February 28, 2026
After the largest buildup of U.S. warships and aircraft in the Middle East in decades, American and Israeli military forces launched a massive assault on Iran on Feb. 28, 2026.
After the largest buildup of U.S. warships and aircraft in the Middle East in decades, American and Israeli military forces launched a massive assault on Iran on Feb. 28, 2026.
President Donald Trump has called
the attacks “major combat operations” and has urged regime change in Tehran.
Iranian media reported Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in the
strikes.
Widespread attacks have been reported across Iran, following weeks of U.S. military buildup in the region. What does the scale of the attacks tell you?
I think that Trump and his administration are going for regime change with these massive strikes and with all the ships and some troops in the area. I think there will probably be a couple more days’ worth of strikes. They’ll start off with the time-honored strategy of attacking what’s known as command and control, the nerve centers for controlling Iran’s military. From media reporting, we already know that the residence of Khamenei was attacked.
What is the U.S. strategic end game here?
Regime change is going to be difficult. We heard Trump today call for the Iranian people to bring the government down. In the first place, that’s difficult. It’s hard for people with no arms in their hands to bring down a very tightly controlled regime that has a lot of arms.
The second point is that U.S. history in that area of the world is not good with this. You may recall that during the Gulf War of 1990-1991, the U.S. basically encouraged the Iraqi people to rise up, and then made its own decision not to attack Baghdad, to stop short. And that has not been forgotten in Iraq or surrounding countries. I would be surprised if we saw a popular uprising in Iran that really had a chance of bringing the regime down.
Do you see the possibility of U.S. troops on the ground to bring about regime change?
I will stick my neck out here and say that’s not going to happen. I mean, there may be some small special forces sent in. That’ll be kept quiet for a while. But as far as large numbers of U.S. troops, no, I don’t think it’s going to happen.
Two reasons. First off, any president would feel that was extremely risky. Iran’s a big country with a big military. The risks you would be taking are large amounts of casualties, and you may not succeed in what you’re trying to do.
But Trump, in particular, despite the military strike against Iran and the one against Venezuela, is not a big fan of big military interventions and war. He’s a guy who will send in fighter planes and small special forces units, but not 10,000 or 20,000 troops.
And the reason for that is, throughout his career, he does well with a little bit of chaos. He doesn’t mind creating a little bit of chaos and figuring out a way to make a profit on the other side of that. War is too much chaos. It’s really hard to predict what the outcome is going to be, what all the ramifications are going to be. Throughout his first term and the first year of his second term, he has shown no inclination to send ground troops anywhere.
Speaking of President Trump, what are the risks he faces?
One risk is going on right now, which is that the Iranians may get lucky or smart and manage to attack a really good target and kill a lot of people, like something in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv or a U.S. military base.
The second risk is that the attacks don’t work, that the supreme leader and whoever else is considered the political leadership of Iran survives, and the U.S. winds up with egg on its face.
The third risk is that it works to a certain extent. You take out the top people, but then who steps into their shoes? I mean, go back and look at Venezuela. Most people would have thought that who was going to wind up winning at the end of that was the head of the opposition. But it wound up being the vice president of the old regime, Delcy Rodríguez.
I can see a similar scenario in Iran. The regime has enough depth to survive the death of several of its leaders. The thing to watch will be who winds up in the top jobs, hardliners or realists. But the only institution in Iran strong enough to succeed them is the army, the Revolutionary Guards in particular. Would that be an improvement for the U.S.? It depends on what their attitude was. The same attitude that the vice president of Venezuela has been taking, which is, “Look, this is a fact of life. We better negotiate with the Americans and figure out some way forward we can both live with.”
But these guys are pretty hardcore revolutionaries. I mean, Iran has been under revolutionary leadership for 47 years. All these guys are true believers. I don’t know if we’ll be able to work with them.
Any last thoughts?
I think the timing is interesting. If you go back to last year, Trump, after being in office a little and watching the situation between Israel and Gaza, was given an opening, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attacked Qatar.
A lot of conservative Mideast regimes, who didn’t have a huge problem with Israel, essentially said “That’s going too far.” And Trump was able to use that as an excuse. He was able to essentially say, “Okay, you’ve gone too far. You’re really taking risk with world peace. Everybody’s gonna sit at the table.”
I think the same thing’s happening here. I believe many countries would love to see regime change in Iran. But you can’t go into the country and say, “We don’t like the political leadership being elected. We’re going to get rid of them for you.” What often happens in that situation is people begin to rally around the flag. They begin to rally around the government when the bombs start falling.
But in the last few months, we’ve seen a huge human rights crackdown in Iran. We may never know the number of people the Iranian regime killed in the last few months, but 10,000 to 15,000 protesters seems a minimum.
