What Will Iran Do Next?

The world now knows Trump’s initial play. But what of Iran’s next move? Here history suggests a course forward, which, if history is indeed our guide, says diplomacy is the endgame. What matters most to Iran is regime survival, and some form of diplomacy is the only path.

Look back at the previous time the United States “bombed Iran,” the assassination on January 3, 2020 of Qasem Soleimani, the powerful Iranian major general and the head of the Quds Force, in a U.S. drone strike near Baghdad International Airport in Iraq. Soleimani was an almost mythical figure in Iran; when I visited there prior to his death, I saw his face painted on massive wall murals next to the religious leaders of the country.

Soleimani was in charge of Iran’s overseas militia and terrorist operations, and directed the Shia resistance to the U.S. occupation of Iraq. He quite literally had American blood on his hands and, through his charisma and tactical skills, played a critical role in Iran’s regional reach. The U.S. killing him so overtly—like a mafia hit, everyone was intended to know who did it—was expected to set off a massive and global retaliation by Iran. President Trump, then in his first term, was accused of starting World War III (#WWIII was trending on Twitter) and kicking off a new cycle of violence against American forces in the region. Sleeper cells would be activated and a new front in the Iraq War was said to be imminent. Sound familiar?

Instead, despite the rhetoric—Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei vowed “harsh revenge”—Iran’s response was tepid. A few days after the assassination, Iran launched “Operation Martyr Soleimani,” sending all of 16 missiles against U.S. bases in Iraq, including at Al-Asad airbase and Erbil. No Americans were killed. Sound familiar?

Then-Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted that Iran had finished fighting and would not actively pursue further escalation. For his part, Trump launched no military counter-attack, although he spoke of further economic sanctions, and gestured at future agreements. Everyone called it quits.

Because Iran is a semi-developed nation, unlike other locales for American adventures overseas, it can be effectively destroyed from the air, as the Israelis and U.S. have demonstrated. It suffers from a massive technological disadvantage in any conflict with the U.S., which will retaliate against any aggression. Trump’s America will take a punch to throw back two.

Further, America is no longer dependent on Persian Gulf oil. There are threats by Tehran to close the Straits of Hormuz, but Iran needs the oil to flow more than the U.S. does. (By Washington’s current calculus, who cares about Europe’s and China’s needs?) Thanks to sanctions, Iran is almost totally dependent on oil exports, Tehran’s biggest source of external income. The oil industry’s massive infrastructure can be bombed, and most of it has so far been untouched by Israel and America. Iran’s military operates in large part out of fixed sites. It has a weak navy, and its bases are vulnerable to bombing and mining. The Iranian military is ranked globally below Indonesia. Iran knows it will never find itself in a fair fight, especially stripped as it is now of its nascent nuclear threat. That has changed everything.

The Iranian government is a tense coalition of elected civilians, unelected military officials, and theocrats. The population under them is of two minds; it is happy to chant Death to America, but equally open to the idea of finding a way out from under sanctions that would open them to the world.

Iran 2025 understands its limits. Despite more saber rattling—Iran’s Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh warned recently “all U.S. bases are within our reach and we will boldly target them”—Iran has endured many provocations without significant escalation: U.S. troops landing in-country in a failed hostage rescue in 1980, U.S. support for Iraq in the Iraq–Iran war, the U.S. killing some 300 innocents in a civilian aircraft in 1988, U.S. invading and occupying Iran’s eastern border during the Iraq War and its western approaches in the Afghan War.

In 2003, in response to Iranian diplomatic overtures following the War on Terror’s initial American military successes, George W. Bush declared the country part of an “Axis of Evil.” In 2007, U.S. forces raided an Iranian diplomatic office in Iraq and arrested several staffers. The U.S. has maintained crippling sanctions for decades, helped execute the 2010 Stuxnet cyberattack that destroyed many Iranian nuclear centrifuges, and another 2019 cyberattack—not to mention whatever the Israelis have done covertly. Nothing led to a wider war. Soleimani died in this context. And look what it has not done so far in response to Israel dismantling its nuclear program piece by piece: no dirty bomb on Tel Aviv, no terror acts against Israel or the U.S. anywhere in the world, no known major cyber attacks, no activation of the Houthis to attack shipping in the Gulf, no proxy attacks against vulnerable American enclaves in Iraq.

The lobbing of missiles into Israeli cities and Qatar is by no means inconsequential, but it is within the accepted (and expected) boundaries of tit-for-tat. No one could have expected Iran to do nothing and history would not support that. Limited retaliation is an expected part of the calculus of the Israeli and America strikes; the New York Times even reported that Iran “coordinated the attacks on the American air base in Qatar with Qatari officials and gave advanced notice that attacks were coming to minimize casualties.”

What will happen next is probably up to Trump (and Israel). But what will happen after that is in Tehran’s hands. Their goal is regime survival first of all, some sort of modus vivendi with Israel and the West in second place. The decades-long strategy to match Israel as a regional nuclear power has failed. What was bombed once by Israel and the U.S. can be bombed again. History suggests Iran will absorb the next blow, and seek a diplomatic solution to assure its own survival. Washington seems to agree; “We’re not at war with Iran,” Vice President J.D. Vance said. “We’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program.” This is a watershed moment in the modern history of the Middle East.

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