President Trump's second term has been defined by a catastrophic misreading of his 2024 electoral comeback. He treated the victory as a blank check to pursue his personal vision of the national interest, often sidelining Congress and ignoring the counsel of his own national security team. He listened only to advisors who echoed his own instincts, a pattern that led directly to the current crisis in Iran.
The swift, casualty-free capture of Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro convinced Trump that a similar operation could succeed against Tehran. He overlooked the stark reality that Iran's military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are far more capable than Venezuela's forces. The presence of a restive civilian opposition in Iran seemed to him a guarantee of success—he needed only to call on them to rise up, as they had during the Obama era. Unlike his predecessor, he promised, America would respond with military might. "Help is on its way," he declared.
But there was no real coordination between the anticipated uprising, the U.S. bombing campaign, and the related military and information operations. The result was a humanitarian catastrophe: tens of thousands of unarmed protesters were killed by the regime while the United States stood by. This debacle has severely damaged American credibility and made future cooperation with the Iranian people far more difficult.
The Democratic takeover in last week's midterms was largely a referendum on Trump's erratic handling of the Iran war and its ripple effects on domestic energy prices and inflation. Voters who remembered his promises of "no new wars" and his vocal opposition to "endless wars" in the Middle East were especially angered by his "war of choice."
Now, the knee-jerk reaction among many Democrats and some Republicans is to demand an immediate end to the conflict. But a hasty, humiliating withdrawal—which is how America's enemies would interpret it—risks compounding Trump's recklessness. The manner in which the Iran hostilities conclude is of critical importance.
If the United States simply walks away, leaving the aggressive Islamist regime in power with its nuclear ambitions unchecked, its brutal oppression of its people, and its threats to neighbors and the international order, then Trump or his successor will inevitably face the same crisis again. A smarter approach, as some analysts suggest, is for Democrats to use the political interregnum to approach Trump with a cooperative, bipartisan plan to end the conflict by ending the regime that is its root cause.
Such a plan would involve reassuring and coordinating with the Iranian opposition and with European and Middle Eastern allies. It would rely on intensified economic pressure and integrated special operations—information warfare, support for a mass civilian uprising, and selective arming of opposition elements—with a minimum of kinetic action. A unified president and Congress pursuing peaceful regime change could trigger mass defections and the regime's collapse.
This bipartisan path would not only remove a major obstacle to global energy flows through the Strait of Hormuz, easing inflation, but also set a precedent for presidential-congressional cooperation on other issues. It would demonstrate the self-correcting nature of democracy, as the voices of the people force their leaders to work together. It would also undercut the smugness of authoritarian leaders in Iran, China, North Korea, and Russia, who have prematurely celebrated the decline of America's democratic model. The Free World would welcome the return of unified American leadership.
Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He is a nonresident fellow at the Institute for Corean-American Studies and a member of the advisory boards of the Global Taiwan Institute and the Vandenberg Coalition.
