WHY IS IRAN SUDDENLY DESPERATE TO KILL TRUMP?

The lesson of Iraq and Libya is not that hostile regimes must be preserved because their collapse might be messy. The lesson is that serious countries should plan for transition before events force the issue.

That distinction matters because the Trump administration keeps treating Iran’s current regime as if it were the thing standing between Iran and chaos.

It is not.

The Islamic Republic is the chaos.

For nearly half a century, the regime has exported terrorism, armed proxies, crushed dissent, ruined its economy, alienated its own people, and turned one of the world’s great civilizations into a permanent revolutionary project. It has made enemies of its neighbors, held its own population hostage, and treated the region as a chessboard on which Lebanese, Syrians, Iraqis, Yemenis, Israelis, Palestinians, and Iranians are all expendable pieces.

And yet, when Washington looks at the regime, it keeps seeing a structure to preserve.

That is the fatal confusion in Vance’s argument. He worries about what might happen if the Islamic Republic falls, while understating what the Islamic Republic has already done by remaining in power.

Vance worries about terrorist infrastructure after regime collapse. But Iran’s terrorist infrastructure is not a future risk. It is already here. It has been built, funded, trained, and exported by the regime itself. Hezbollah is not a hypothetical danger in a post-regime Iran. It is the regime’s most successful foreign project. Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthis, Iraqi militias, assassination plots abroad, attacks on shipping, and threats against American forces are not symptoms of regime absence. They are instruments of regime policy.

The same inversion applies to migration. Vance warns about desperate Iranians flooding into Europe and the United States if the regime falls. But Iranians have already fled under this regime. Students, dissidents, professionals, women, religious minorities, and ordinary families have sought exits because the Islamic Republic has made normal life increasingly impossible. The regime is not holding back a refugee crisis. It is creating the conditions for one.

This is why Washington’s obsession with continuity is so misplaced.

Continuity can be stabilizing when the institutions being preserved serve the state rather than the regime. A future Iran will need hospitals, power plants, ports, water systems, airports, schools, oil workers, ordinary civil servants, honest judges, and military officers who choose the nation over the clerics. It will need people who can keep the lights on, the hospitals open, the food moving, and the state functioning.

That kind of continuity is essential.

But that is not the same as preserving the machinery of the Islamic Republic.

Continuity of the Revolutionary Guards, the Basij, clerical veto power, hostage diplomacy, proxy warfare, terrorist financing, censorship, and torture is not stability. It is chaos with official letterhead.

That is the line Vance and others must not blur. Preserving the Iranian state is one thing. Preserving the Islamic Republic’s instruments of coercion is another. The first may prevent collapse. The second guarantees that the same disease survives under a new label.

We saw a version of this mistake in the Iran memorandum of understanding. The administration presented it as a diplomatic breakthrough: a way to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, pause the war, and move toward a final agreement. But the language did what vague diplomatic language often does. It allowed both sides to claim victory.

The United States heard de-escalation. Iran heard leverage.

The United States heard free passage. Iran heard future administration.

The United States heard a pause on the way to peace. Iran heard time and space to regroup.

This is the recurring danger of diplomacy that values signatures over shared meaning. Honest negotiators always seek terms favorable to their own side. That is normal. But when language is left vague so each side can sell a different agreement to its own audience, the negotiators are not resolving conflict. They are postponing it — and sometimes authoring the next round.

In an American courtroom, vague language can be litigated. Lawyers argue. Judges interpret. Precedents guide the outcome. A statute or contract can survive ambiguity because a legal system exists to decide what the words mean.

But there is no neutral court where Washington and Tehran submit briefs over the meaning of a ceasefire, a shipping lane, or a promise not to interfere. There is no judge to rule whether “safe passage” means free navigation or Iranian-managed transit. There is no appellate court to decide whether “maritime services” means technical coordination or a disguised tollbooth. There is no bailiff to enforce compliance when the loser refuses to accept the ruling.

In the Middle East, ambiguity is not resolved by jurisprudence. It is resolved by leverage, missiles, drones, hostages, oil prices, and facts on the ground.

