On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched a joint military operation against Iran, resulting in the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Brookings experts break down what the ensuing war means for Iran and what’s at stake internationally and domestically.
Suzanne Maloney
‘Khamenei raft’
In February 1979, after months of internal unrest, Iranian newspapers announced the departure of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last king of Iran. The massive banner headline declaring “Shah raft” (“the Shah is gone”) quickly became iconic. That concise phrase and the vivid image evoked the magnitude of this historical moment, at the culmination of an unlikely popular revolution that toppled the modernizing monarch of a wealthy, pro-Western state in a strategically and economically vital region.
Saturday’s death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of the state that succeeded the monarchy, in an Israeli airstrike on his compound, is no less momentous. Over the course of nearly 37 years in power, Khamenei cemented the unique dominance of his office, thwarted every effort to make meaningful changes to Iran’s approach to the world, and empowered and expanded its influence across the region. For many Iranians and others, Khamenei’s quick elimination elicited celebrations and a rare sense of hope for the future.
Sadly, however, that hope may be short-lived. Just as the shah’s departure failed to usher in the aspirations of the millions who rallied in the streets during the 1979 revolution, it’s highly uncertain that the U.S.-Israeli operation will successfully produce a real transition to a different regime. Over the past few days, airstrikes have powerfully degraded Iran’s military capabilities and decapitated key political and military leadership. Still, the deeply embedded networks and institutions that have underpinned the Islamic Republic for nearly half a century ensure that, at least in the near term, the vestiges of the power structure continue to hold an overwhelming advantage over any challengers.
To regain some leverage even as the country remains under bombardment, Tehran is deploying its time-tested strategy of escalating strikes on its neighbors’ energy and economic infrastructure in the hopes of creating pressure and incentives for diplomacy. After the attrition of its proxies and its nuclear program at the hands of Israel and the United States over the past 18 months, and then the shock of a massive internal uprising in January, the regime saw this conflict coming. For Iran’s battered and bloodied regime, the stakes are existential. Imposing high costs on Washington, their neighbors, and the global economy is their survival strategy.
Mara Karlin
High-end war, low-cost drones
The horrific October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks triggered a series of conflicts across the Middle East, culminating this weekend in sweeping American and Israeli efforts to conduct regime change in Iran. Together, the U.S. and Israeli militaries have apparently hit more than a thousand Iranian targets in two days, demonstrating a historic joint operation against high value political and military people and places, and employing sophisticated conventional capabilities paired with rich intelligence and strategic planning.
In response, the Islamic Republic has operated like there is no tomorrow—which is plausible given the breadth, depth, and efficacy of these attacks on its foundations. In doing so, Iranian missiles and drones have attacked at least nine different countries as of Monday morning, including Gulf bases where the U.S. military operates, likely executed by devolved command and control. Iranian efforts to expand the war have resulted in a number of countries who hoped to avoid engagement in this conflict now being brought into the conflict. While many Iranian missiles have been shot down, relatively low cost Iranian drones appear to have been more effective in evading air defense and hitting targets; further evidence that contemporary wars span the low to high end of the continuum of conflict. This latest chapter in Middle East wars looks like “everything everywhere, all at once.”
Vanda Felbab-Brown
The limits of leadership targeting
In the United States and Israel’s war against Iran, the Trump administration announced as a key goal the end of the theocratic regime that has ruled Iran since 1979. But it’s provided few—and contradictory—details as to what the regime’s end means, and the new political dispensation it would find satisfactory. It merely called on the Iranian people to overthrow the regime, without repeating its earlier promises of protection.
In the first days of airstrikes, the United States and Israel killed the ayatollah as well as several top leaders of the Iranian military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), adding to those killed in July 2025 during the joint attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities. But the Iranian regime is vast, with sprawling religious authority, layers of officers across various armed branches and militias, and widespread control of the country’s economic assets. Even if the United States and Israel continue mowing down newly-replaced leaders for weeks, the IRGC and various armed forces and their economic assets will not just melt away, even if they eventually fracture.
Even a future electoral process, should a transitional regime at some point emerge, may not lead to a sustained democratic system. Although many people in Iran crave it, such outcomes require nurturing over many years, including from the external intervener. Iran’s fragmented political opposition may produce unstable governments that struggle to satisfy the immense economic needs of the Iranian people and a clamoring for a strongman. And that’s even if armed struggles and militancy don’t rise, such as from Iran’s oppressed Kurdish and Baluch people or from Islamist groups.
