He went big. On Saturday morning, US and Israeli forces unleashed Operation Epic Fury, what US President Donald Trump called “a massive and ongoing” campaign against Iran. He called on the Iranian people to overthrow the regime once the fighting is done. Iran responded quickly by attacking Israel and US bases in the region. Below, our experts assess the unfolding war and where it goes from here.
This article will be updated as more information and responses come in.
Click to jump to an expert analysis:
Nate Swanson: We know the objective—and little else
Jonathan Panikoff: The Iranian regime is under unprecedented strain, but beware ‘IRGCistan’
Matthew Kroenig: A high-risk, high-reward campaign
Jennifer Gavito: Iran’s retaliation signals that it is not planning to deescalate
Danny Citrinowicz: A campaign with an abstract objective and no clear endgame
Thomas S. Warrick: This war will have a home front in the United States
Rob Macaire: The pathway to a stable Iran just got narrower
Alex Plitsas: Iran could be deliberately holding some of its missiles in reserve
C. Anthony Pfaff: Previous strikes have followed a pattern toward de-escalation
Michael Rozenblat: The experiment of the Islamic Revolution is done
We know the objective—and little else
By launching a massive joint attack with Israel on Iran, Trump is gambling that that he can inflict enough damage on the Islamic Republic’s core security and political institutions that the regime will fall.
By choosing to initiate this war, Trump has diverged from his past pattern of decisive actions with immediate and pain-free off-ramps. This is an enormous gamble with questionable legal justification. Trump did not outline an imminent threat from Iran, nor a detailed plan for what comes next in Iran if the United States succeeds in decapitating the regime. Trump also acknowledged the significant risk to US troops in the region.
As this operation moves forward, I am looking at three interconnected questions:
- Will Iran successfully inflict costs on the United States? Facing a truly existential threat for the first time since the Iran-Iraq war, the Iranian regime will likely respond with everything it has, including its full missile arsenal and proxies. How much damage Iran inflicts on the United States and Israel could very well determine the regime’s fate.
- Polling consistently shows Americans are deeply opposed to intervening in Iran. If there are significant US casualties or impacts on global energy prices, will Trump stary committed to this campaign?
- Trump has defined a successful campaign as one where the Iranian people rise up and end the Islamic Republic. Absent ground troops or an armed opposition, this requires significant defections within Iran’s security apparatus. Is there a plan for how that will come together?
Finally, while I am a deep skeptic of this operation, it is important to acknowledge the depravity of the Iranian regime and my genuine desire to see the Iranian people freed. I welcome the prospect of an Iranian government replaced with one that is a responsible international actor and more responsive to its people. But initiating a major war with a nation of 93 million people, 2,500 years of history, significant retaliatory capabilities, and no clear opposition within the county is a significant risk.
—Nate Swanson is a resident senior fellow and director of the Iran Strategy Project at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative. Beginning in 2015, he served as a senior advisor on Iran policy to successive administrations, including most recently as director for Iran at the National Security Council.
The Iranian regime is under unprecedented strain, but beware ‘IRGCistan’
Trump’s decision to launch major strikes against Iranian regime targets goes beyond his promise to protesters that “help is on the way.” This is an extensive campaign designed to kill the leadership, not a few hours of targeted, narrow strikes.
But neither protests nor airstrikes alone are likely to end the regime’s grip on power. History suggests it will require either the varying Iranian security forces stand aside, as happened in 1979, or at least a part of the security establishment to switch sides to the opposition. One of those two results may be more likely than it was previously, however. The breadth of economic pain felt across the country, the water crisis, and the regime’s brutal reaction to the protests, killing thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—makes this moment unique among the Iranian public’s history of protests since the revolution.
Indeed, this time, something fundamental has changed in Iran. And even if the regime does not collapse immediately, it’s critical to remember that the 1979 revolution took a year to unfold. This iteration of protests, therefore, should be viewed as the start of a new era, not another failure to bring change to the country.
But what that new era entails is unclear. The end of the regime is less likely to foster democracy as it is to birth what some are calling “IRGCistan”—a military-controlled state that might offer a new supreme leader as a symbolic token to millions of conservative Iranians, but with power firmly vested in the hands of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Such a result would provide three pathways forward.
An IRGC-run Iran could initially be a bigger regional and domestic threat, staking out even harder-line stances in seeking to consolidate power and focused on ensuring no other insider can outflank it. Second, it could seek to quickly gain the support of the Iranian people by showing greater flexibility for a deal with the United States in exchange for an economic boost in the form of sanctions relief. Third, it could lead to a period of confusion and jockeying for power in which Western states will have to decide how much to try to jump into the fray and influence the outcome.
