What’s the plan Mr President? The clamour for an explanation for what comes next is building. Anxious allies across the region are demanding the Trump team shows it has a strategy.
With Americans already killed in this war, with oil prices spiking, and with the toll on US allies and their economies around the Gulf mounting, so pressure is building on President Trump.
The publicly stated strategy is unconvincing. Donald Trump has urged the Iranian people to rise up and seize control, and Iranians with guns to hand them in.
Iranian people in Berlin at a demonstration in support of the US and Israeli strikes on Iran. Pic: AP
So far, the opposite has happened – far from surrendering their weapons, Iran‘s security forces have used them to shoot more Iranians for daring to celebrate the death of their despised dictator.
Live updates on strikes
By the end of day two, unnamed sources within the US administration were insisting there is a more cunning plan. Not to topple the regime so much as to split it.
With supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei dead, the hope is that more moderate elements will step forward, stabilise the country and negotiate more pragmatically.
That would be the Venezuela model. Decapitate and co-opt. There, the Trump administration seized the dictator and claimed to find more amenable elements in Nicolas Maduro’s regime.
It is too early to gauge the success of that strategy, but the Trump team may well hope to repeat something similar in Iran.
In his Truth Social post, President Trump hinted that it may already be working in Iran. Some members of Iran’s security forces, he said, are giving up the fight.
Iran, though, is not Venezuela. The regime is more coherent and much larger than Maduro’s. More than 200,000 armed men are thought to be on the payroll. They are in it together.
What is not known is what is happening on the ground. Israeli intelligence appears to have penetrated the country and almost certainly will be trying to compromise the integrity of that regime. There will be efforts, both diplomatic and covert to co-opt elements within its leadership.
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What we know so far about airstrikes
Which Iranian officials are dead?
Attacks close Middle East airports
We have no idea what efforts have been under way to seduce figures in Iran’s government in return for sparing their lives.
For now, it is far from clear what the plan is and if it is working. In the absence of one emerging, the future looks extremely uncertain for Iran and the region.
