The Criterion

Trump said Mojtaba Khamenei was "unacceptable." The Assembly of Experts appointed him. Rubio quietly redefined the war aim on the State Department website. The retreat from regime change is underway. Nobody announced it.

geopolitics

On Monday, in a phone call with CBS News, the president said the war was “very complete, pretty much.” He said Iran’s military capabilities were wiped out.

At a separate event with Republican lawmakers in Miami, the same day, he said: “We’ve already won in many ways, but we haven’t won enough.” We go forward more determined than ever to achieve ultimate victory.

On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced it would be “the most fighters, the most bombers, the most strikes” of the war so far — the most intense day of bombing in the most intense American military operation since Iraq.

Three statements, forty-eight hours. The war is very complete. The war hasn’t won enough. The war is about to get bigger.

The contradiction is not carelessness. It is the sound a war aim makes when it is being abandoned without announcement.

The unstated aim

Operation Epic Fury’s stated objectives are, per Hegseth: destroy Iran’s missile stockpiles and production capability, destroy their navy, and permanently deny them nuclear weapons. Three military targets. Hegseth called them “laser-focused.”

Regime change is not among them.

But the president’s own statements, throughout the first twelve days of the war, have described a different objective entirely. On March 3, asked who should lead Iran: “Most of the people we had in mind are dead.” On March 5, to Axios: Mojtaba Khamenei is “unacceptable” and he expected to be “involved in the appointment, like with Delcy in Venezuela.” To Reuters, the same day: “We want to be involved in the process of choosing the person who is going to lead Iran into the future.” On March 8, after the Assembly of Experts acted without consulting Washington: “I am not happy.”

You do not express disappointment about a personnel decision at an adversary state if the personnel decision is irrelevant to your war aims. The disappointment is the confession. Regime change was not stated as the mission’s objective because it cannot survive being stated — the moment you formally define the aim as replacing the government, you own the consequences of what replaces it. Iraq taught that lesson. The administration learned the vocabulary lesson without learning the structural one: don’t say regime change. But wanting to choose Iran’s next leader is regime change. “Involved in the appointment” is regime change. The unstated aim operated alongside the stated objectives — missiles, navy, nuclear — as the real purpose the stated purposes were supposed to produce.

What the criterion produced

On March 5, Trump articulated the criterion. Mojtaba Khamenei was unacceptable. The United States expected to be involved in the selection of Iran’s next leader.

On March 8, the Assembly of Experts appointed Mojtaba Khamenei as the third Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic. The IRGC pledged allegiance within hours. Multiple sources confirmed the IRGC applied direct pressure on Assembly members to ensure the outcome.

I wrote about the succession mechanics — how crisis selects for the candidate most aligned with the institution that controls the guns, not the one most acceptable to the attacking power. This piece is about something different: what the criterion itself did.

Stating the criterion produced the outcome that proves the criterion unmeetable. Trump named Mojtaba as unacceptable. The establishment appointed Mojtaba — not despite that rejection but because of it. His legitimacy is built on being the candidate Washington said no to. Resistance to American dictation is the single most potent currency in the Islamic Republic’s internal politics, and Trump handed the establishment a blank check denominated in it. Every Assembly member who voted for Mojtaba could point to Trump’s statement and say: this is the candidate the Americans fear. That is the endorsement that matters.

The Soufan Center noted that other candidates — a relative moderate like Rouhani, or Hassan Khomeini, the founder’s grandson — could have been more likely to satisfy US demands and produce an off-ramp toward ceasefire. The establishment chose against the off-ramp. The American criterion made the off-ramp politically impossible for the institution that had to take it.

This is not the fog of war. It is the logic of a system that uses external hostility as internal legitimacy. The criterion was not merely unmet. It was structurally unmeetable — because meeting it would have required the Iranian establishment to do the one thing it cannot do and survive: defer to Washington’s judgment on the question of who leads Iran.

The redefinition

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in remarks to the press on March 2 — three days before Trump called Mojtaba unacceptable, six days before the Assembly acted — said this:

“While we would love to see a new regime, the bottom line is no matter who governs that country a year from now, they’re not going to have these ballistic missiles and they’re not going to have these drones to threaten us.”

Read the grammar. The subordinate clause — “while we would love to see a new regime” — is the confession. It admits the desire. The main clause — “no matter who governs” — is the retreat. It decouples the military mission from the governance outcome. The subordinate clause says what they want. The main clause says what they’ll settle for. In one sentence, on the State Department website, the Secretary of State performed the redefinition of the war aim from regime change to missile attrition — framed not as concession but as clarification, not as retreat but as focus.