—Jonathan Panikoff is the director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative and a former deputy national intelligence officer for the Near East at the US National Intelligence Council.
A high-risk, high-reward campaign
Some have argued that Trump has not effectively made his case for US and Israeli strikes on Iran, but this military action became all but inevitable in January. Trump set a redline, warning the Iranian regime not to kill protesters. The clerics ignored the redline and massacred tens of thousands of their own people anyway. Trump’s advisers likely argued that he had to follow through on his threat or risk undermining US credibility. He did not want to follow in the footsteps of former President Barack Obama, who drew a redline over Syrian chemical weapons use only to back down later.
The only remaining question then concerned the target set. In late 2025, it was reported that Israel and the United States were considering strikes on Iran’s reconstituted missile program. Limited strikes on these targets could have made sense, at least as a starting point. Instead, having witnessed the vulnerability of the Iranian regime in January, Trump, his advisers, and regional partners, saw an opportunity to remove the Islamic Republic once and for all.
This path comes with higher risks and a higher potential reward. In past conflicts, like Operation Midnight Hammer last summer, Iran engaged in only token military retaliation, hoping to avoid a massive war with the United States. Now, with their backs against the wall, the clerics have little reason not to hit back with everything they’ve got. On the upside, the Islamic Republic is a card-carrying member of the Axis of Aggressors and has posed one of the greatest threats to US national security for decades. Removing it from the chess board could result in a transformational improvement of the regional and US global security environment.
—Matthew Kroenig is vice president and senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and the Council’s director of studies.
Iran’s retaliation signals that it is not planning to deescalate
Iran’s initial response to what now seems to be a regime-change campaign by the United States and Israel reinforces that the regime believes this to be an existential crisis. As such, the type of de-escalatory responses that we have become accustomed to in previous conflicts, including last summer’s twelve-day war, are at least for now off the table. The scope, speed, and scale of Iran’s initial retaliation, including against the Gulf countries (excluding Oman), reinforce the potential for this quickly escalating to wider conflict and widespread disruption. Already, air traffic in the region has ground to a halt and shipping flows through the Strait of Hormuz are slowing.
In these early hours, as the United States and its allies acclimate themselves to the potential for instability and economic disruption, key questions that will shape that trajectory remain to be answered. Chief among them are the intent and preparedness of Iran’s proxies to join the fray. In Iraq, Kataib Hezbollah has indicated it will seek to strike US facilities in Iraq in response to “American aggression,” while the Yemen-based Houthi movement is expected to resume attacks on shipping lanes in Red Sea corridor. And already today, the Lebanese government has warned Hezbollah against dragging the country into conflict, but the terror organization’s response remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the ledger, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have already condemned Iran’s strikes on several Middle Eastern countries that have killed at least one civilian in Abu Dhabi. A critical indicator of how this may all unfold is whether Middle Eastern countries lift their restrictions on US use of their airspaces to undertake its operations against Iran—or offer even more direct support for the campaign.
—Jennifer Gavito is a nonresident senior fellow with the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative. She previously served as deputy assistant secretary of state for Iraq and Iran.
A campaign with an abstract objective and no clear endgame
The United States and Israel have launched an unprecedented campaign aimed at creating the conditions for regime change in Iran—through the targeted killing of senior officials, strikes on regime institutions, and attacks against Iran’s strategic military infrastructure.
This is not a classic preventive strike. There was no immediate Iranian threat triggering the operation. Rather, the logic appears to be the exploitation of what is perceived as regime weakness in order to generate profound political change inside Iran.
The campaign is built upon the intelligence and operational advantages of the United States and Israel, as well as unprecedented firepower intended to pressure the regime to such a degree that internal actors—or the broader public—might ultimately move against it.
Despite early tactical achievements, the central question remains unresolved: what is the endgame? Can external military pressure realistically rely on an Iranian public that lacks cohesive leadership, particularly when facing a regime that has operated for forty-seven years under the disciplined control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)?
Complicating matters further is Iran’s apparent preparedness for this confrontation and its determination to preserve retaliatory capabilities over time. The risk of regional expansion is significant—especially following Iranian strikes against US bases in the Gulf and the possibility that Iranian-aligned actors in Yemen and Iraq could enter the conflict more directly.
Yet the greatest danger may be a prolonged campaign that fails to produce dramatic internal change in Iran and lacks a clearly defined termination mechanism, resulting in an open-ended conflict with no visible conclusion on the horizon.
—Danny Citrinowicz is a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Middle East programs. He is also a fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies. He previously served for twenty-five years in Israel Defense Intelligence.