That is why vague agreements with revolutionary regimes are not harmless compromises. They are invitations to evasion.

Iran and its proxies understand this. Hamas understands this. Hezbollah understands this. The Houthis understand this. They do not treat ambiguity as a path to mutual understanding. They treat it as operational space.

That same danger now appears in Washington’s thinking about Iran’s political future. If the Trump administration wants to avoid chaos after the Islamic Republic, it should be planning seriously for transition. That means talking to Iranian opposition figures, diaspora leaders, dissidents, technocrats, business figures, civil society networks, regional allies, and defectors who understand how the state can survive while the regime is dismantled.

Reza Pahlavi should not be treated as a magic answer or a monarch-in-waiting. Iran’s future should be decided by Iranians in a free vote. But Pahlavi and other opposition figures have been thinking about the transition problem for years. They understand the difference between preserving the country and preserving the dictatorship.

Excluding such voices, or keeping them at arm’s length while negotiating with regime figures, sends exactly the wrong signal.

It tells the Iranian people that Washington is more comfortable with the oppressors it knows than the democratic uncertainty it claims to support.

It tells potential defectors inside Iran that they may be punished for breaking with the regime if Washington later cuts a deal with the regime.

It tells the clerics that survival remains negotiable.

That is not realism. It is not even realpolitik. It is the old Middle East mistake in new clothing: mistaking the men with guns for the men who can produce order.

Vance’s fear of chaos also misunderstands what transition planning is supposed to mean. The point is not to dissolve every institution, purge every civil servant, and repeat the worst mistakes of Iraq. The point is to separate state from regime.

Keep the power grid. Keep the hospitals. Keep the water running. Keep honest administrators at their desks. Keep soldiers who will defend Iran rather than the clerics.

But dismantle the coercive core.

A serious transition plan should not mean American occupation. It should mean identifying who can keep Iran functioning after the Islamic Republic loses its grip. It should mean encouraging defections from the security services before the moment of collapse. It should mean warning regime enforcers that atrocities will bring accountability while giving noncriminal officials a path to serve a future Iran. It should mean making clear that sanctions relief, reconstruction money, and diplomatic recognition will flow toward a legitimate post-regime transition, not toward a wounded dictatorship trying to rebrand itself.

That is how one prevents chaos.

Not by pretending the arsonists are the fire brigade.

The administration’s Iran policy too often feels like an old episode of Let’s Make a Deal: a curtain opens, Washington announces a prize, and everyone is expected to applaud. Then comes the reveal. Behind the curtain is not peace. It is a zonk — another mechanism for Tehran to delay, reinterpret, extract concessions, and survive.

That was the danger in the Hormuz memorandum. It is the danger in any Gaza arrangement that lets Hamas call “disarmament” something other than disarmament. And it is the danger in any Iran transition strategy that treats parts of the Islamic Republic as the price of stability.

In Vance’s imaginary Iran policy, fair is foul and foul is fair: the regime is treated as stability, while the people trying to escape it are treated as the danger. The tyrants become the continuity plan. The dissidents become the risk. The arsonists become the fire brigade.

The United States should learn the right lesson from Iraq and Libya. The lesson is not that dictatorships must be preserved because collapse can be messy. The lesson is that wishing away the day after is reckless. So is cutting deals that give hostile regimes room to define their own obligations after the fact.

Real stability in Iran will not come from preserving the Islamic Republic’s machinery under a new diplomatic label. It will not come from leaving enough regime insiders in place to give Washington the illusion of order. It will not come from memoranda that give Tehran room to reinterpret every promise the morning after signing.

Real stability requires clarity: clarity of language, clarity of purpose, and clarity about the source of the problem.

The Islamic Republic is not Iran’s shield against chaos.

It is the chaos.

CHEMICAL WEAPONS, TERRORISTS, AND IRAN: TRUMP IS IGNORING AMERICA’S NEXT NIGHTMARE

And in Iran, continuity is not the antidote.

Continuity is chaos.

Arie Blitz, MD, MBA, is a physician and independent writer in Weslaco, Texas. He writes on foreign policy, Israel, medical ethics, and biotechnology regulation.