By Steven Myers, Opinion Contributor

This week may mark the beginning of the end for Iran’s current regime. Not because diplomacy has finally succeeded—but because it has definitively failed.

For more than four decades, negotiations with Tehran have followed a predictable script: delay, deflection, and tactical concession without structural change. There is little evidence this latest round will be different. At the same time, the United States has materially increased its military posture in the region. That is not a signal of patience. It is a signal of preparation.

At this point, the issue is no longer whether pressure will escalate. It is whether the United States is prepared to follow through on what it has already set in motion.

For President Donald Trump, the stakes are not abstract. They are central to his credibility—both internationally and domestically. Having framed Iran as an existential threat and committed to preventing it from achieving nuclear capability, he cannot now accept an outcome that leaves the regime intact, emboldened, or strategically advantaged.

That reality defines a set of objectives that are not negotiable.

First, the Strait of Hormuz must remain open to global commerce and closed as a coercive lever. Allowing Iran to control or disrupt one of the world’s most critical energy corridors would represent a strategic failure with immediate global consequences.

Second, Iran’s enriched uranium stockpiles must be located and neutralized. Containment is no longer sufficient. The risk of dispersal, concealment, or rapid weaponization leaves little margin for half-measures.

Third, the operational capacity of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) must be decisively degraded. The IRGC is not simply a military force; it is the regime’s central instrument of control and regional projection. As long as it remains intact, meaningful change inside Iran remains unlikely.

Finally, the trajectory must lead to regime change—not necessarily through occupation or external imposition, but through the systematic erosion of the structures that sustain the current leadership.

These objectives are ambitious. They are also, given the current strategic posture, unavoidable.

Critics will argue that diplomacy remains the only viable path. European leaders and the United Nations will call for restraint. Domestic opposition will warn of escalation and unintended consequences. These reactions are predictable—but they rest on an assumption that has not held for decades: that diplomacy alone can constrain a regime that has consistently used negotiation as a tool of delay.

The historical record suggests otherwise. Diplomatic engagement has coincided with the steady expansion of Iran’s missile capabilities, proxy networks, and nuclear infrastructure. The 2015 nuclear agreement, while intended to limit Iran’s nuclear ambitions, arguably provided the regime with time and resources to strengthen its broader strategic position.

At some point, strategy shifts from managing a problem to resolving it. That point may have arrived.

None of this implies a clean outcome. Any sustained effort to dismantle Iran’s current power structure will be volatile, contested, and potentially prolonged. There will be economic disruption, regional instability, and significant political backlash.

But the alternative—allowing Iran to retain nuclear capability, regional leverage, and control over critical global chokepoints—carries its own long-term costs.

The United States has now crossed a threshold where partial measures are unlikely to succeed. The credibility of its commitments, and of the president who made them, is directly tied to the outcome.

If those commitments are to mean anything, the coming phase will not be incremental. It will be decisive.

And if it is decisive, it may well mark the end of the current Iranian regime—and the beginning of a very different strategic landscape in the Middle East.

Author Bio

Steven Myers is a two-time Air Force veteran, pilot, and entrepreneur. He served three terms on the U.S. Department of State Advisory Committee on International Economic Policy under two secretaries of state. He was the first American since Charles Lindbergh to pilot an aircraft into Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula following the Cold War and later formed one of the first post-Soviet joint ventures. He is the author of Cross Winds: Adventure and Entrepreneurship in the Russian Far East.