That’s the excuse Trump can use. You can sell it to the Iranian people and say, “Look, they’re killing you in the streets. Forget about your problems with Israel and the U.S. and everything. They’re real, but you’re getting killed in the streets, and that’s why we’re intervening.” It’s a bit of a fig leaf.
Now, as I said earlier, the problem with this is if your next line is, “You know, we’re going to really soften this regime up with bombs; now it’s your time to go out in the streets and bring the regime down.” I may eat these words, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. The regime is just too strong for it to be brought down by bare hands.
Expect none of that restraint by Iran’s leaders following the latest U.S. and Israeli military operation currently playing out in the Gulf nation.
In the early hours of Feb. 28, 2026, hundreds of missiles struck multiple sites in Iran, including a compound housing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who Iranian state media later confirmed had died in the attack.
“Operation Epic Fury,” as the U.S. Department of Defense has called the strikes, follows months of U.S. military buildup in the region. But it also come after apparent diplomatic efforts, in the shape of a series of nuclear talks in Oman and Geneva aimed at a peaceful resolution.
Any such deal is surely now completely off the table. In scale and scope, the U.S. and Israel attack goes far beyond any previous strikes on the Gulf nation.
In response, Iran has said it will use “crushing” force. As an expert on Middle East affairs and a former senior official at the National Security Council during the first Trump administration, I believe the calculus both in Washington and more so in Tehran is very different from earlier confrontations: Iran’s leaders almost certainly see this as an existential threat given President Donald Trump’s statement and the military campaign already underway. And there appears to be no obvious off-ramp to avoid further escalation.
What we should expect now is a response from Tehran that utilizes all of its capabilities – even though they have been significantly degraded. And that should be a worry for all nations in the region and beyond.
The apparent aims of the US operation
It is important to note that we are in the early stages of this conflict – much is unknown.
As of Feb. 28, it is unclear who has been killed among Iran’s leadership and to what extent Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities have been degraded. The fact that ballistic missiles have been launched at regional states that host U.S. military bases suggests that, at a minimum, Iran’s military capabilities have not been entirely wiped out.
Iran fired over 600 missiles against Israel last June during their 12-day war, but media reporting and Iranian statements over the past month suggested that Iran managed to replenish some of its missile inventory, which it is now using.
Clearly Washington is intent on crippling Iran’s ballistic program, as it is that capability that allows Iran to threaten the region most directly. A sticking point in the negotiations in Geneva and Oman was U.S. officials’ insistence that both Iran’s ballistic missiles and its funneling of support to proxy groups in the region be on the table, along with the longstanding condition that Tehran ends all uranium enrichment. Tehran has long resisted attempts to have limits on its ballistic missiles as part of any negotiated nuclear deal given their importance in Iran’s national security doctrine.
This explains why some U.S. and Israeli strikes appear to be aimed at taking out Iran’s ballistic and cruise missile launch sites and production facilities and storage locations for such weapons.
With no nuclear weapon, Iran’s ballistic missiles have been the country’s go-to method for responding to any threat. And so far in the current conflict, they have been used on nations including the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain.
‘It will be yours to take’
But the Trump administration appears to have expanded its aims beyond removing Iran’s nuclear and non-nuclear military threat. The latest strikes have gone after leadership, too, taking out Khamenei alongside other key members of the regime.
It is clear that the U.S. administration hopes that regime change will follow Operation Epic Fury. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take,” Trump told Iranians via a video message recorded during the early hours of the attack.
Regime change carries risks for Trump
Signaling a regime change operation may encourage Iranians unhappy with decades of repressive rule and economic woes to continue where they left off in January – when hundreds of thousands took to the street to protest.
But it carries risks for the U.S. and its interests. Iran’s leaders will no longer feel constrained, as they did after the Soleimani assassination and the June 2025 conflict. On those occasions, Iran responded in a way that was not even proportionate to its losses – limited strikes on American military bases in the region.
Now the gloves are off, and each side will be trying to land a knockout blow. But what does that constitute? The U.S. administration appears to be set on regime change. Iran’s leadership will be looking for something that goes beyond its previous retaliatory strikes – and that likely means American deaths. That eventuality has been anticipated by Trump, who warned that there might be American casualties.
So why is Trump willing to risk that now? It is clear to me that despite talk of progress in the rounds of diplomatic talks, Trump has lost his patience with the process.
On Feb. 26, after the latest round of talks in Geneva, we didn’t hear much from the U.S. side. Trump’s calculus may have been that Iran wasn’t taking the hint – made clear by adding a second carrier strike group to the other warships and hundreds of fighter aircraft sent to the region over the past several weeks – that Tehran had no option other than agreeing to the U.S. demands.
