To better understand what this means for the U.S. and Iran, Alfonso Serrano, a U.S. politics editor at The Conversation, interviewed Donald Heflin, a veteran diplomat who now teaches at Tufts University’s Fletcher School.

Widespread attacks have been reported across Iran, following weeks of U.S. military buildup in the region. What does the scale of the attacks tell you?

I think that Trump and his administration are going for regime change with these massive strikes and with all the ships and some troops in the area. I think there will probably be a couple more days’ worth of strikes. They’ll start off with the time-honored strategy of attacking what’s known as command and control, the nerve centers for controlling Iran’s military. From media reporting, we already know that the residence of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was attacked.

What is the U.S. strategic end game here?

Regime change is going to be difficult. We heard Trump today call for the Iranians to bring the government down. In the first place, that’s difficult. It’s hard for people with no arms in their hands to bring down a very tightly controlled regime that has a lot of arms. 

The second point is that U.S. history in that area of the world is not good with this. You may recall that during the Gulf War of 1990-1991, the U.S. basically encouraged the Iraqi people to rise up, and then made its own decision not to attack Baghdad, to stop short. And that has not been forgotten in Iraq or surrounding countries. I would be surprised if we saw a popular uprising in Iran that really had a chance of bringing the regime down. 

Do you see the possibility of U.S. troops on the ground to bring about regime change?

I will stick my neck out here and say that’s not going to happen. I mean, there may be some small special forces sent in. That’ll be kept quiet for a while. But as far as large numbers of U.S. troops, no, I don’t think it’s going to happen. 

Two reasons. First off, any president would feel that was extremely risky. Iran’s a big country with a big military. The risks you would be taking are large amounts of casualties, and you may not succeed in what you’re trying to do.

But Trump, in particular, despite the military strike against Iran and the one against Venezuela, is not a big fan of big military interventions and war. He’s a guy who will send in fighter planes and small special forces units, but not 10,000 or 20,000 troops. 

And the reason for that is, throughout his career, he does well with a little bit of chaos. He doesn’t mind creating chaos and figuring out a way to make a profit on the other side of that. War is too much chaos. It’s really hard to predict what the outcome is going to be, what all the ramifications are going to be. Throughout his first term and the first year of his second term, he has shown no inclination to send ground troops anywhere. 

Speaking of President Trump, what are the risks he faces?

One risk is going on right now, which is that the Iranians may get lucky or smart and manage to attack a really good target and kill a lot of people, like something in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv or a U.S. military base. 

The second risk is that the attacks don’t work, that the supreme leader and whoever else is considered the political leadership of Iran survives, and the U.S. winds up with egg on its face. 

The third risk is that it works to a certain extent. You take out the top people, but then who steps into their shoes? I mean, go back and look at Venezuela. Most people would have thought that who was going to wind up winning at the end of that was the head of the opposition. But it wound up being the vice president of the old regime, Delcy Rodríguez.

I can see a similar scenario in Iran, if Khamenei and a couple of other leaders were taken out. But the only institution in Iran strong enough to succeed them is the army, the Guards in particular. Would that be an improvement for the U.S.? It depends on what their attitude was. The same attitude that the vice president of Venezuela has been taking, which is, “Look, this is a fact of life. We better negotiate with the Americans and figure out some way forward we can both live with.”

But these guys are pretty hardcore revolutionaries. I mean, Iran has been under revolutionary leadership for 47 years. All these guys are true believers. I don’t know if we’ll be able to work with them.

Any last thoughts?

I think the timing is interesting. If you go back to last year, Trump, after being in office a little and watching the situation between Israel and Gaza, was given an opening, when Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu attacked Qatar.

A lot of conservative regimes, who didn’t have a huge problem with Israel, essentially said “That’s going too far.” And Trump was able to use that as an excuse. He was able to essentially say, “Okay, you’ve gone too far. You’re really taking risk with world peace. Everybody’s gonna sit at the table.”

I think the same thing’s happening here. I believe many countries would love to see regime change in Iran. But you can’t go into the country and say, “We don’t like the political leadership being elected. We’re going to get rid of them for you.” What often happens in that situation is people begin to rally around the flag. They begin to rally around the government when the bombs start falling.

But in the last few months, we’ve seen a huge crackdown in Iran. We may never know the number of people the Iranian regime killed in the last few months, but 10,000 to 15,000 protesters seems a minimum. 

That’s the excuse Trump can use. You can sell it to the Iranian people and say, “Look, they’re killing you in the streets. Forget about your problems with Israel and the U.S. and everything. They’re real, but you’re getting killed in the streets, and that’s why we’re intervening.” It’s a bit of a fig leaf. 

Now, as I said earlier, the problem with this is if your next line is, “You know, we’re going to really soften this regime up with bombs; now it’s your time to go out in the streets and bring the regime down.” I may eat these words, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. The regime is just too strong for it to be brought down by bare hands.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Expect none of that restraint by Iran’s leaders following the latest U.S. and Israeli military operation currently playing out in the Gulf nation.

In the early hours of Feb. 28, 2026, hundreds of missiles struck multiple sites in Iran. Part of “Operation Epic Fury,” as the U.S. Department of Defense has called it, the strikes follow months of U.S. military buildup in the region. But they also come after apparent diplomatic efforts, in the shape of a series of nuclear talks in Oman and Geneva aimed at a peaceful resolution.

Any such deal is surely now completely off the table. In scale and scope, the U.S. and Israel attack goes far beyond any previous strikes on the Gulf nation.