The Trump administration broke a cruel, brutal, and dangerous regime with little clarity, planning, readiness, and accountability for how to foster a new, desirable replacement system. In Venezuela, it remains satisfied with 99% of the Maduro regime staying in power, including those with egregious human rights records, and only cosmetic political liberalization, as long as the “new” regime appears to be doing U.S. oil bidding. President Donald Trump is hinting that such a minimal change of leadership in Iran may be enough for him. It hardly will be for the Iranian people or Israel.
Stephanie T. Williams
Flying blind
We are flying blind, captured by magical thinking. The United States has launched an entirely volitional and illegal war against a country in which it has had no diplomatic presence for nearly 50 years. Against a theocratic dictatorship whose leader the U.S. military has now decapitated, and who will be mourned by few, but who may well be replaced by someone far worse. A country of 92 million people ruthlessly ruled for decades by a corrupt cabal of armed thugs, whose tentacles deeply penetrated what little remained of the state’s institutions.
The Trump administration has no clue and no plan for what comes next. We can, however, draw lessons—none of them good—from the United States’ 21st–century failures in regime change wars in the Middle East and North Africa. The United States must therefore prepare for the likelihood of Iran’s full implosion, fragmentation, and the spread of a chaos that would make the aftermath of our misadventures in Iraq and Libya look like a picnic. Is the Trump administration prepared to stand by while the Middle East region is engulfed in violence? Will it dispatch ground troops? Will it maintain an armada in the Persian Gulf? None of this has been explained to the American people or U.S. congressional representatives. Ironically, the greatest beneficiaries of the United States’ grave violations of international law are the very actors whom, under normal circumstances, Washington would be seeking to restrain: Moscow will be emboldened to continue its barbaric assault on Ukraine, while China will feel empowered to move on Taiwan.
Sharan Grewal
The most likely scenario is still a deal, not regime change
For Trump, the best option in Iran is still a “Venezuela scenario”: striking a deal with whoever comes to replace Khamenei, likely a modified nuclear deal plus some oil concessions. Trump—and especially his MAGA base—has no interest in a long, drawn-out war in the Middle East, which is what is required to truly topple the Iranian regime. Especially as casualties mount—with three U.S. troops already killed over the weekend, followed by a friendly fire downing of three jets Monday morning—Trump is likely to abandon his earlier calls for regime change and attempt to strike a deal. Iran, for its part, appears to be pursuing the same strategy, expanding the war as much as and as quickly as possible in order to create the greatest diplomatic pressure on Trump to end the war, and signaling its interest in negotiations as well.
Inside Iran, while the killing of Khamenei and other top officials has decapitated the regime, the incentives of each element of the regime have not meaningfully shifted. While protesters celebrated Khamenei’s death in the streets, the regime also organized continued nationalist counterprotests in its favor. That suggests the regime’s networks remain resilient, and, at least as of writing, there have still been no major defections.
If so, then for Iran, all Trump’s attacks have really done is to accelerate Khamenei’s already looming death. But the operation may have a meaningful impact on Trump himself: Nicolás Maduro’s capture and now Khamenei’s killing might further embolden him to continue to pursue these reckless, unilateral military operations against heads of state across the globe. Despite his campaign rhetoric, Trump has proven to be even more hawkish than his predecessors, leaving future generations to face the eventual blowback.
Steven Heydemann
The regime change gamble
Wars rarely go according to plan. In launching a war of choice with Iran, the United States and Israel have unleashed a confrontation that is unlikely to succeed and certain to produce unintended effects that they will be unable to manage or contain. There is little question that the United States and Israel can inflict serious damage on Iran’s military capabilities. It is likely that Iran, already severely weakened, will be unable to mount a sustained response to blistering attacks by the United States and Israel, though it will certainly try to inflict as much damage as it can on United States and Israeli targets across the region.
Whether the United States will succeed in its longer-term objectives, however, is doubtful. The Trump administration’s minimal aims can be seen as reversing the unintended effects of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the event that paved the way for the expansion of Iran’s influence across the Arab east and reinforced its commitment to its nuclear program. These include giving up its nuclear ambitions; accepting limits on its missile program; abandoning its proxies in Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen; and conceding its status as a regional power. The Trump administration’s maximalist aims can be seen as reversing the effects of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, restoring Iran’s standing as a status quo power aligned with the West. Neither outcome is possible if the current regime remains in power, and appeals by both Trump and Netanyahu encouraging Iranians to rise up underscore the centrality of regime change to the success of their plans.
