In November 2002, during the run-up to the US-led invasion aimed at toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime in Baghdad, the then British Prime Minister Tony Blair met with some of his country’s leading experts on Iraq. Gathered in the room in Downing Street were a select group of historians, political scientists and Arabists, all of whom were convinced that supporting an American invasion would be a grave mistake. One, Toby Dodge, had just returned from a trip to Baghdad, where he had become increasingly alarmed by the rapid deterioration of British and US relations with Hussein’s regime. He tried to warn Blair of the torturous difficulties that an invasion of Iraq would bring. As he later recalled:

Our basic message was that if you choose to invade, it will be much, much more difficult than you may have been led to believe… Much of the rhetoric from Washington appeared to depict Saddam’s regime as something separate from Iraqi society… All you had to do was remove him and the 60 bad men around him. What we wanted to get across was that over 35 years the regime had embedded itself into Iraqi society, broken it down and totally transformed it. We would be going into a vacuum, where there were no allies to be found, except possibly for the Kurds. We were saying: ‘Be prepared to spend a great deal of time and money. This could take a generation.’

Blair wasn’t listening. He had already made up his mind that it was in Britain’s strategic interest to support the Bush administration come what may. In the meeting, he seemed fixated not on the potential fallout of invading a major Arab state, but rather on whether Hussein could be considered evil. Not for the first or last time in his career, Blair sought simple, moralistic answers to a complex problem.

The subsequent slide into war, and the state collapse and sectarian conflict that followed, is a familiar story. What is interesting about this episode, however, is that it has some unsettling parallels with the current crisis gripping Iran and the Middle East. Much like the leaders of the Coalition that invaded Iraq in 2003, the Trump administration is emboldened by a sense of the moral righteousness of its cause. In his post on Truth Social announcing the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, Trump described Iran’s long-term dictator as ‘one of the most evil people in history’.

At the same time, Trump and his close advisers appear to believe that carrying out a relatively short, surgical air campaign to decapitate the Islamic Republic’s main political and military leaders will result either in the current regime moderating its behaviour, or in a total regime change favourable to Washington and its allies. Emboldened by the stunning success of the recent capture of Venezuela’s strongman president, Nicolas Maduro, Trump seems to think that a similar solution can now be imposed on Iran. In an interview with the New York Times on Sunday, Trump suggested that ‘What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario.’

Such assumptions have led to the current conflict across the region, and yet both have clouded the judgment of the president and his administration. On the one hand, there is a sense that Trump is animated by a desire for vengeance – a feeling that the regime of the ayatollahs in Tehran has insulted the United States for over 40 years, going back to the humiliation of the Hostage Crisis of 1979-81 that followed the Iranian Revolution. In a blending of the personal and the official that is so common to his style of government, Trump now sees himself as the president who can avenge all previous slights to US prestige. If his campaign also rids the region of an evil, tyrannical government in the process, then so much the better. In many ways, this logic resembles the Bush administration’s combination of moralising rhetoric and vengeful impulse in the lead up to the Iraq invasion of 2003. Today as then, moreover, moralising rhetoric has served to mask the absence of any coherent strategic vision or long-term plan.

Indeed, Trump and those around him appear to have a simplistic, almost recklessly optimistic, idea of what could be achieved through the sheer might of superior air power alone. Over the last 48 hours, Trump has floated various potential scenarios – first calling on the Iranian people to rise up and seize control of their own institutions, then suggesting that negotiations with a new figure from the current regime might be acceptable. Nor does he appear to have a clear timeframe in mind, floating the idea that negotiations should resume again very soon while saying to others that the current campaign could last for up to a month.

Trump seems to have fundamentally misunderstood the resolve of his adversaries. The week before Operation Epic Fury was unleashed on 28 February, Steve Witkoff, the US Special Envoy to the Middle East, told Fox News that President Trump was ‘curious as to why they [the Iranian government] haven’t…capitulated’. According to Witkoff, Trump couldn’t understand ‘Why, under this sort of pressure, with the amount of sea and naval power that we have over there, why they haven’t come to us and said, “We profess that we don’t want a weapon, so here’s what we’re prepared to do.”’

Such a view underestimates the resilience of the Iranian regime and ignores its unique ideological character. Iran is not Venezuela, and the system that governs in Tehran is not the same beast as that in Caracas. The Islamic Republic did not capitulate to the United States because it cannot conceive of doing so. It thrives on a siege mentality and draws upon a deep tradition of political martyrdom in the Twelver branch of Shia Islam.

The Islamic Republic has institutionalised its rule in ways that would make uprooting it an enormously complicated task. It is deeply entrenched in Iranian society through its patronage networks, while dependable regime clients – including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – dominate the economy. To draw on Toby Dodge’s description of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the Islamic Republic has had the best part of half a century to embed itself into Iranian society, break it down and totally transform it. Entire industries, charitable organisations and welfare networks are in the hands of IRGC-linked figures and their families. Its political institutions exercise a vice-like grip on the levers of power, and its leading paramilitary – the Revolutionary Guards – adhere to the ayatollahs’ government with an almost fanatical loyalty. It was they who recently upheld the Supreme Leader’s rule by brutally killing thousands of Iranian protesters. So long as there are still henchmen whose entire existence is wedded to the survival of the regime, it is likely that they will keep shooting unarmed protestors to secure its future.

The regime has also had time to plan for the scenario that has unfolded over the last two days. Since Iran’s air defences were crippled by US and Israeli strikes during the 12-Day War in June last year, it appears that contingency plans have been put in place. Ayatollah Khamenei is believed to have nominated a list of successors, one of whom will be chosen by Iran’s Assembly of Experts. Meanwhile, the military command of the country was fragmented, creating localised command units across Iran in what Abbas Araghchi, the foreign minister, described as a ‘Decentralized Mosaic Defense’. Crucially, they still have their proxies – in Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon – even if Hezbollah in Lebanon has been significantly weakened.

This explains why the Iranian military has continued to launch counter-strikes, and why the interim rulers refuse to sue for negotiations even as the regime’s senior leadership has been killed. They have managed to build a ‘rope-a-dope’ strategy into their regime design, and they know that all they have to do is survive with their hold on power – and the country’s weapons – intact.

It is possible that the current US-Israeli campaign will eventually wear down the regime’s monopoly of violence, thereby creating the space for Iranian people to mount a renewed revolutionary challenge and seize power. This would establish a Libya-style scenario, where an air campaign induces total regime collapse. Yet while such an outcome is possible, it feels unlikely. The Libyan regime of Muammar al-Gaddafi was institutionally thin, with a weak infrastructure, and reliant on a highly fragmented tribal landscape to remain in power – none of these is true of the ayatollahs’ system in Iran. In any case, an Iranian version of the Libyan experience of externally induced regime collapse followed by civil war and state failure would generate its own bitter fallout.

Short of putting boots on the ground, Iraq-style, it is unclear whether the US will achieve its desired outcome of regime moderation or outright regime change. If the Islamic Republic does indeed survive, much will depend on who is chosen as the new Supreme Leader and on who becomes the power behind the system as a whole. A turn towards a more pragmatic figure might allow Trump to quickly claim victory and retreat. Yet there remains the possibility that an embattled, besieged regime will turn towards those counselling ever more extreme solutions. If that happens, Washington will need to be prepared to spend more time and money in its quest to counter Iranian influence across the Middle East. The ultimate collapse of the regime could take a long time yet.