What is Trump’s true objective in the Iran war? U.S. targets provide a clue

WASHINGTON— Last week, the Defense Department laid out a brief set of military objectives in President Trump’s war against Iran, claiming that its ultimate goal is to eliminate Tehran’s ability to project power beyond its borders. But those that offer the clearest insight yet into Trump’s true intentions may be the Pentagon’s largely unacknowledged targets.

According to US Central Command, US military strikes have focused on Iran’s ballistic missile, drone and nuclear programs as well as its naval forces. But attacks are also increasingly targeting Iran’s internal security forces, which are used by the Islamic Republic to suppress popular dissent, according to an analysis by the Institute for the Study of War and the Critical Threats Project shared with The Times.

The attacks targeted at least 123 headquarters, barracks and local bases operated by Iran’s paramilitary organizations, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Basij militia. Regional police forces were also targeted, primarily in the capital region around Tehran and near areas in western Iran dominated by Kurdish groups hostile to the Iranian government.

A US official, speaking publicly and on condition of anonymity, said some of these groups were armed and supported by the US intelligence community.

Nicholas Carl of the Critical Threats Project said this pattern shows that the campaign to set the conditions for the revolution is already underway.

“As we go after these repressive institutions, we undermine the regime’s ability to control and repress its population,” Carl said. “And it appears that the strike campaign may have been organized around trying to erode the regime’s ability to crack down on those areas.”

Attacks on domestic forces could be larger than they have measured so far, analysts said, noting the difficulty of tracking targets in the war based on publicly available data due to an internet blackout strictly enforced by the Iranian government.

The explosion occurred following attacks near the Azadi Tower near Mehrabad International Airport in Tehran on Saturday.

(Atta Kenare / AFP / Getty Images)

The quieter side of the US campaign suggests a political strategy by the Trump administration that goes beyond simply containing the Iranian government and may instead aim to lay the groundwork for its overthrow.

Trump and his top aides have been inconsistent in their messaging regarding war goals; They have oscillated between calls for regime change and much shorter goals, such as an Islamic Republic that remains in power under leadership more amenable to the United States.

Before the war began, Trump was presented with an intelligence assessment that a large-scale military operation was unlikely to overthrow the Iranian government, two sources familiar with the assessment said. The assessment led analysts at the CIA, State Department and Pentagon to advise the White House not to proceed with the operation. The intelligence analysis was first reported by the Washington Post.

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Greasing the wheels for civil unrest, rebellion, or revolution may also serve other strategic purposes for the Trump administration beyond effecting regime change; If it is still intact at the end of the war, it could add new sources of pressure on an Islamic Republic that would face renewed internal pressures at a moment of historic weakness.

Rob Malley, the chief negotiator of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and the US special envoy for Iran under President Biden, said a sustained US campaign that cripples Iran’s ability to maintain internal control could mean “the collapse of the regime in the sense that it can no longer truly and effectively govern the entire country.”

“What Trump is saying right now points to an extremely ambitious, extremely long-term, extremely dangerous campaign that will only end with Iran surrendering, and it is very difficult to see Iran surrendering,” Malley said. But the campaign may already be running. “Their communications have definitely been infiltrated; they cannot meet without being targeted by Israel or the United States,” he added.

A woman holds a portrait of the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei during a protest Saturday by medical professionals in front of Tehran’s Gandhi Hospital, which was damaged in an airstrike earlier this week.

(Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)

Malley continued: “Either the regime remains weakened, blood-soaked, and it becomes more difficult to govern a more fragmented, chaotic country, or the regime can no longer govern the country.”

An Israeli official did not deny that internal security forces were targeted, but the official said Israel was focused on assassinating Iran’s political and security leaders (tier one, two and three). So far, the vast majority of attacks against internal security services have been carried out by the United States.

“Our goal is to weaken the Ayatollah regime to the point where the Iranian people can choose their own destiny,” the official told The Times. “It’s still not to the point where they can do that, but there’s still work to be done.”

By all accounts, the campaign against Iran’s military assets was a success. Iran’s ballistic missile attacks on Israel, U.S. forces and allies in the region have decreased by 90 percent after just one week of conflict, defense officials said. Drone attacks decreased by 83%. More than 30 Iranian ships were destroyed, including those used as launch pads for unmanned aerial vehicles and aircraft; This is a significant number for Iran’s aging and underfunded naval fleet.

Elliott Abrams, who served as Trump’s special representative for Iran in 2020, said Trump can only declare victory based on these results.

“As they consume resources, they will weaken, and we are bombing more and more relevant areas. Air traffic is already restarting,” Abrams said, noting that commercial flights in the region started to restart this weekend. “So I doubt the president will need a prolonged campaign.”

But this would leave open the possibility of a revanchist Islamic Republic that would leave the regime in place and could restructure its military and crack down further on democratic protesters; Abrams said this could create political backlash for Trump after losing American soldiers in war.

A woman runs among closed shops in South Tel Aviv on Saturday.

(Olympia de Maismont / AFP / Getty Images)

“The outcome is entirely in doubt; a wave of protests, civil war, regime collapse after a deal that leaves the regime in place with a new face,” Abrams added. “If there is a wave of protests like in January and the regime starts shooting again, there will be a real test for Trump. Can he do nothing? Unlikely.”

In his first speech announcing the start of the campaign, Trump addressed the Iranian people and told them to stay home until the US bombing campaign is over.

“When we’re done, take over your government. This will be yours. This will probably be your only chance in generations,” the president said. “For years you asked for America’s help. But you never got it. No president was willing to do what I wanted to do tonight. Now you have a president who gives you what you want. Let’s see how you respond.”

But the president’s message has complicated over the past week after he offered conflicting goals in a series of interviews with reporters.

After assassinating Iran’s longtime supreme leader Ali Khamenei in the opening salvo of the war, he quickly said he expected to personally choose the next ayatollah. He has said in other interviews that the joint US-Israeli campaign killed many potential leaders with whom Washington could work.

On Friday, Trump called for Iran’s “unconditional surrender.” He did not specify whether he was referring to Iran’s nuclear program, its ballistic missile program, or control of the country itself, and said in a later interview that it could only mean “when Iran no longer has the capability to wage war.”

Last week, Kurdish leaders shared accounts of Trump and his top aides reaching out to them encouraging them to join the war, including a ground offensive from Iraqi Kurdistan into western Iran. But the president appears to have put that effort on hold for now. “The war is complicated enough without involving the Kurds,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One on Saturday.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters at Central Command headquarters on Thursday that Trump is keeping the promise he made to the Iranian people at the beginning of the war that the time for an uprising would come.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth addresses the audience as he listens to President Trump during the “Inter-American Shield Summit” attended by heads of state and government officials from 12 countries in the Americas at the Trump National Doral Golf Club in Doral, Florida, on Saturday.

(Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images)

“No one has done more than President Trump to reopen opportunity to those who want a free Iran,” Hegseth said. “After all, as he said at the beginning, it is prudent not to go out and protest while bombs are being dropped on Tehran and other places. There will come a time when he decides, or they decide, that it is time to seize that advantage.”

Suzanne Maloney, vice president and director of the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution and an expert on Iran, said she expects the government to recover from the U.S. attack and “still be able to easily outmaneuver and outmaneuver any challenge from the streets.”

However, a concerted and long-term campaign can change this assessment.

“Of course, months of full-scale war could certainly disrupt the system as well,” Maloney said. “I don’t think the short-term outcome will be a steady transition to a more liberal system; instead it will be the collapse of the state itself, creating a dangerous vacuum of power and order at the heart of the Middle East, at least for a while.”