Yet regime change is also the war’s central vulnerability and holds out the most dangerous of its potential unintended consequences. Several scenarios are possible, none of which offer any assurance that the war will go according to plan. First, the regime may well survive the war even if its current leadership has been killed off, paving the way for a period of increased repression, renewed determination to restore its deterrent capabilities, and increased use of asymmetric means to impose costs on its enemies. After all, Hamas and Hezbollah have survived far more devastating assaults. Iran’s regime will likely prove to be no less resilient. Second, the regime might collapse yet be replaced by leaders even more repressive and even less inclined to make the concessions demanded by the United States and Israel. Or, third, regime collapse could inaugurate a period of sustained conflict and political instability that will be difficult to contain within Iran’s borders. In going to war to exploit the Iranian regime’s weakness, therefore, Trump and Netanyahu may well have set the stage for a lose-lose outcome that will leave no one, least of all the Iranian people, better off.
Dafna H. Rand
Civilian tools, not bombs
Trump’s war of choice is unwise and potentially unlawful. It also misaligns ends and means, like so many of Trump’s other defense and foreign policies. If this war’s objective is to transform the Iranian regime’s nature—rather than merely its leadership—the prioritization and expansion of U.S. civilian tools of influence should be paramount. For decades, the United States and its allies have supported quiet, locally led efforts within Iran to strengthen civil society—journalists, academics, trade unions, environmental advocates, and women’s rights organizations. Congress has consistently funded these activities through the Near East Regional Democracy Program, which, since its establishment in 2009, has invested nearly $600 million in on-the-ground initiatives.
Administrations of both parties have approached this work with appropriate caution, given the recognition that only the Iranian people can legitimately mobilize internal pressure for political change. U.S. involvement in Iran’s domestic politics also carries historical baggage. When major protests emerged—the Green Movement (2009-2010), the Dey protests (2017-2018), and the Women, Life, Freedom movement (2021-2022)—the United States calibrated its endorsement out of concern that its involvement would discredit these local efforts. In retrospect, this caution may have been excessive, and the United States should have provided more public support.
Even so, during the peak of the Women, Life, Freedom protests, roughly one in four Iranians used a U.S.-funded virtual private network (VPN) to bypass heavy government censorship. In the years since, U.S. programs—often involving partnerships with U.S. technology companies—have developed more advanced methods that allow Iranians to circumvent total internet shutdowns—rare events that require technologies more sophisticated than VPNs or even satellite-based systems, such as Starlink.
Over the past five years, U.S. policymakers added new accountability measures and used Global Magnitsky sanctions to target Iranian officials responsible for human rights abuses and corruption.
The United States should now expand every civilian lever of statecraft. Policymakers should restore the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor and associated foreign assistance programs, including internet freedom funding. For more than a decade, these capabilities allowed the United States to anticipate and counter authoritarian crackdowns in the information space. They should also rebuild the specialized teams that administer Global Magnitsky and related sanctions so they can hold individual perpetrators of repression and state violence accountable. Most urgently, the administration should set aside its counterproductive tensions with the European Union, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and other multilateral institutions. Without a U.S. presence on the ground in Iran, Washington will need to rely on its partners to help support opposition actors.
Aslı Aydıntaşbaş
After Iran, Turkey and Israel face a reckoning
With the death of Iran’s supreme leader and the continued U.S.-Israeli strikes on the Iranian regime, the Islamic Republic’s future is suddenly much harder to predict. The regime may decline gradually, and then suddenly. Or a narrower security elite may consolidate power, eventually strike a deal with Washington, and preserve the system through harsher repression at home.
One consequence, however, is already coming into view: this war is sharpening the enmity between Turkey and Israel, pushing them closer to a long-term collision.
That much was clear in Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s initial response. He blamed Netanyahu for triggering the conflict and condemned Israel’s strikes as “provocations,” with no reference to the U.S. military role. Ankara wants to believe Trump was dragged into war by an Israel determined to reshape the Middle East.
Turkey doesn’t want another war at its doorstep and will quietly work with the Trump administration and regime insiders to identify an off-ramp—not out of sympathy for Tehran but because it fears the day after. Iran and Turkey are historic rivals, and Turks have long been nervous about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, missile capabilities, and proxy networks. But Turkish officials also feared that war would bring prolonged instability and produce consequences worse than the status quo—including refugee flows, trade and energy disruption, and the possibility that turmoil inside Iran could create new space for Kurdistan Workers’ Party-linked Kurdish autonomy inside Iran. Turkey does not believe regime change is in the cards.
Ankara’s deeper concern, however, is geopolitical. It prefers the Iran it knows to a postwar order shaped more decisively by Israel. In Turkish eyes, American and Israeli aims diverge. Trump is seen as a transactional actor who may still declare a quick victory and return to nuclear diplomacy. Israel, by contrast, is viewed by Turks as pursuing something broader: an ideological transformation, a fractured Iran, and a Middle East reorganized around Israeli military primacy. That will inevitably clash with Turkey’s own interests and quest for regional influence.
