Amna Nawaz:
For additional perspective on all the latest developments, we turn now to our panel of experts.
Holly Dagres is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. That’s a Washington think tank. She spent her teenage years in Tehran and now curates The Iranist. That’s a weekly Substack newsletter. Alan Eyre served in the U.S. government for four decades. He was part of the Obama administration’s negotiating team for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, deal with Iran. He’s now at the Middle East Institute.
And retired Colonel Joel Rayburn served in the Army for 26 years. During the first Trump administration, he was on the National Security Council staff focusing on Iran in the Middle East. He’s now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
Thank you all for being here.
Holly, I will begin with you because we have seen in our reporting an evolution of messaging from the administration, President Trump calling for regime change a couple of days ago, Secretary of Defense Hegseth now saying it’s not about regime change. What’s your reaction to that and how is all that resonating in Iran?
Holly Dagres:
Well, the messages, they are conflicting.
And it is a bit disturbing, because the sense that some Iranians on the ground got was that they were actually going to see some sort of change inside the country. And this was started, of course, with that unprecedented massacre in January and President Trump saying that help is on the way, take over your institutions.
And it seems that we’re hearing from senior U.S. officials that they do want the Iranian people to take control of their own future, but, at this juncture, much of the clerical establishment’s still in power, so it’s hard to envision that.
And just on the note that President Donald Trump said that he would very much like to see a Venezuela model and he’s — granted, he said three of his top choices were killed in the past three days, but, in January, Iranians were really worried about that prospect because they do not want this regime.
So any kind of deal of that sort with a different face of the Islamic Republic would be contrary to what most of the anti-regime Iranian population stands for.
Amna Nawaz:
Colonel Rayburn, what do you make of that, the prospects of someone in the current regime stepping up to take over? Is that a potential plan and is it a good one?
Col. Joel Rayburn (Ret.):
Well, whether it’s a good one or not I think would depend on the way the next several days, couple of weeks goes in terms of whether that could result — whether you could actually have the remnants of the current regime that actually had the credibility and the capacity to stabilize the country on terms that would be acceptable to the United States and our allies.
I think that’s a — that’s a serious question. Militarily speaking, though, the outcome of this confrontation I think is a foregone conclusion. So you’re going to wind up in any case with the remnants of a regime there in Tehran that I think don’t have the military wherewithal to do anything other than capitulate at some point on the terms that the president is going to offer.
Amna Nawaz:
Alan, what do you make of that and also the prospects of people in Iran rising up? Do you see that happening?
Alan Eyre:
I think it’s a — possibly. I wouldn’t characterize it as the remnants of the regime.
The regime is more than just the individuals, some of whom may live through this, many of whom will not. It’s institutions. And I see no indication that currently those institutions are weak or fraying or that you can destroy these institutions from the air.
So in terms of regime change, for that to happen, two things would have to happen. The current institutions, interlocking institutions, like the IRGC, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, would have to be destroyed kinetically from the air, which I think is improbable, and then you would have to have a substitute, interlinking, functional series of institutions to plug in its place. And I think that’s even more improbable.
So I think the most likely outcome is, after four weeks or so, you will have a vastly degraded command structure in the Islamic Republic, but the core institutions in one way or another will still remain.
Amna Nawaz:
Colonel, the U.S. president has not ruled out U.S. troops on the ground. Is that a good idea?
Col. Joel Rayburn (Ret.):
Well, I think President Trump is somebody that likes to keep his options open. He likes strategic ambiguity. He wouldn’t like to rule out, I think, a military option this early in a campaign.
But I think the objectives that have been laid out so far by the president, by Secretary of State Rubio, and then very clearly today by General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, those are some very clear military objectives of finishing the elimination of the Iranian regime’s nuclear program, eliminating its ballistic missile capability, eliminating the IRGC navy, the part of the regime that has the mission of just potentially disrupting the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, and then severing its ties with its militant proxies.
And as Chairman Caine put it very interestingly today, I think it’s the first time someone stated what the mission of the theater command is, the operational command, U.S. Central Command. He said it was essentially to prevent the Iranian regime or Iran from having the ability to project power beyond its borders.
That’s a very clear kind of end state if you — so it says the military phase of that, you could have, as Alan wouldn’t say, the remnants of a regime in Tehran that are still there somehow, somewhat intact, but have no ability to damage the region beyond their borders or international security.
Amna Nawaz:
Holly, we have heard more from U.S. officials about justification in the original U.S. and Israeli attacks. Does that line up for you in terms of what they’re saying, that there was a potential imminent threat, that the U.S. is acting both defensively and proactively?
Holly Dagres:
I mean, we’re getting a lot of mixed messaging right now. And it just — I’m not entirely sure what exactly led to this, because, essentially, if we remember, there was a massacre in January, and it was that reason that Trump wanted to respond to that. And he sent assets into the region for that very reason.
Amna Nawaz:
You’re referencing the regime cracking down on protesters.
Holly Dagres:
Yes, the anti-regime uprising in January. And, before that, we heard in December Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his meeting with President Donald Trump saying that ballistic missiles were a very big issue.
So it seems like the goalposts are moving around frequently about what the modus operandi of this war was. And it seems like it’s a very different from why assets were moved in January to where it is now.
Amna Nawaz:
Alan, is it clear to you, three days in now, and as the president projects that this is a campaign that could go on four to five weeks, what the objectives are?
Alan Eyre:
I think this administration is trying to justify the war the same way Jackson Pollock used to paint. You just throw a bucket of reasons up against the canvas and hope the result looks good.
It said, for example, there’s an imminent threat to the U.S. Well, the intelligence community said that the Iranian nuclear weapons program stopped in 2003. President Trump said the underlying Iranian nuclear energy program was obliterated June of last year, and it’s still under rubble.
Ok, missiles. Iranian missiles are a threat to the United States. That falls short of the truth by about 4,000 miles, OK?So you then go to the other set of reasons. This is a preventative war because Iran is hostile and might one day be a real threat.
Well, if that’s the case, if we’re doing preventative wars now to prevent countries that might one day be a threat, is North Korea in line, is China in line, is Russia in line? I don’t think so.
So, as Holly said, I can’t make head or tails out of the reason this administration has put forward for this war.
Amna Nawaz:
Colonel, I will ask you to respond to what we just heard from Alan. Are these other countries in line if this is the reasoning?
Col. Joel Rayburn (Ret.):
Well, no, look, as I have said before, we’re in a post-October 7 environment here.
The Iranian regime posed a very real, concrete threat to the region around it, to Israel and other of our allies by joining that war on October 8. And really Hamas used on October 7 the capability that the Iranian regime equipped it with over a course of more than 15 years.
So I think October 7, October 8, then the missile attacks in 2024, 2025 by the Iranians on Israel, this is the culmination of what was Ali Khamenei’s very aggressive, very hostile foreign policy in the region and beyond. They were — they continued to intervene in European security by providing the Russians with the military means to attack Ukrainian cities.
So this is a regime that was posing a threat to U.S. interests, U.S. allies, not just in the region, but beyond. So I don’t think they were just sitting there not doing any harm and then the Trump administration decided out of nowhere to attack them.
Amna Nawaz:
Lots more to cover in the days and weeks ahead, it looks like.
Alan Eyre, Colonel Joel Rayburn, Holly Dagres, thank you very much.
Col. Joel Rayburn (Ret.):
Thank you, Amna.
