The Iranian regime is crippled. What comes next?

Majid Sadeghpour was driving to his Saturday morning shift as a pharmacist in Virginia when he heard the news on the radio that the United States and Israel had bombed Iran. He immediately turned the car around. Sadeghpour fled the Iranian regime in 1982, after his brother was executed as a political dissident. He is now the political director of the Washington-based Organization of Iranian American Communities (OIAC).

“It is difficult to assert any Persian, any Iranian, would be shedding any tears for the ayatollah in Iran when he was dead,” Sadeghpour told me.

But he’s also hesitant to rely on the United States for further help. Sadeghpour and his organization support an Iranian-led plan to turn the country into a republic. It is one of several ideas for how to replace leadership in Tehran after U.S.-Israeli missile strikes in the past week eliminated Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his top deputies and potential successors.

“Our community, our resistance, believes the U.S. policy should recognize the Iranian people’s resistance [efforts] to overthrow this regime,” Sadeghpour said. “We don’t need or ask for weapons, we don’t need or ask for money. What is necessary is political legitimacy for that change. And saying goodbye to the notion that you can somehow change this regime for the better.”

Thus far, President Donald Trump has been unclear about what is next for Iran and his military campaign there. Since Operation Epic Fury commenced last weekend, the Trump administration has offered various explanations for the attack. In a video message Saturday morning, Trump said he will never allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon. He has said his goals are also to destroy Iran’s navy and missile capabilities and to prevent the regime from funding terrorist groups. But the Trump administration has not elaborated on what precisely it would need to achieve to end its military operation.

The initial strikes in Iran delivered a decapitation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that hundreds of thousands of exiled Iranians have long awaited. But Iranian resistance movements and U.S. isolationists alike worry the operation’s final objectives remain vague. The Trump administration appears to have embroiled itself in a costly and unclear foreign war—and it has done so without the formal approval of Congress.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Wednesday the U.S. military action could last up to eight weeks. President Trump has insisted that he did not need congressional approval because it is a limited operation, not a declaration of war. But many see the facts on the ground differently.

“It’s best to speak plain and true: we are at war,” Center for Renewing America senior fellow Sumantra Maitra told me. “We are using air power. They’re shooting, and we are shooting back at them.”

A top question is how long the United States will be involved. Right now, U.S. involvement in Iran is only through air power, but Hegseth said in a news conference Thursday that both the United States and Israel are ramping up for a second phase of the joint operation.

“You cannot have a long, drawn-out regime change operation without troops on the ground. Someone has to … go inside and provide order,” Maitra said. “It’s a next forever war that has already started, and we have no idea how to get out of it.”

In 2024, Trump declared repeatedly that he would end so-called forever wars, and he promised to “stop the chaos in the Middle East.” Members of his Cabinet—particularly Vice President J.D. Vance and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard—have staked out similar positions in the past. Vance insisted in a Monday post on X that Trump will not involve the United States in a yearslong conflict with no clear objective.

Maitra criticizes the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy that claimed that it would refocus attention on the Western Hemisphere. It said the administration would avoid Middle East involvement that led to “forever wars” and that the region was “no longer [a] constant irritant.” The strategy said it would focus less attention even on Iran, given last year’s strikes on its nuclear facilities.

Now, Maitra says, the region has been destabilized.

“Once the Iranian regime is powerless, which it kind of is, they can still keep their power in Iran, but they won’t be able to exploit it and export it outside. What happens after that point of time?” Maitra asked. “The Turks want to be the bigger power in that region. The Israelis don’t like that. What’s going to happen? Any of those places can break out in a conflict, and what do we do then?”

Cato Institute research fellow Jon Hoffman argued that Iran did not pose a direct threat to the United States, even though it did routinely threaten Israel, a U.S. ally. Now, he said, with Iran launching hundreds of retaliatory missile strikes and drone attacks against targets in countries including Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates in recent days, it is difficult to predict what may happen next.

“Iran responded first and foremost by going after the Gulf states, and that was very deliberate,” Hoffman said. “They’re trying to raise the political and economic costs of this conflict, whereby the Gulf states go running to Donald Trump and say, ‘Please stop this.’ And I think what you’re going to see is Iran is far more strategically significant than Iraq ever was. If you have a country of 93 million people that is central to the geopolitical fabric of the Middle East, and that descends into chaos, it’s hard to even project what we could be talking about.”

Roughly half of Americans disapprove of U.S. military action against Iran, according to an aggregate of recent polls. In a CNN poll released this week, 6 in 10 Americans said they don’t think the president has a clear plan for how to handle the situation. But the results are also divided along partisan lines. While most Democrats and independents disagree with Trump’s actions, only around 23% of Republicans did in the CNN poll. But disapproval rates have been increasing as the conflict has claimed more American lives. As of Thursday, six American soldiers had been killed, and Trump and Hegseth said more are likely.

In his initial comments following Saturday’s attack on Iran, Trump called on the Iranian people to rise up and take control of the government. Then on Thursday, he told Axios that he must be involved in choosing a successor to Khamenei, although he has not identified a particular person. That leaves an open question over whether Iranians may fill a leadership vacuum with another authoritarian figure.

George Mason University visiting fellow Ramesh Sepehrrad fled Iran with her family in the 1980s. She said that even though Khamenei’s death is a good thing for Iran’s future, foreign wars have never successfully introduced democracy to Iran, or any other Middle Eastern country.

“As an Iranian, I am not a big fan of war with my country, but as a scholar, I am also not a big fan of foreign intervention to solve this problem with the Iranian regime,” Sepehrrad told me. “The solution is not with military interference. … The solution is in the hands of the Iranian people. Yes, there is a war to be had, but that war belongs to the people of Iran against this regime, not any other countries.”

Sepehrrad—along with Sadeghpour of OIAC—believes the United States should recognize the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), which has a 10-point transition plan to shift the country to a republic. She believes the Iranian regime is significantly weakened and cannot regain power. But the NCRI remains in exile.

“From my research and years of studying, the National Council of Resistance of Iran is the only coalition that really stands above and passes all the tests when it comes to the demands of the Iranian people,” Sepehrrad said. “They’ve already been fighting the regime for four decades.”

But the NCRI is only one of a few potential replacements for the regime. In 1979, the last shah of Iran was exiled. His son, Reza Pahlavi, now lives in Maryland. He has positioned himself as the rightful successor of Iran and has said that he would install a secular parliamentary republic. But Pahlavi does not have support among all Iranians, especially those who do not want to return to a monarchical structure. Trump also said he does not see Pahlavi as the next leader.

“Some people like him and we haven’t been thinking too much about that,” he told the press in the Oval Office on Tuesday. “It would seem to me that somebody from within maybe would be more appropriate.”

On the other hand, the NCRI is a coalition of several organizations, including the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (MEK). It is a militant group that has attacked regime strongholds for years. The president-elect of the NCRI, Maryam Rajavi, is also a top leader of the MEK. The MEK still operates inside Iran and has grassroots support, but it is significantly smaller than the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Due to its militant nature, those who support a secular republic have worried that the MEK is too violent to trust.

But less than a week into the conflict, it is far from clear how the war winds down. In a Pentagon news briefing Thursday afternoon, Defense Secretary Hegseth said the operation was moving into a new phase to disable Iran’s military.

“We have clear objectives, with maximum authority on the battlefield,” Hegseth said. “The dumb, politically correct wars of the past were the opposite of what we’re doing here. They had vague objectives with restrictive minimalist rules of engagement. No more.”