ALSO SEE: Bobby Ghosh | There’s No “Short and Powerful” Way Out of the War

Why a resumption of airstrikes is unlikely to change the calculus for the regime in Tehran.

The plan now sitting on Donald Trump’s desk has the seductive virtue of brevity. According to reporting by Axios, U.S. Central Command has prepared a “short and powerful” wave of strikes against Iran to break the deadlock in negotiations that have produced nothing since the February 28 opening salvos of the war. The pitch, as such pitches always are, is that a sharp blow will concentrate the minds in Tehran and produce the flexibility that 11 weeks of war and blockade have not.

It is the wrong plan. Not because the US military cannot execute it, but because it cannot accomplish what its authors say it will. As I’ve written before, a strike package is not a strategy. And the gap between the language being used in Washington this week and the political reality in Tehran is the kind of gap that, especially in the Middle East, has historically been filled with American body bags and four-figure oil prices.

Begin with what the war has, and has not, already accomplished, because that record is the best available guide to what another round of strikes will achieve. On the very first night of hostilities, joint U.S.-Israeli airstrikes killed Iran’s then-supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with the Revolutionary Guards commander Mohammad Pakpour and a long roster of senior officers. Tehran replaced them within days. Mojtaba Khamenei now sits in his father’s chair. Ahmad Vahidi, an IRGC veteran wanted by Interpol for the 1994 bombing in Buenos Aires, runs the Revolutionary Guards.

The Iranian regime has been decapitated, but has not folded. If the assassination of a supreme leader did not produce capitulation, it is unclear why the destruction of a refinery or a pipeline pumping station would.

Karim Sadjadpour, the Carnegie Endowment’s Iran scholar, made the point bluntly to NPR last week: every compromise the Islamic Republic has agreed to since the 1979 revolution has come “after many months, sometimes years, of very difficult negotiations.” Compromises do not arrive on the clock of an American news cycle. They certainly do not arrive on the clock of a presidential need to declare victory before the midterms.

That clock is the real driver here, and worth naming plainly. Iran expert Suzanne Maloney put it crisply on a Brookings podcast last week: “What the president needs fundamentally is some kind of image of victory that he can project publicly to the world and to his base.” The trouble is that no Iranian regime — and especially not one whose founding myth is resistance to the US — can publicly hand him such an image and expect to live. So long as the official chants remain “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” the regime cannot accept the kind of public concession Trump needs to declare. As Sadjadpour told Foreign Policy magazine’s Ravi Agrawal: “Trump has somewhat unrealistic expectations that this Iranian regime, whose senior leadership has been decapitated, is going to be able to come to a quick decision on such a monumental set of issues.”

So what can a “short and powerful” wave of strikes actually achieve? In practice, one of three things, none of them what is advertised.

First, it can be a tactical strike — an oil terminal here, an air defense node there, perhaps the assassination of Vahidi himself. This is a press conference dressed up as a strategy. It demonstrates American capability, which is not in doubt, and changes nothing about the negotiating positions on either side.

Second, it can be a wider campaign of several days, ending with a unilateral declaration that the Iranians have been brought to heel — whether or not they have. The advantage is theatrical and short. The disadvantage is that Iran gets a vote on whether the theater closes when the curtain falls. There is no indication the new leadership in Tehran will play the parts Trump would assign them in his kabuki of victory.

Third, it can be the real thing — Marines, ground operations, the seizure of Kharg Island or one of the islands at the mouth of Hormuz. This is the only option with genuine coercive weight, but no one is seriously proposing it. It comes with American casualties, an open-ended deployment, and the kind of mission creep that turned every previous “short, decisive” Middle East operation into a multi-decade engagement. Anyone who lived through 2003 already knows this story.

The deeper problem is that whichever option Trump chooses, he is now dealing with an enemy that has spent 11 weeks learning and adapting. The first round of strikes worked because Iran was surprised — its planes, ships and missile launchers were where satellites had last seen them, its senior officers gathered where intelligence reports said they would. None of that will be true a second time. Mobile missile batteries have, by every credible report, been dispersed eastward, away from Israeli reach. Khamenei Jr. has not been seen or heard since his elevation. The IRGC’s senior commander in a public statement Thursday promised “prolonged and wide-ranging painful strikes” in response to any renewed American campaign — bluster, perhaps, but bluster from a force that has now seen the American playbook and rehearsed for the second performance.

Then there is the matter of oil, which is where promises of a “short” campaign break on the rock of reality. Brent crude is north of $110 a barrel as I write this, on the mere prospect of further strikes. If Trump actually orders them, Tehran’s most obvious response is the one it demonstrated in September 2019, when a swarm of drones and cruise missiles took out half of Saudi Arabia’s daily crude production at Abqaiq and Khurais in a matter of minutes. (The Houthis took the credit; everyone serious knew the planning was Iranian.) Saudi Arabia’s air defenses, billions of dollars deep, intercepted nothing.

The lesson Tehran drew from that day was that the Gulf’s energy infrastructure is a soft target the US cannot reliably defend. Strikes against oil infrastructure in the current war have only confirmed Iran’s calculus. Add the Houthis’ continued capacity to harass Bab al-Mandab and the East-West pipeline running across Saudi Arabia, and a now-closed Strait of Hormuz… and you see how a “short and powerful” campaign turns very quickly into a regional energy crisis whose costs are paid at gasoline pumps all over the world.

There is a constitutional dimension as well, and it is not a footnote. Today, May 1, marks the 60-day deadline under the 1973 War Powers Resolution, triggered by the Trump’s March 2 letter notifying Congress of the February 28 strikes. Congress has not authorized continued military action. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has floated the creative argument that the ceasefire nullifies the clock — a reading the resolution’s drafters would have found imaginative. Whatever one’s view of the War Powers Act’s enforceability, this much is true: the US is on the verge of a new wave of strikes against a country with which it has no declared state of war, on the authority of one man’s calculation about his political needs.

What, then, is the alternative? Not the absence of pressure. The blockade, oil sanctions, the exclusion of Iran from international banking — these are working as advertised. Sadjadpour reports that American negotiators in Islamabad came away convinced the regime is in “desperate need of cash.” But Sanam Vakil, who runs the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, warns against assuming economic pain translates linearly into political concession: “The Islamic Republic doesn’t make decisions based on inflation or GDP per capita.”

Patience is unfashionable in this White House, but patience is what economic strangulation requires — patience that accepts the regime’s pain threshold is calibrated to its own survival, not to the suffering of its citizens. So is allowing the Iranian street, whose protests have toppled regimes before, the time and space to do its own work. Bombs do not accelerate that process. They only retard it, by giving the regime the external enemy it needs to silence its own dissidents.

The CENTCOM plan on Trump’s desk is not a way out of the war. It is a way deeper in.