Trump’s noose tightens on Iran — here’s what must come next

President Trump warned the Iranian regime that time is running out to make a "fair" nuclear deal. Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images

Nobody can say President Donald Trump didn’t give Tehran a chance.

Even at the11th hour, with massive military assets pouring into the Middle East after Iran’s brutal attacks on its own protesting people, Trump has offered the regime an off-ramp.

“Negotiate a fair and equitable deal,” he told Iran’s leaders Wednesday on Truth Social.

If not, he wrote, he’ll order a strike considerably more damaging than his June attack against the regime’s nuclear program.

Trump previously said his goal in Iran was simple: winning.

But winning cannot mean cutting a deal with the Ayatollah or his security forces over the bodies of more than 30,000 murdered protesters.

There is no diplomatic solution to this humanitarian catastrophe, not after the regime’s killing spree — and certainly not for the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism.

The military muscle Trump has moved into the region gives Washington multiple options.

The “massive Armada” he’s sending can tighten the noose on Tehran’s oil exports, drying up revenues that sustain the regime’s security forces.

It can take out Iran’s remaining long-range missile systems that threaten American and allied security facilities.

It can even target political elites who ordered this crackdown.

But any strategy that treats US military force as a one-and-done — without a broader strategy to help Iranian protesters and achieve their aims — would be shortsighted.

If Trump is serious about using force, he must target the regime’s apparatus of repression.

That means striking the “spinal cord” of command and control: the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the volunteer Basij paramilitary, its Law Enforcement Forces and “Special Units,” pro-regime vigilante groups, and Shiite militias from Iraq and Afghanistan — all of which have waged war against the population on Tehran’s behalf.

Three of the four militias reported to have crossed into Iran to crush protesters are designated foreign terrorist organizations with American blood on their hands.

Affiliates of these groups in Iraq are now recruiting suicide bombers ready to go if Washington attacks Tehran.

Trump must understand what winning in Iran looks like — and what it doesn’t.

There’s no photo-op to be had with the Islamic Republic under Ali Khamenei, the Middle East’s longest-tenured dictator.

To help dislodge him, the president will need a credible threat of force, not a signal of conciliation.

While Trump has rightly earned the title “Negotiator-in-Chief,” he also knows a bad deal when he sees one — and extending a diplomatic lifeline to Tehran now would be disastrous on multiple fronts.

First, it undercuts Trump’s own statements about the success of the US strike that destroyed Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities months ago.

Tehran hasn’t been able to credibly rattle a nuclear saber since Trump took that capability away.

Seeking a nuclear deal now would undermine this critical fact, robbing the president of the political win his military win last summer achieved.

Second, negotiations would ride roughshod over the corpses of tens of thousands of murdered Iranians.

That’s not bad optics; it’s a moral stain Washington cannot afford — not after the president’s promise that help for Iran’s suffering people was on the way.

Third, it would discard the lessons America should have learned from the failures of former President Barack Obama, whose quest for nuclear diplomacy in 2009 empowered the Islamic Republic at the expense of Iranian protestors.

Turning away from the slaughter of the most pro-American population in the Muslim Middle East would represent a political defeat for Trump, a strategic defeat for America, and a moral defeat for anyone who believes in human liberty.

The priority for Washington now must be to use US military superiority to meaningfully level the playing field between the street and the state in Iran and to clip the wings of the regime’s repression apparatus.

This can be accomplished by targeting the networks and individuals supporting the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ command-and-control, as well as the headquarters of the Basij paramilitary.

Any action that follows should be aimed at disarming the Islamic Republic of any strategic systems and helping defend against potential retaliation from Tehran in the region.

Iran is the only non-nuclear member of an authoritarian and anti-American “Axis of Aggressors.”

Trump’s choice in the coming days will have profound implications for great-power competition with China and Russia, for America’s credibility, and for deterrence against adversaries everywhere.

The Iranian people are rising against their oppressors.

They’re not demanding better terms from the ayatollahs; they want the ayatollahs gone — and are unlikely to settle for a Venezuela-style option involving musical chairs at the top.

Trump prides himself on winning.

In Iran, that means only one thing: helping Iranians drive their brutal regime into history’s graveyard.

Behnam Ben Taleblu is senior director of the Iran program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. X: @therealbehnambt.