That is why Turkey and Israel are increasingly locked into a security dilemma, each viewing the other’s gains as a direct threat—accusing each other of “neo-Ottomanism” and “Greater Israel” ambitions, respectively. Their rivalry had already intensified over Gaza and Syria. Now, the prospect of an Israel-led regional order will deepen it further. Ankara may stay out of the war itself. But managing the rivalry with Israel—and the diplomacy with Washington over what comes next—will be far harder.
Kemal Kirişci
Turkey is holding its breath
Turkish leaders repeatedly expressed their categorical opposition to a military intervention against Iran. Two concerns would have been at the forefront of their minds: the potential for a mass influx of refugees and the economic consequences.
After the current Iranian regime rose to power in 1979, an estimated 1.5 million Iranians transited Turkey during the 1980s and early 1990s on their way to a then-welcoming Western Europe and the United States. Today, traditional countries of asylum have closed their doors. A case in point is the Syrian refugees, who were overwhelmingly hosted in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. In Turkey, the government initially received them with open arms, expecting a quick regime change in Syria and a quick return home. This did not happen. Instead, for more than a decade, until a slow repatriation process started with the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria late 2024, Turkey housed the largest refugee population in the world. Their presence—still numbering more than 2.3 million—has taxing social, political, and economic consequences in Turkey. This experience has unsurprisingly led the government to build a wall along both the Syrian and Iranian borders and consider receiving refugees on the Iranian side of the border.
The Turkish economy today is not booming, in contrast to when Syrians began to arrive in the spring of 2011. The government is following a painful anti-inflationary policy with limited results, a policy dependent on a highly overvalued and fragile national currency. A hike in energy prices and a slowdown in the world economy would aggravate Turkey’s so far manageable trade deficit. This could jeopardize the government’s economic policies and weaken its capacity to resist the opposition’s persistent calls for early national elections.
Constanze Stelzenmüller
Will Europe enter the fray?
The Iranian regime has played a nefarious role in European security for a long time: it has supported terrorist networks, fed wars and civil strife in the Middle East that swept streams of refugees to Europe, and helped Russia pursue its brutal invasion of Ukraine with Shahed drones. For Tehran, Europe was an enemy as much as Israel and the United States.
But the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran present European governments with a highly uncomfortable dilemma. Relief at the overthrow of a dictatorial regime that butchered its own citizens and exported terror is mixed with apprehension at the potential destabilizing consequences, including in Europe—and a sharp sense of limited agency and options. Most European governments initially responded to the aerial bombings with calls for restraint or the respect of civilian lives and international law.
Yet, following Iranian drone hits on British and French military bases, as well as bases in Jordan and Iraq that station German soldiers, the “E-3” (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom) declared on Sunday night: “We will take steps to defend our interests and those of our allies in the region, potentially through enabling necessary and proportionate defensive action to destroy Iran’s capability to fire missiles and drones at their source. We have agreed to work together with the US and allies in the region on this matter.” The U.K. has agreed to let the United States use British bases; France says it will boost its military presence in the region. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who arrives in Washington on Monday, will no doubt be asked what his repeated vow to build “the strongest army in Europe” means in this context.
Meanwhile, Europeans and Americans might do well to remember that there is one country with four years of expertise in downing Iranian drones: Ukraine.
For Russia, a major geopolitical setback with a sharp personal twist
The high probability of a U.S. attack on Iran was obvious in Moscow, but it still came as a shock. Russia sought to discourage this escalation by staging naval exercises with Iran, both on its own and together with China, but Trump’s “beautiful armada“ was too expensive to assemble to be deterred. From the narrow focus of the U.S.-Iranian talks in Geneva, Russian experts deduced a limited scope of air assault targeting primarily nuclear assets. They did not expect the first strike to be so massive, let alone effectively eliminate Iran’s top leadership.
During the previous escalation of hostilities in June 2025, President Vladimir Putin firmly refused to discuss the possibility of Israel or the United States targeting Iran’s supreme leader. Last Saturday, he held an emergency meeting of the Security Council, but not a word on the proceedings was published. His message of condolences decried Khamenei’s “assassination” as a “cynical violation of all norms of human morality and international law,” which rings hollow for any researcher of the Russian way of war, but betrays his angst. Putin has been obsessed with personal safety since the death of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, and Putin’s long self-isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic turned it into paranoia. How this fear would play in the U.S.-Russian-Ukrainian talks on a peace deal, no rational analysis can tell, but it is not impossible that Putin may discover new incentives for a compromise.
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