The Empire’s Menu for Iran

Reading America’s Iran strategy the way it was meant to be read

When people ask me why I don’t trust Washington’s “diplomacy” with Iran, I usually answer with history.

In 2009, the Saban Center at Brookings published a strategy paper with a title that reads like a travel brochure and functions like a regime change recipe: Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy toward Iran. The premise is straightforward: Iran is hard, American policy has been unimpressive, and therefore Washington must consider a range of tools—diplomatic, military, and covert—to force Tehran into compliance or change its regime.

What matters is not only what the paper proposes, but what it normalizes.

It lays out “nine discrete approaches” and groups them into bundles: “Persuasion” (carrots and sticks), “Engagement” (accommodation), military options (invasion, airstrikes, and even encouraging Israeli strikes), regime change options (“colour revolution,” “insurgency,” “coup”), and finally “containment.”

This think-tank language is polished enough to be read on Sunday morning in Washington, while describing pathways that, in plain English, amount to coercion, sabotage, and war.

The paper even admits what every serious observer knows but polite Western discourse tries to hide: the best American strategy, it argues, would “combine several” options into an “integrated policy,” pursued sequentially or simultaneously. In other words, Washington does not choose between diplomacy and pressure. It uses diplomacy as pressure, and pressure as the background music for diplomacy.

This is why I keep returning to the “gang” metaphor. Empires do not act like philosophical debating societies. They act like syndicates: negotiate when convenient, punish when necessary, and keep alternative methods ready in the drawer.

When I spoke with Firas Modad, we started from this same reality. We discussed the new U.S. approach to regime change that does not require occupying a country and rebuilding it from scratch. Instead, you decapitate the leadership and do business with whoever remains inside the structure. Take Venezuela, for example: kidnap Maduro, keep the state, keep parts of the regime, just change the terms of loyalty and the direction of policy.

Whether you agree with every aspect of that Venezuela analogy is not the main point here. The main point is the pattern. And Brookings, years before today’s headlines, already mapped that pattern for Iran.

Look at how “Persuasion” is described. It is not merely dialogue. It is a tactical engagement aimed at producing a “deal,” where Washington offers Iran economic and political benefits in exchange for what Washington “needs” on the nuclear file, support for militant groups, and Iran’s regional posture. If Tehran refuses, the plan is “ever more painful” sanctions, and even the possibility of layering regime change methods on top of sanctions as additional pressure.

And then the paper walks you into the darker corridors: the regime change section reads like a catalog of destabilization tools, carefully presented as policy options rather than acts of aggression. It treats “The Velvet Revolution” as the “most obvious and palatable” route, pretending to help Iranians topple their own government “in their own name.” It concedes that revolutions are rare and complex, and that the literature on how to promote them is speculative. Yet the option remains on the table because it offers Washington the fantasy outcome: the elimination of “all the problems it faces from Iran,” at a “bearable cost,” with global acceptability.

If velvet fails, the paper proposes moving to something harsher: “Inspiring an Insurgency,” including working with ethnic groups—Kurds, Baluch, Arabs—who have fought the Iranian state before, potentially combined with dissident Persians, to create sustained unrest and force Tehran to divert resources or concede. It even discusses supporting exile groups like the NCRI/MEK as potential instruments.

And if an insurgency is messy, there is “The Coup.” Here, the paper makes an important admission: Iran is “coup-proofed,” with a parallel military—specifically the IRGC—designed to protect the revolution internally and externally. It highlights how difficult a coup would be without “superb intelligence” on loyalties, command structures, and key centers of power—intelligence the U.S. often lacks due to the absence of an embassy and limited expertise.

That last admission is worth sitting with. Because it reveals the core arrogance of this entire genre: even when Washington admits it does not understand the society it wants to reshape, it still produces a list of ways to reshape it.

Now zoom forward to the present rhetoric and the present region, and you start to see why Trump’s threats are not simply “Trump being Trump.” In our conversation, Modad described the Iranian government as exhausted, partly because the grand revolutionary project—the pan-Islamic promise, the transnational axis, the claim of unstoppable momentum—has run into hard limits and strategic failures. He argued that the Islamic Revolution’s promise of transcending sectarianism and borders has “completely failed,” and that the regional architecture Iran relied on is under severe stress.

