What Will Iran Do Next?

July 1, 2025

Tags: Iran, Qasem Soleimani
Posted in: Democracy

The world now knows Trump’s initial play. But what of Iran’s next move? Here history suggests a course forward, which, if history is indeed our guide, says diplomacy is the endgame. What matters most to Iran is regime survival and some form of diplomacy is the only path.

Look back at the previous time the United States “bombed Iran,” the assassination on January 3, 2020 of Qassem Soleimani, the powerful Iranian major general and the head of the Quds Force, in a U.S. drone strike near Baghdad International Airport in Iraq. Soleimani was an almost mythical figure in Iran; when I visited there prior to his death, I saw his face painted on massive wall murals next to the religious leaders of the country. Soleimani was in charge of Iran’s overseas militia and terrorist operations, and directed the Shia resistance to the U.S. occupation of Iraq. He quite literally had American blood on his hands and through his charisma and tactical skills, played a critical role in Iran’s regional reach. The U.S. killing him so overtly — like a mafia hit, everyone was intended to know who did it — was expected to set off a massive and global retaliation by Iran. President Trump, then in his first term, was accused of starting World War III (#WWIII was trending on Twitter) and kicking off a new cycle of violence against America forces in the region. Sleeper cells would be activated and a new front in the Iraq War was said to be imminent. Sound familiar?

Instead, despite much saber rattling — Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei vowed “harsh revenge”– Iran’s response was tepid. A few days after the assassination, Iran launched “Operation Martyr Soleimani,” sending all of 16 missiles against U.S. bases in Iraq, including at al-Asad airbase and Erbil. No Americans were killed. Sound familiar?

Then-Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif tweeted Iran was finished fighting and was not actively pursuing further escalation. Trump undertook no immediate counter-attack, and in a speech spoke only of further economic sanctions alongside some vague thoughts on future agreements. The two countries’ actions add up to a collective “I’m done if you’re done.”

Iranian leaders know theirs is a semi-developed nation, unlike Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, and Iraq (and Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos before them.) It does not need to be invaded or occupied, it can be effectively destroyed as a industrialized nation from the air, as the Israeli’s and U.S. are demonstrating. As only a regional power, it suffers from a massive technological disadvantage in any conflict the U.S., a nation perhaps sadly, now long past the calculations of “kill a few Americans and watch them run” that drove it from Somalia in 1993 after “Black Hawk Down,” or out of Lebanon after the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks by Iranian-proxy Hezbollah. Trump’s America will take a punch to throw back two.

America’s lack of dependence on Persian Gulf oil means 2025 is not 1991. There are threats by Tehran to close the Straits of Hormuz. But Iran needs the oil to flow more than the U.S. does (and in Washington’s current calculus, who cares about Europe’s and China’s needs.) Iran under sanctions is near totally dependent on what oil it can export, Tehran’s biggest source of external income. Oil requires massive infrastructure, all of which can be bombed and most of which has so far been untouched by Israel and America. Iran’s military operates in large part out of fixed sites. Its navy is small and its bases can be destroyed from the air, its harbors mined. The Iranian military is ranked globally below Indonesia. Iran knows it will never find itself in a fair fight, especially stripped as it is now of its nascent nuclear threat. That has changed everything.

Iran’s government meanwhile is a tense coalition of elected civilians, unelected military, and theocrats. They face an almost schizophrenic population, happy to chant Death to America but equally open to the idea, albeit on more liberal terms than most American presidents, Republican and Democrat, have been willing to offer, of finding a way out from under sanctions that would open them to the world.

Iran 2025 understands its limits. Despite more saber rattling — Iranian Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh warned recently “all U.S. bases are within our reach and we will boldly target them” — think about the provocations Iran has endured without significant escalation: U.S. troops landing in-country in a failed hostage rescue in 1980, U.S. support for Iraq using weapons of mass destruction and the provision of intelligence which allowed the Iraqis to rain missiles on Iranian cities in 1980s, the U.S. shooting down an Iranian civilian aircraft, killing some 300 innocents in 1988, U.S. invading and occupying Iran’s eastern border (Iraq 2003) and western approaches (Afghanistan 2001).

In 2003, when Iran reached out diplomatically following initial American military successes in the War on Terror, George W. Bush flippantly declared them part of an Axis of Evil. U.S. forces then raided an Iranian diplomatic office in Iraq and arrested several staffers in 2007. The U.S. has kept crippling economic sanctions in place for decades, helped execute the Stuxnet cyberattack in 2010 destroying many of Iranian nuclear centrifuges, and another 2019 cyberattack, never mind what nasty things the Israelis have done covertly on our behalf. Nothing led to a wider war. Soleimani died in context.

Iraq, politically and geographically in the middle, has every reason to help calm things down. Look what it has not done so far in response to Israel dismantling its nuclear program piece by piece: no dirty bomb on Tel Aviv, no terror acts against Israel or the U.S. anywhere in the world, no known major cyber attacks, no activation of the Houthis to attack shipping in the Gulf, no proxy attacks against vulnerable American enclaves in Iraq. The lobbing of missiles into Israeli cities and Qatar is by no means inconsequential, but it is within the accepted (and expected) boundaries of tit-for-tat. No one could have expected Iran to do nothing and history would not support that. Limited retaliation is an expected part of the calculus of the Israeli and America strikes; the New York Times even reported Iran “coordinated the attacks on the American air base in Qatar with Qatari officials and gave advanced notice that attacks were coming to minimize casualties.”

What will happen next is likely up to Trump, and Israel. But what will happen next next is in Tehran’s hands. Their goal is regime survival first of all, some sort of modus vivendi with Israel and the West in second place. The decades long strategy to match Israel as a regional nuclear power has failed. What was bombed once by Israel and the U.S. can be bombed again. History suggests Iran will absorb the next blow, and seek a diplomatic solution to assure its own survival. Washington seems to agree; “We’re not at war with Iran,” Vice President J.D. Vance said. “We’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program.” This is a watershed moment in the history of the Middle East.

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