Toppling Tehran Is the Easy Part: History Says the Real Crisis Starts the Day After
The United States and Israel aren't just fighting Iran — they've publicly committed to ending the Islamic Republic itself, with President Trump telling Iranians their government 'will be yours to take.' That single sentence transforms this from a military campaign into something America has attempted repeatedly in the Middle East and never successfully finished: engineering what comes after a regime falls. The historical record on that project is grim, and it's the part almost no one is talking about.
Bottom Line
The military question — can the U.S. and Israel badly damage the Islamic Republic — is separate from the political question of what replaces it, and the second question is where every prior American regime-change effort in the region has failed. With one Supreme Leader dead, his successor missing, and the ceasefire collapsed, the succession vacuum is arriving faster than any plan to fill it. The lesson of Iraq and Libya isn't that regimes can't be toppled. It's that the day after is the war.