This war will have a home front in the United States
Trump announced the goal for this operation only after it started: sustained attacks to weaken Iran’s security and strategic targets, including Iran’s leadership, until the Iranian people overthrow the regime. This represents a gamble not just in the skies and streets of Iran but on the home front as well. The American people, by a significant majority, wanted Trump to focus his second term on domestic affairs, the economy above all. Because he did not seek the support of Congress and the American people in advance, he will own the outcome. If it succeeds, he may receive a mild domestic boost, but he risks a significant setback to his domestic agenda if he fails.
Trump’s postwar plan for Iran appears to rest on an obviously untested proposition: that the Iranian people will be able to overthrow an entrenched, if weakened, Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps determined to hold onto power.
But there is another untested proposition: that the United States can resist whatever asymmetric efforts the Iranian regime will try here in the United States. Given Iran’s peculiar sense of symmetry, Trump’s targeting of Iran’s leadership will almost certainly lead to attempts to target Trump and other top US officials. The Secret Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the US Capitol Police will all be tested in the coming weeks and can afford zero failures. Iran will try every cyber trick it can mount, testing the Department of Homeland Security, the private sector, and US cyber defenses. Iran tried in the past, unsuccessfully, to meddle in US elections, and would almost certainly fail to have any impact this time. Even though the United States imports very little oil from the Middle East, energy prices may spike, setting back the US economy.
This war will have a home front, and Trump needs to find ways of broadening support at home.
—Thomas S. Warrick is a nonresident senior fellow in the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative and a former deputy assistant secretary for counterterrorism policy in the US Department of Homeland Security.
The pathway to a stable Iran just got narrower
From a European perspective, there is a lot of attention on whether these military strikes are in breach of international law, but that seems not to have been a dominant consideration in the decision process. Arguments about legality would have to focus on the intent of the military action, but the intent remains somewhat obscure. Both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statements as the strikes were launched talked about hitting nuclear, missile, and naval capabilities, but also encouraging the Iranian people to overthrow the regime. “This is the moment for action, do not let it pass,” Trump told the Iranians. And he threatened the IRGC and other security forces with “certain death” if they do not lay down their arms.
But the IRGC alone has some 190,000 active members: it doesn’t seem realistic that the president can kill them all or, indeed, guarantee their safety if they defect from their posts. If the Iranian regime emerges decimated, bloodied but still in power, its leaders will declare survival as victory. But if these attacks are devastating enough to collapse the regime, despite its preparations and resilience, it is possible that the whole authority of the state collapses with it. Either way, the pathway to a stable resolution that ends Iran’s threat to its neighborhood and oppression of its people may have become narrower.
—Rob Macaire is a nonresident senior fellow at the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative. He previously served as British ambassador to Iran.
Iran could be deliberately holding some of its missiles in reserve
The joint US–Israeli strikes against Iran mark a decisive escalation designed not merely to punish but to reshape the strategic equation. Trump has stated that the objective is regime change, pursued through sustained US air and naval operations, which are intended to weaken Tehran’s coercive apparatus while empowering protest elements on the ground.
The opening round of strikes appears calibrated toward degrading Iran’s retaliatory capacity and security apparatus: ballistic missile infrastructure, drone production and launch sites, government and military leaders, and key naval facilities tied to potential attempts to close the Strait of Hormuz. There are also indications of decapitation strikes targeting senior Iranian leaders, though battle damage assessments remain incomplete and confirmation of high-level casualties is pending.
The strategic logic is straightforward. Nuclear negotiations had frozen over nonnegotiable redlines. Rather than accept incremental stalemate, Washington and Jerusalem appear to have concluded that altering the players, not merely the terms, was necessary. Force, in this framework, is being used to degrade capability and change the calculus in Tehran.
Iran’s response thus far has been measured and rational. It has targeted major US military installations across the region: the US Navy Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, Al Dafra in the UAE, and Ali Al Salem in Kuwait.
Iran was assessed to possess roughly 2,000–3,000 medium-range ballistic missiles, 6,000–8,000 short-range systems, and thousands of drones. We have not yet seen saturation attacks intended to overwhelm layered air defenses. It is unclear if that is due to US and Israeli strikes on missile stocks, Iran holding missiles in reserve, Iran testing defenses, or a combination thereof.
Whether Tehran is deliberately holding reserves, probing defensive responses, or suffering greater degradation than publicly known remains unclear. The most plausible explanation may be a combination of all three.
