The Latest Iran War Is Going Well for the US, but How Will It End?| National Catholic Register
COMMENTARY: No matter what the U.S. does, the Iran that emerges from this war will be different.
Since the dawn of the Islamic Revolution in Iran 47 years ago, every American administration, including the Trump administration, has sought to make peace with Iran.
I remember seeing, in both Republican and Democratic administrations, various versions of conciliatory letters to the supreme leader. Not much came out of these repeated American efforts. Even after the 2015 Obama administration’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal with Iran, the regime sought to publicly humiliate the United States in a much-publicized incident involving two small U.S. Navy riverine boats straying into Iranian waters.
Some Americans, and American Catholics, are surely puzzled, if not angry, at the latest conflict. Another war in the Middle East. Some commentary makes it sound as if Iran is some far-off country over there minding its own business rather than an aggressive, revolutionary regime built on a foundation of eternal enmity toward the United States. That enmity is not just verbal but made up of acts of mass violence, from the seizing of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 to the attacks on American embassies and military facilities in Lebanon, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Hundreds of American soldiers have been killed, in Lebanon and Iraq, directly because of Iran. Despite the talk of Israel, in the Iranian vision of the world, Israel is America’s junior partner, America is the main enemy, the “Great Satan,” as opposed to various lesser devils. This is not a new war but, perhaps, the summation of a long and ongoing conflict, one that has had numerous flashpoints and periods of relative calm through the years.
It is unlikely that the situation would have deteriorated as it had if Iran hadn’t just slaughtered 20,000 to 30,000 of its own population in suppressing anti-regime protests. As late as last week, the administration seems to have made some bold, creative efforts to find an agreement with Iran — one of those famous Trump deals — only to be rudely rebuffed. The war has to date gone well for the allies and badly for Iran. Many senior military and political leaders have been killed and Iran’s defense capacity seriously degraded. Most of the Iranian navy is at the bottom of the Persian Gulf.
Iran has responded with an interesting, possibly spectacularly counterproductive, strategy. Instead of focusing on well-defended Israel and the hard-to-hit Americans, Iran has launched more than a thousand short-range missiles and drones against the oil-rich Arab Gulf states. Although reportedly supposed to strike American bases, the Iranians have targeted civilian infrastructure in those countries — airports, hotels and oil and natural gas facilities. The idea is to inflict pain on the Gulf states (and, indirectly, on global customers for Arab energy), which will then plead to Washington for the war to end soon. It is a race to see who will run out of capacity first — Iran’s capacity to strike and the Gulf states’ capacity to defend themselves from these strikes. At least publicly, the attacks seem to have strengthened rather than weakened the resolve of the Gulf states and drawn them closer to the United States.
As far as Middle East Christians are concerned, they are mostly bystanders and observers in this war. The current Iranian regime is a longtime, cruel oppressor of Christians domestically. What a successor or transitional regime looks like in terms of religious tolerance is anyone’s guess. Iran has also succeeded in getting its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah to enter the war (even after the disastrous losses the group endured in the 2023-2025 war with Israel). This has caused the Lebanese government to finally decree the banning of Hezbollah as an armed force, something most Lebanese Christians have demanded for decades.
President Donald Trump has been purposefully vague on the war’s endgame. The conflict could last four weeks or longer. It could lead to renewed talks or to the fall of the regime. He has signaled an obvious interest for regime change but emphasized that the heavy lifting on the ground would be by Iranians not Americans. He could, at any time, given the damage assessment on the regime, declare victory and go home.
It seems clear that no matter what the U.S. does, the Iran that emerges from this war will be different. It might be a military dictatorship, or more democratic, or complete chaos. One official close to power told Atlantic magazine that “the Islamic Republic has no way but to end the conflict with the U.S. and focus on economic development. Our resources are done. That’s the only way forward.”
In this sense, the administration seems to be using different foreign-policy tools aiming at the same thing in Venezuela, Iran and probably Cuba — pushing for a political transition in strategic countries long ruled by hostile regimes that have begun to implode, more as a result of regime decisions rather than because of the United States. This probably explains while some of the most enthusiastic observers of these events have been millions of Venezuelan, Iranian and Cuban exiles.
Pope Leo’s comments on the war have been interpreted by some progressives as criticizing the Trump administration, but neither the president nor the United States were mentioned. By the time the comments appeared, Iran was striking (mostly non-American) targets in eight (now 10) countries. The Holy Father called for diplomacy and for peace, but also for “peaceful existence founded on justice,” a phrase which can — if we are going to try to read between the lines as progressives do — be as apt about an Iran that just killed thousands of its own people and jailed thousands more. But Trump will also be judged by history on how the conflict ends and what comes out of it.
It seems clear that even if the war were to stop this week, the region has already been transformed in very consequential ways.