In response, Iran has said it will use “crushing” force. As an expert on Middle East affairs and a former senior official at the National Security Council during the first Trump administration, I believe the calculus both in Washington and more so in Tehran is very different from earlier confrontations: Iran’s leaders almost certainly see this as an existential threat given President Donald Trump’s statement and the military campaign already underway. And there appears to be no obvious off-ramp to avoid further escalation.

What we should expect now is a response from Tehran that utilizes all of its capabilities – even though they have been significantly degraded. And that should be a worry for all nations in the region and beyond.

It is important to note that we are in the early stages of this conflict – much is unknown. 

As of Feb. 28, it is unclear who has been killed among Iran’s leadership and to what extent Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities have been degraded. The fact that ballistic missiles have been launched at regional states that host U.S. military bases suggests that, at a minimum, Iran’s military capabilities have not been entirely wiped out.

Iran fired over 600 missiles against Israel last June during their 12-day war, but media reporting and Iranian statements over the past month suggested that Iran managed to replenish some of its missile inventory, which it is now using.

Clearly Washington is intent on crippling Iran’s ballistic program, as it is that capability that allows Iran to threaten the region most directly. A sticking point in the negotiations in Geneva and Oman was U.S. officials’ insistence that both Iran’s ballistic missiles and its funneling of support to proxy groups in the region be on the table, along with the longstanding condition that Tehran ends all uranium enrichment. Tehran has long resisted attempts to have limits on its ballistic missiles as part of any negotiated nuclear deal given their importance in Iran’s national security doctrine.

This explains why some U.S. and Israeli strikes appear to be aimed at taking out Iran’s ballistic and cruise missile launch sites and production facilities and storage locations for such weapons.

With no nuclear weapon, Iran’s ballistic missiles have been the country’s go-to method for responding to any threat. And so far in the current conflict, they have been used on nations including the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain.

But the Trump administration appears to have expanded its aims beyond removing Iran’s nuclear and non-nuclear military threat. The latest strikes have gone after leadership, too. 

Among the locations of the first U.S.-Israeli strikes was a Tehran compound in which the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in known to reside, and Israel’s prime minister has confirmed that the 86-year-old leader was a target of the operation.

While the status of the supreme leader and other key members of Iran’s leadership remains unknown as of this writing, it is clear that the U.S. administration hopes that regime change will follow Operation Epic Fury. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take,” Trump told Iranians via a video message recorded during the early hours of the attack.

Signaling a regime change operation may encourage Iranians unhappy with decades of repressive rule and economic woes to continue where they left off in January – when hundreds of thousands took to the street to protest.

But it carries risks for the U.S. and its interests. Iran’s leaders will no longer feel constrained, as they did after the Soleimani assassination and the June 2025 conflict. On those occasions, Iran responded in a way that was not even proportionate to its losses – limited strikes on American military bases in the region. 

Now the gloves are off, and each side will be trying to land a knockout blow. But what does that constitute? The U.S. administration appears to be set on regime change. Iran’s leadership will be looking for something that goes beyond its previous retaliatory strikes – and that likely means American deaths. That eventuality has been anticipated by Trump, who warned that there might be American casualties.

So why is Trump willing to risk that now? It is clear to me that despite talk of progress in the rounds of diplomatic talks, Trump has lost his patience with the process.

On Feb. 26, after the latest round of talks in Geneva, we didn’t hear much from the U.S. side. Trump’s calculus may have been that Iran wasn’t taking the hint – made clear by adding a second carrier strike group to the other warships and hundreds of fighter aircraft sent to the region over the past several weeks – that Tehran had no option other than agreeing to the U.S. demands.

What we don’t know is whether the U.S. strategy is now to pause and see if an initial round of strikes has forced Iran to sue for peace – or whether the initial strikes are just a prelude to more to come.

For now, the diplomatic ship appears to have sailed. Trump seems to have no appetite for a deal now – he just wants Iran’s regime gone. 

In order to do that, he has made a number of calculated gambles. First politically and legally: Trump did not go through Congress before ordering Operation Epic Fury. Unlike 23 years ago when President George W. Bush took the U.S. into Iraq, there is no war authorization giving the president cover.

Instead, White House lawyers must have assessed that Trump can carry out this operation under his Article 2 powers to act as commander in chief. Even so, the 1973 War Powers Act will mean the clock is now ticking. If the attacks are not concluded in 60 days, the administration will have to go back to Congress and say the operation is complete, or work with Congress for an authorization to use force or a formal declaration of war.

The second gamble is whether Iranians will heed his call to remove a regime that many have long wanted gone. Given the ferocity of the regime’s response to the protests in January, which resulted in the deaths of thousands of Iranians, are Iranians willing to face down Iran’s internal security forces and drive what remains of the regime from power?

Third, the U.S. administration has made a bet that the Iranian regime – even confronted with an existential threat – does not have the capability to drag the U.S. into a lengthy conflict to inflict massive casualties.

And this last point is crucial. Experts know Tehran has no nuclear bomb and only has a limited stockpile of drones and cruise and ballistic missiles.

But it can lean on unconventional capabilities. Terrorism is a real concern – either through the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, which coordinates Iran’s unconventional warfare, or through its partnership with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Or actors like the Houthis in Yemen or Shia militias in Iraq may seek to conduct attacks against U.S. interests in solidarity with Iran or directed to do so by the regime. 

A mass casualty event may put political pressure on Trump, but I cannot see it leading to U.S. boots on ground in Iran. The American public doesn’t have the appetite for such an eventuality, and that would necessitate Trump gaining Congressional approval, which for now has not yet materialized.

No one has a crystal ball, and it is early in an operation that will likely go on for days, if not longer. But one thing is clear: Iran’s regime is facing an existential threat. Do not expect it to show restraint.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.