—Alex Plitsas is a nonresident senior fellow with the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative, the head of the Atlantic Council’s Counterterrorism Project, and a former chief of sensitive activities for special operations and combating terrorism in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Previous strikes have followed a pattern toward de-escalation
There are two likely outcomes to this recent escalation of the conflict with Iran: the conflict escalates into an asymmetric war with Iran, or, after a series of tit-for-tat strikes, it de-escalates as it has done in the past. Regarding the first possibility, the scope of any escalation is limited by both sides’ inability to settle their differences. For Washington, that entails regime change to one more friendly to the United States, Israel, and the West more generally. For Tehran, that means driving the US military presence out of the region. For both sides, that requires a greater military commitment than either seems willing or capable of giving. While the US may hope that this current round of strikes will mobilize protests capable of toppling the regime, the fact that Tehran’s ability to crack down on protesters remains undiminished suggests that, while worthwhile, that outcome is unlikely. Without a way to eliminate the other side’s ability to resist, all that’s left are asymmetric means such as air strikes and terrorist attacks.
If the above is true, then the second outcome is more likely. In October 2024, for example, Iran conducted a massive ballistic missile and drone strike against Israel in response to Israel’s assaults against Lebanese Hezbollah, including the killing of its leader Hassan Nasrallah. Israel responded to the Iranian attack by targeting missile production facilities in Iran, underscoring their limited nature. In return, the Iranians downplayed the damage and thus the need to respond. This pattern has repeated itself for some time, going back at least as far as the Iranian response to the US killing Qassem Soleimani in 2020 and the US responses to proxy attacks against its personnel in Iraq. Whether this pattern will continue going forward depends on how expansive the responses are. As long as both sides stick to attacking military targets, de-escalation is more likely. Should, however, Tehran conduct terrorist attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure—more likely if it feels its survival is threatened—then escalation to a larger, regional conflict becomes the only option either side has.
—C. Anthony Pfaff is a nonresident senior fellow with the Iraq Initiative in the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs
The experiment of the Islamic Revolution is done
The joint US-Israeli campaign is underway. While the dust hasn’t settled yet, it’s hard to assess who and what were targeted successfully, and who will remain in Iran after the opening strikes. Reports coming out suggesting Ali Khamenei was targeted at the offset are a good start, hopefully along with his close political and military aides, key for the regime’s survival. The major figures that carried the regime for decades, accumulating hundreds of combined years in experience, are to be removed to make way for Iranians to take their fate in their own hands.
With this, the objective for the operation had been marked: hitting the pillars of the regime to a point where post-war survival would be impossible politically, economically, and militarily.
After years of brutality, corruption, and violation of every right Iranians deserve as humans, they can now see what this regime had come to. The experiment of the Islamic Revolution is done.
Going forward, the pressure on the regime will rise and the groundwork for an opposition to present itself will be laid out. The real question is: Who will take the opportunity to unite the people and present an alternative for this clerical regime—and when?
It’s now time for the Iranian opposition, inside Iran and in the diaspora, to realize this moment. If the regime goes on to survive this war, then it’s hard to see another opportunity for change down the line. However, if the opposition manages to unite around an agreed-upon leader or group of leaders that can claim themselves the only legitimate leadership — then Iranians might have a chance at a better future.
—Michael Rozenblat is a visiting research fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East programs, from the Israeli security establishment.
Multiple factors led the US and Israel to strike Iran—and they’re pursuing multiple objectives
The joint US-Israel operation targeting Iran follows nuclear talks in Geneva this past week that failed to produce an outcome acceptable to the United States. Further, the strikes come as both the United States and Israel perceive the Iranian regime to be at its weakest point since its founding in 1979, where stagnant economic conditions and ever increasing brutality exercised by the regime are indicative of a state that is forced to resort to extreme violence to retain control.
Following the October 2023 attacks on Israel and the subsequent military operations that followed, Iran has lost its most important proxy forces in the region, as well as its client state in Syria. That loss of strategic depth, as well as an increasingly forward defensive posture by Israel, likely drove Jerusalem to seize what it sees as a historical moment to end what it views as its last remaining existential threat in the region.
For the United States, the operation is likely designed to achieve several strategic objectives, including the destruction of Iran’s nuclear program and an end to its use of proxies and missile forces to hold its neighbors at risk. It perhaps also saw an opportunity to reshape Iran and the region in such a way that could see the clerical regime in Tehran replaced by something else, though it remains unclear what may follow.
Regional states such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE will likely continue to call for de-escalation in the coming days as regional instability threatens their economic development models based on energy exports, tourism, and the attraction of wealthy expats. Already there are reports of civilian causalities in the UAE from falling debris when an Iranian missile was intercepted by air defense systems. But so far the Iranian regime has demonstrated its willingness to strike US targets in Gulf countries, and it will likely increase the intensity of its attacks if it perceives operations by the United States and Israel are designed to topple it.
—Nic Adams is a nonresident senior fellow with the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs. He most recently served as a professional staff member on the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and as senior advisor to Senator John Cornyn (R-TX).