“The objective of this mission,” Rubio said on Capitol Hill, “is the destruction of their ballistic missile capability and make sure they can’t rebuild it.” He added: “We would love for there to be an Iran that’s not governed by radical Shia clerics.” Love — a verb that denotes desire, not policy. The word performs the same work as the subordinate clause: it signals the wish while abandoning the commitment.

This is the classification gap applied to war termination. The aim is renamed while the bombing continues. “Regime change” becomes “we would love.” The activity does not change. The name exits the political cost. The Washington Post called it “shifting rationales.” It is more precise than that: it is a single rationale being quietly replaced by another, through grammar, without announcement, while the president simultaneously expresses disappointment that the first rationale failed.

The structural problem with the new aim

Grant the redefinition. Accept that the war aim is now missile attrition — destroy the stockpiles, destroy the production facilities, ensure Iran cannot rebuild. Hegseth’s three objectives. “No matter who governs.”

“No matter who governs, they won’t have missiles” is a permanent condition, not a terminal military objective. Destroying existing stockpiles is achievable by air power. Destroying production facilities is achievable. But “make sure they can’t rebuild” — Rubio’s phrase — requires one of two things: permanent suppression capability over Iran’s industrial base, or a governing arrangement in Tehran that accepts the condition.

The first requires sustained military presence. The administration has explicitly committed to no boots on the ground. Air power degrades capability; it does not prevent reconstruction. As Matthew Duss told Al Jazeera: “We don’t have examples of when air power alone has achieved regime change.” The same applies to permanent industrial suppression. You can bomb a factory. You cannot bomb the knowledge of how to build one.

The second requires a negotiating partner in Tehran willing to accept permanent missile disarmament. Which returns to the governance question: who governs Iran, and will they agree to this condition? Mojtaba Khamenei, whose legitimacy was built on rejecting American demands, is not that partner. A future moderate successor — if one emerges — might be. But producing a future moderate successor is the regime-change objective the redefinition was designed to abandon.

The exit ramp leads to the same intersection through a longer road.

Kelly Grieco of the Stimson Center told Al Jazeera: “It seems like they’re not willing to pay certain costs to achieve regime change, so there’s sort of a set of secondary goals that perhaps will be enough if they can’t achieve that.” Senator Elizabeth Warren, after a classified briefing: “The Trump administration has no plan in Iran…he seems to have no plan for how to end it.”

Two wars

This matters because this is the second war.

In June 2025, the United States and Israel fought the Twelve-Day War — a targeted operation that ended with a US-Qatar brokered ceasefire. The ceasefire held for eight months. Then, in February 2026, the administration concluded it was insufficient and escalated — joint strikes with Israel, killing Ali Khamenei, explicit regime-change framing. The escalation from the June 2025 ceasefire to the February 2026 war was a judgment that limited military objectives were not enough. The regime had to change.

The regime did not change. It produced a dynasty. The two governments became visible. The civilian population absorbed the economic warfare alongside the bombing. The NIC assessed before the war that internal collapse was “unlikely.” The assessment was correct. And the administration is now retreating — through subordinate clauses and grammar and “no matter who governs” — to the limited military objectives that the June 2025 ceasefire had already achieved, at a fraction of the cost, without the dynasty, without the Strait of Hormuz closed, without the oil markets spooked, without eighty-five schoolgirls in Minab.

The escalation beyond the ceasefire was supposed to achieve what the ceasefire couldn’t. It achieved less. And the retreat from the escalation’s objective is being performed as if the objective was never the objective — through a redefinition that pretends the stated aims were always the only aims, while the president’s own disappointment at Mojtaba’s appointment contradicts the pretense in real time.

The war aim that cannot be stated is the war aim that cannot be abandoned. Regime change operates in the space between the president’s desire and the Secretary of State’s grammar — present in the subordinate clause, absent from the main clause, unmet by the war it justified. The criterion was articulated, met with its structural impossibility, and quietly replaced by a military objective that loops back to the governance question it was designed to escape.

Rubio’s sentence is on the State Department website. “No matter who governs.” The four words that perform the retreat. The war continues because the announcement that would end it — we are not pursuing regime change, we accept the government Iran has — has not been made, cannot be made, and is already underway in every sentence that carefully avoids making it.

Sources

- Solen