The old "Death to America" order is over in Iran, but what replaces it?
For years, the West treated Iran’s regime like a permanent fact of life. A menace, yes. A sponsor of terror, yes. A nuclear aspirant, obviously. But also somehow untouchable. The mullahs could fund proxies, menace shipping lanes, arm militias, target civilians, destabilize neighbors, and still be discussed in the soft, bloodless language of “containment,” “de-escalation,” and “regional sensitivities.”
Now that illusion appears to be breaking all at once.
The Trump administration is making a very blunt case: Iran’s military capacity is being shattered, its proxies are weakened, its leadership is living on borrowed time, and the old bipartisan habits of pretending this regime could be managed are collapsing under the weight of events.
Iran’s own actions have demonstrated the truth of this.
“The Iranian terrorist regime has attacked 12 different countries and continues to deliberately target civilians throughout the Middle East,” said Adm. Brad Cooper, CENTCOM commander this morning in a statement. “Last night, Iranian forces fired seven attack drones at civilian, residential neighborhoods in Bahrain. This is unacceptable and will not go unanswered. We will continue working with regional partners to address this threat to innocent people across the region.”
According to the latest word from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, President Donald Trump only expects the conflict to last four to six weeks.
President Trump told CNN on Friday that he isn’t worried about establishing Iran as a democracy, either.
“Iran is not the same country it was a week ago,” President Trump told CNN during a telephone interview. “A week ago they were powerful, and now they’ve been indeed neutered.”
Replacing Iran’s erstwhile leadership is “gonna work very easily,” Trump told CNN. “It’s going to work like did in Venezuela. We have a wonderful leader there. She’s doing a fantastic job. And it’s going to work Iike in Venezuela.”
“I don’t mind religious leaders,” Trump added. “I deal with a lot of religious leaders and they are fantastic,” he said. “I’m saying there has to be a leader that’s going be fair and just. Do a great job. Treat the United States and Israel well, and treat the other countries in the Middle East — they’re all our partners.”
“And I became very friendly with all those countries,” Trump added. “That’s why they’re all fighting for us. Before I got involved, we didn’t even speak to UAE and Saudi Arabia. You know, Biden shut out. Biden and Obama shut Saudi Arabia, UAE Qatar, he shut them all out. They were all going to go to China, and I got involved in very short period of time that became my friends.”
“It’ll be short term time,” Trump predicted of the conflict. “It’ll go way down very quickly. We’ve knocked their Navy because, you know, when you knock out the Navy, they can’t do what they wanted to be able to do. The Navy is almost, we just hit about the 25 mark. Can you imagine that? Big ones — 25 ships are down.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also told media outlets that President Trump expects “unconditional surrender” from Iran.
“Well, what President Trump means when he says unconditional surrender is when he, as commander in chief of the United States military and the leader of the free world, determines that Iran can no longer pose a threat to the United States of America, to our troops, or to our personnel in the Middle East,” Leavitt said on Friday morning. “That is the ultimate goal of Operation Epic Fury — to annihilate their military capability, to take out their ballistic missile threat, which we have largely done in just six days, and of course to ensure they can never obtain a nuclear weapon.”
“It is also about significantly weakening their proxies in the region that have killed and maimed hundreds of Americans over the years,” she said. “We’ve seen the Houthis and Hezbollah hardly put up a fight over the past six days, and we are already well on our way to achieving the objectives of this operation.”
“When the president determines that Iran no longer poses that threat, that’s when that unconditional surrender will take place,” she reiterated. “As for the next leader of Iran, the president has said that it is in the best interest of the United States to have a leader who is no longer chanting ‘Death to America,’ who is no longer conspiring behind our backs and lying to the American people and to our government about proliferating nuclear weapons — which Iran has been doing for decades.”
“That is unacceptable to the president, and that is why he decided to launch this operation,” she concluded blithely.
Unconditional surrender might be short in coming.
President Trump told POLITICO on Tuesday that Iran was already running out of rocket launchers and other crucial elements vital to continued warfare.
“They’re running out and they’re running out of areas to shoot them, because they’re being decimated,” Trump said. “They’re running out of launchers.”
“The defense companies are on a rapid tear to build the various things we need,” he added. “They’re under emergency orders. We’re making it fast. But we have unlimited, as stupid as [former President Joe] Biden was, he didn’t use it.”
Conservative and independent media outlets are mixed.
Some are heralding “Trump’s big bet on Operation Epic Fury: It’s hard to underestimate the importance of removing the serious nuclear threat against the West that Iran has posed for decades, ” as a shrewd geopolitical move.
Others aren’t as sure. But even some countries who were initially reluctant to join the fight have come, in time, to cooperate with U.S. forces.
But not everyone is a fan. Trump’s political opponents in the U.S. are, naturally, opposed.
“On Iran, Democrats Offer Only Partisanship,” lamented Mark Penn and Andrew Stein for the Wall Street Journal on March 3, 2026. “Most oppose the war effort and even seem to hope for failure.”
“When Barack Obama spent eight months on a campaign against Libya, Mr. Schumer and his fellow partisans took a pass and didn’t demand that Mr. Obama seek authorization from Congress. The Democrats know that Mr. Trump has observed all the requirements of the War Powers Act of 1973, which gives him 60 days as long as he delivers regular reports to Congress. Democrats could have given the president tentative support for those 60 days and presented a united American front to the world.”
“Are they concerned about the cost, or about the risk of international entanglements?” they added. “The same Democrats supported sending nearly $200 billion to Ukraine for a war that has far less direct impact on America.”
These comments allude to something that underpins the whole crisis: Iran’s regime was never merely a local problem. It was a regional arsonist with global implications. It threatened shipping, armed militias, targeted civilians, funded terror, lied about nuclear ambitions, and treated “Death to America” not as rhetoric but as mission statement. The fantasy that such a regime could simply be negotiated into good behavior was always exactly that — a fantasy.
If Trump is right, then what we are witnessing is not just another Middle East flare-up. It is the collapse of a very old bluff. The regime projected power by convincing the world it was too dangerous to confront directly. But a regime that cannot defend its own launchers, its own navy, its own proxy network, or its own prestige is no longer imposing inevitability on the region. It is revealing fragility.
That does not mean what comes next will be simple. It rarely is. Regimes can be weaker than they appear right up until the moment they suddenly fall, and replacement is always harder than demolition. But it does mean something important: the old equilibrium was not stable, moral, or sustainable.
(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)