What happens next
What we don’t know is whether the U.S. strategy is now to pause and see if an initial round of strikes has forced Iran to sue for peace – or whether the initial strikes are just a prelude to more to come.
For now, the diplomatic ship appears to have sailed. Trump seems to have no appetite for a deal now – he just wants Iran’s regime gone.
In order to do that, he has made a number of calculated gambles. First politically and legally: Trump did not go through Congress before ordering Operation Epic Fury. Unlike 23 years ago when President George W. Bush took the U.S. into Iraq, there is no war authorization giving the president cover.
Instead, White House lawyers must have assessed that Trump can carry out this operation under his Article 2 powers to act as commander in chief. Even so, the 1973 War Powers Act will mean the clock is now ticking. If the attacks are not concluded in 60 days, the administration will have to go back to Congress and say the operation is complete, or work with Congress for an authorization to use force or a formal declaration of war.
The second gamble is whether Iranians will heed his call to remove a regime that many have long wanted gone. Given the ferocity of the regime’s response to the protests in January, which resulted in the deaths of thousands of Iranians, are Iranians willing to face down Iran’s internal security forces and drive what remains of the regime from power?
Third, the U.S. administration has made a bet that the Iranian regime – even confronted with an existential threat – does not have the capability to drag the U.S. into a lengthy conflict to inflict massive casualties.
And this last point is crucial. Experts know Tehran has no nuclear bomb and only has a limited stockpile of drones and cruise and ballistic missiles.
But it can lean on unconventional capabilities. Terrorism is a real concern – either through the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, which coordinates Iran’s unconventional warfare, or through its partnership with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Or actors like the Houthis in Yemen or Shia militias in Iraq may seek to conduct attacks against U.S. interests in solidarity with Iran or directed to do so by the regime.
A mass casualty event may put political pressure on Trump, but I cannot see it leading to U.S. boots on ground in Iran. The American public doesn’t have the appetite for such an eventuality, and that would necessitate Trump gaining Congressional approval, which for now has not yet materialized.
No one has a crystal ball, and it is early in an operation that will likely go on for days, if not longer. But one thing is clear: Iran’s regime is facing an existential threat. Do not expect it to show restraint.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader for 36 years, has been killed in US and Israeli airstrikes on his country, Iranian state media reported.
As one of Iran’s longest-serving leaders, Khamenei was almost as ubiquitous in Iranian society as his predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who founded the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979.
And despite the fact Khomeini authored the Iranian Revolution, some say Khamenei was actually the most powerful leader modern Iran has had.
In more than three decades as supreme leader, Khamenei amassed unprecedented power over domestic politics and cracked down ever more harshly on internal dissent. In recent years, he prioritised his survival – and that of his regime – above all else. His government brutally put down a popular uprising in December 2025–January 2026 that killed thousands.
Ultimately, though, Khamenei will not be remembered by most Iranians as a strong leader. Nor will he be revered. Instead, his legacy will be the profound weakness his regime brought the Islamic Republic on all fronts.
Khamenei’s rise through the ranks
Khamenei was born in the city of Marshad in northeastern Iran in 1939. As a boy, he began to form his political and religious world view by studying at Islamic seminaries in Najaf and Qom. At 13, he started to embrace ideas relating to revolutionary Islam. These included the teachings of cleric Navab Safavi, who often called for political violence against the rule of the shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
Khamenei met Khomeini in 1958 and immediately embraced his philosophy, often referred to as “Khomeinism”.
This world view was informed by anti-colonial sentiment, Shia Islam and elements of social engineering through state planning, particularly when it came to preserving a “just” Islamic society. Khomeinism stipulates that a system of earthly laws alone cannot create a just society – Iran must draw its legitimacy from “God Almighty”.
The concept of velayat-e faqih, also known as guardianship of the jurist, is central to Khomeinism. It dictates that the supreme leader should be endowed with “all the authorities that the Prophet and infallible Imams were entitled”.
Essentially, this means Iran was to be ruled by a single scholar of Shia Islam. This is where Khomeini, and later Khamenei, would draw their sweeping power and control.
From 1962, Khamenei began almost two decades of revolutionary activity against Pahlavi (the shah) on behalf of Khomeini, who was exiled in 1964. Khamenei was arrested by the shah’s secret police in 1971 and tortured, according to his memoirs.
When the shah was overthrown in the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Khomeini returned from exile to become the new supreme leader.
Khamenei was selected to join the Revolutionary Council, which ruled alongside the provisional government. He then became deputy defence minister and assisted in organising the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). This military institution – initially created to protect the revolution and supreme leader – would become one of the most powerful political forces in Iran.