Whether one agrees fully with the wording or not, the diagnosis contains an uncomfortable truth for Tehran: revolutionary legitimacy is not just an ideology; it is a performance. You can sell sacrifice to a population when you can convincingly sell victory. When the story collapses, the sacrifices become unbearable. Modad put it bluntly: when people no longer believe the revolution is “going forward and winning,” public support erodes fast.

This is exactly the kind of internal vulnerability that Western strategists look for.

And here is where Washington’s “integrated policy” meets Modad’s “decapitation” logic.

If you accept that Iran is tired, that its legitimacy is fraying, and that the core center of gravity is an aging leadership with succession questions, then the empire does not need an Iraq-style invasion. It can attempt something cheaper: intensify pressure, offer deals to the security elite, signal personal vulnerability to top figures, and encourage internal reconfiguration without collapsing the state. That is the gangster logic modern empires prefer: high impact, low cost, minimal responsibility.

Modad described this choice as a message to the IRGC: either “go to the grave” with the old revolutionary project, or make a deal and transform into a nationalist security establishment that can do business with the West. He went even further: he argued that for Israel, the core issue is not necessarily the personnel of the IRGC but the ideological mission of the Islamic Revolution; swap the ideology, and the personnel can remain.

From a purely cynical, realist angle, that is coherent. And it fits the Brookings framework almost perfectly.

Because the Brookings paper is not fundamentally about “Iran’s nuclear program” or “terrorism.” It is about whether the United States should accept the Islamic Republic at all. And if it cannot topple it cleanly, then it will pressure it until it changes its behavior, or pressure it until it changes its skin.

This is where my critique cuts in two directions.

First, toward Washington: this entire approach is imperial management dressed up as policy debate. Even the language of “helping” Iranians is contaminated, because American help is never neutral. The paper itself acknowledges that U.S. assistance to opposition movements can backfire and reduce the likelihood of favorable outcomes. Yet, it still presents a toolkit where “help” is inseparable from coercion. When a superpower openly discusses turning ethnic grievances into an insurgency, it is playing with the fire of civil fragmentation.

Second, toward Tehran: the Iranian leadership has, for decades, claimed that its greatest achievement is resisting American domination. But resistance is not a slogan; it is a strategy. If your regional posture becomes overextended, if your messaging becomes disconnected from outcomes, and if your society no longer believes the sacrifices are producing security or dignity, you create the permissive environment your enemies need. You don’t need a CIA masterpiece. You need exhaustion, cynicism, and elite drift.

And that elite drift is exactly what the empire tries to accelerate. Modad noted something uncomfortable but widely observed: many senior officials’ families are deeply entangled with Western education and lifestyles. This is a strategic vulnerability because it signals to Washington that there are people inside the structure who can be tempted, sanctioned, flipped, or “recycled” into a new order.

This is the real danger for Iran in the coming period: not only airstrikes and not only sanctions, but a slow process of ideological hollowing, where the revolution remains in symbols, while the security establishment transitions into a purely nationalist bargain with external powers.

If that sounds far-fetched, remember: Brookings explicitly argues that effective U.S. policy will likely combine options, and that “Persuasion” can shift into long-term “Engagement” if a deal is reached, while other methods remain as fallbacks or parallel pressure tracks.

So what should readers take away from this?

That the question is not whether Washington has a plan for Iran. Washington always has plans. It has plans stacked on plans, bundled into options, and written in polished prose. The question is whether Iran—and the wider region—understands that those plans are not designed to produce stability for the people living there. They are designed to produce compliance at the lowest possible cost to the empire.

And Iran’s leadership must confront a harder truth: you cannot build a foreign policy on permanent slogans while your society is asked to absorb permanent pain. If you do, you don’t just risk military confrontation. You risk elite betrayal, internal fracture, and the quiet conversion of the revolution into a managed transition, exactly the kind of “change without collapse” that modern imperial strategy prefers.

We are entering an era where the old theater of international law is fading and the raw mechanics of power are returning to center stage. In that world, a PDF from 2009 matters because it shows you how the empire thinks when it is calm, sober, and planning.

And once you see the menu, you stop mistaking the waiter’s smile for goodwill.

—Kevork Almassian is a Syrian geopolitical analyst and the founder of Syriana Analysis.