end of all the violence. Now, Washington can say what it wants. They make the argument: we tried negotiation, and they attacked us anyway. Well, it works both ways, and there’s political logic to it.
The strategic importance is that the United States and Israel may have altered the Iranian regime without replacing it. However, that’s different from regime change. One could argue that it was an involuntary internal political selection process, destroying parts of one elite configuration and thereby increasing the relative power of another. Basically, put the entire country under new management until you get the right management to run it. I think the important part is that Iran is not the Islamic Republic we knew, but something else. The decapitation carousel appears to be transforming Iran into something far more radical: a harder authoritarian system in which the internal balance has shifted further toward the security establishment.
So when you break it down, if you look at the strategic logic in all this, yes, you can destroy the command structures, the missile infrastructure, the nuclear infrastructure, political leadership, and its economic capacity, and still fail to eliminate the enemy’s ability to impose costs. It’s a tit-for-tat game. What it really is, though, is a war of the fleas.
This intersects with something I’ve discussed in previous articles: physical destruction becomes functional destruction only when the destroyed physical system can no longer perform its function. Killing commanders is physical destruction. Destroying missile launchers is physical destruction. But if replacement commanders assume control, those dispersed systems will continue operating. Proxies will remain in place, waiting for further notice, and Iran can switch to other means of coercion. Then you’ve destroyed components without necessarily destroying the broader strategic function.
That’s the biggest issue. The campaign has been extremely successful in terms of physical destruction, including much of Iran’s military and civilian infrastructure. But it’s incomplete strategically in terms of political conversion. Washington may have destroyed much of Iran’s previous military-political architecture without creating the political conditions necessary to produce the behavior Washington wants.
One of the biggest things people forget in the minutiae of war and politics is this: never confuse removing people with removing the system, and never confuse destroying capability with achieving the political outcome that destruction was meant to produce. Overall, wrecking Iran is easier than determining what political and strategic system occupies the wreckage afterward. It’s always about the day after.