After surviving an assassination attempt in 1981, Khamenei was elected president of Iran in 1982 and again in 1985. He held the presidency during the majority of the Iran–Iraq war – a conflict that devastated both countries in both human and economic cost.
Although subordinate to the supreme leader, Khamenei wielded significant power compared to later presidents, given the revolution was still very young and the Iraq war posed a great threat to the regime. But he remained in lock-step with Khomeini’s wishes. He also managed to build a close relationship with the IRGC that would go far beyond his presidency.
A surprising choice for supreme leader
Khomeini died in June 1989 after a period of deteriorating health, with no clear successor.
Khomeini had initially supported Grand Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri to be his successor. However, Montazeri had become increasingly critical of the supreme leader’s authority and human rights violations in the country. He resigned in 1988 and was put under house arrest until his death in 2009.
Khamenei had the political credentials to lead. He was also a steadfast support of Khomeinism. However, he was seen a surprising choice for supreme leader when he was elected by the Assembly of Experts, a group of Islamic clerics.
In fact, his appointment sparked a significant amount of controversy and criticism. Some Islamic scholars believed he lacked the clerical rank of grand ayatollah, which was required under the constitution to ascend to the position. These critics believed the Iranian people would not respect the word of “a mere human being” without a proper connection to God.
A referendum was held in July 1989 to change the constitution to allow for a supreme leader who has shown “Islamic scholarship”. It passed overwhelmingly and Khamenei became an ayatollah.
Khamenei’s position had been consolidated on paper, but despite being president since 1982, he did not enjoy the same popularity as Khomeini within both the clerical elite and general public.
The constitutional amendments, however, had given Khamenei significantly more power to intervene in political affairs. In fact, he had far more power as supreme leader than Khomeini ever enjoyed.
This included the ability to determine general policies, appoint and dismiss members of the Council of Guardians, and order public referendums. He also had enough power to silence dissent with relative ease.
Consolidating power over the decades
Khamenei worked with his presidents to varying degrees, though he exercised his power to undermine legislation when he disagreed with it.
For example, he largely backed the economic agenda of President Hashemi Rafsanjani (who served from 1989 to 1997), but he often stood in the way of Mohammad Khatami (1997–2005) and Hassan Rouhani (2013–21). Both had attempted to reform Iran’s political system and foster a better relationship with the West.
Khamenei’s most famous intervention in domestic politics occurred after the first term of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005–13). After Ahmadinejad claimed victory in the disputed 2009 presidential election, thousands of Iranians took to the streets in one of the largest protest movements since the revolution. Khamenei backed the election result and cracked down harshly on the protesters. Dozens were killed (perhaps more), while thousands were arbitrarily arrested.
Khamenei later clashed with Ahmadinejad and warned him against seeking the presidency again in 2017. Ahmadinejad defied him, but was later barred from running.
After the death of hardline President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash in 2024, Khameini continued his manoeuvring behind the scenes. After the reformist Masoud Pezeshkian won the presidency, Khameini immediately blocked him from negotiating with the United States over sanctions relief and used his influence to thwart his economic reform agenda.
And when protests again broke out at the end of 2025 over the struggling economy, Khamenei again ordered them to be crushed by any means necessary.
A tarnished legacy
Thanks to the powers vested in him in the constitution, Khamenei also had extraordinary control over Iran’s foreign policy.
Like his mentor, Khomeini, he staunchly supported the regime’s resistance to what it considered “Western imperialism”. He was also a key architect of Iran’s regional proxy strategy, funding militant groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and others to carry out Iran’s military objectives.
Khamenei had, at times, been amenable to cooperation with the West – namely negotiating with the US over Iran’s nuclear enrichment program.
During the first Trump administration, however, Khamenei returned to a staunchly anti-Western posture. His government railed against Trump’s scuttling of the 2015 nuclear deal, the reimposed economic sanctions on Iran’s energy sector and the assassination of the head of the IRGC’s Quds force, Qassem Soleimani.
After Trump returned to office in 2025, Iran grew even weaker. And Khamenei’s anti-Western posture began to look increasingly hollow. Iran’s defeat in the 12-day war with Israel in 2025 shredded whatever legitimacy his regime had left.
In the months that followed, Khamenei ruled over a population increasingly resentful of the Iranian political system and its leadership. In the 2025–26 protests, some openly chanted for Khamenei’s death.
When Khomenei died in 1989, his state funeral was attended by millions. Mourners pulled him out of his coffin and scrambled for sacred mementos.
Though Khameini served longer, Iranians will likely not show the same grief for him.
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