Netanyahu chases Tehran regime change into a familiar quagmire

By Tom Beckwith · Reporting from Washington · October 23, 2026

As Benjamin Netanyahu urges the overthrow of Tehran, Washington contemplates strikes that mistake the collapse of a hostile regime for an enduring peace.

The calculus of capitals under pressure

We begin, as all serious intelligence assessments must, with interests. In Jerusalem, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces declining poll numbers ahead of national elections scheduled for October 27, 2026, and has made overthrowing the Iranian regime Israel's primary objective, according to reporting by Al Jazeera. Desperation is a poor lodestar for strategy, yet it makes excellent domestic theater. A politician whose coalition is fracturing finds distinct utility in a foreign war. Analysts told the New York Times that Netanyahu could use the prospect of joint strikes to form a unity government to maintain power.

In Washington, President Donald Trump is managing a different set of electoral constraints. As NPR and Time Magazine report, the administration has amassed forces in the region and is developing plans for major strikes following the U.S. midterm elections on November 3. Trump has objected to premature offensives, stating that the conflict will end immediately after the election because the Iranian regime would quickly capitulate, while also weighing the use of a 22,000 GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb, known as the “mother of all bombs,” on targets like the Pickaxe Mountain underground facility. Nations have interests, not friendships, and American ballot boxes currently dictate the timetable of the Levant.

Capabilities form the second tier of any sober cable. What can these actors actually do? Israel can establish temporary air superiority. But as Caglar Kurc, an assistant professor at Abdullah Gul University, observed to Al Jazeera, airpower can degrade military capabilities while well-hidden systems survive, and you cannot change a regime unless you are prepared to deploy troops and stay in the country for some years. The United States and Israel launched a war on Iran on February 28, killing the supreme leader and several senior officials, and have traded strikes over control of the Strait of Hormuz. Yet Sidharth Kaushal of the Royal United Services Institute notes that Iran's antiship missile stockpiles remain large because production is in-housed and southern mountains provide natural shelters.

The cost of treating escalation as theater

Statements come last, usually as noise to obscure the absence of a day-after plan. Netanyahu stated Wednesday night that the Iranian regime must be overthrown "once and for all," per The Washington Post. Trump asked the UN General Assembly whether he should annihilate the Islamic Republic and drive them into hell. Tehran responds in kind. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei stated an attack on Pickaxe Mountain would be met with a response just as hard, if not stronger. Meanwhile, the IRGC stated in an open letter to American voters that they will continue fighting despite all hardships. IRGC spokesperson Hossein Mohebbi warned the Tehran Times that even a limited attack would provoke a serious energy crisis for the world.

Most escalation is miscalculation disguised as resolve. The institutional framework here is deep. Under Executive Order 12957, supplemented by the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, Washington maintains a permanent posture of economic warfare. But economic strangulation is not regime collapse. On Thursday, the IRGC targeted oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, leaving tankers on fire and hit by naval mines, as reported by NPR. The International Monetary Fund projects that regional economies like Iraq, Kuwait, and Qatar will experience economic contractions of around 16% this year, while Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are in recession.

This brings us to the ghost at the table: the Iraq War. The shared mechanism between that protracted quagmire and the current fantasy in Jerusalem and Washington is the attempt to achieve regime change through large-scale military intervention followed by the subsequent struggle to maintain control over a hostile population. In 2003, a coalition toppled a government and discovered that the absence of a regime is not the presence of peace. It is an invitation to an insurgency. The strongest opposing case argues that precision airpower, bunker-busters, and modern cyber capabilities render historical comparisons obsolete, allowing a modern state to decapitate a hostile government from the clouds without setting foot in the dust. This is the technocratic hubris that has failed every Secretary of Defense who ever trusted a PowerPoint slide. Air superiority does not administer sewage systems, police city blocks, or govern sixty million sullen citizens in a mountainous redoubt.

The recurring illusion of cheap victory

We have seen this script before. The Libyan Civil War demonstrated how a coordinated international air campaign can facilitate the ousting of a regime, only to leave behind an archipelago of armed militias and enduring political instability. The Islamic State campaign showed that targeted strikes can degrade an entity's infrastructure, but they do not rebuild a functional state.

To believe that a post-midterm bombing campaign will neatly extinguish forty-seven years of ideological statecraft in Tehran without entangling American forces in a multi-year regional morass requires a deliberate amnesia. Mahdi Mohammadi, an adviser to Gen. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, warned that while Washington may want to keep it short, they will not allow it. The war will continue longer and across a wider geography than the enemy calculates. When security chiefs like Mohsen Rezaei threaten to target U.S.-linked data centers, AI facilities in the Gulf, and subsea communications cables, we are no longer talking about a surgical correction. We are talking about severing the nervous system of the global economy to settle a border dispute.

The professionals in the room know that air campaigns do not legislate new governments into existence, and that an ally's electoral panic is a poor blueprint for American grand strategy. If Washington proceeds with a post-midterm intervention to satisfy Jerusalem's domestic timetable, it will discover that destroying a regime is the easy part. Surviving the chaos you inherit is where empires break their teeth.

Netanyahu chases Tehran regime change into a familiar quagmire

The calculus of capitals under pressure

The cost of treating escalation as theater

The recurring illusion of cheap victory

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