regime change

The war Iran prepared for: How Tehran is raising the cost of war

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Missiles fired from Iran toward Israel are seen in the skies over Ramallah, West Bank on March 8, 2026. [Issam Rimawi – Anadolu Agency]

by Dr Ramzy Baroud  RamzyBaroud

Iran is pursuing a multi-layered strategy—military, economic, political, and diplomatic—to raise the cost of war and prevent regime change.

Iran’s strategy in the current war

As the war on Iran continues to expand across multiple fronts, Tehran appears to be pursuing a complex strategy that combines military escalation, economic leverage, domestic mobilization, and diplomatic signaling.

Rather than relying on what Iranian officials once described as “strategic patience,” the current approach suggests that Iran is attempting to fundamentally reshape the battlefield by increasing the costs of the war for the United States, Israel, and any regional actors that choose to participate.

The strategy appears to rest on several interconnected pillars designed not only to respond to military attacks but also to prevent the broader objective that Iranian leaders believe lies behind the war: regime change.

Overwhelming the battlefield

The most visible element of Iran’s strategy has been its attempt to expand the battlefield geographically and operationally.

Rather than focusing solely on Israeli territory, Iran has targeted a wide range of US and allied assets across the region. These include military bases, intelligence facilities, radar systems, and logistical infrastructure that support American operations.

The aim appears to be twofold.

First,

Iranian strikes are intended to impose a form of “strategic blindness” on opposing forces by degrading radar systems, surveillance networks, and early-warning capabilities.

Such attacks reduce the ability of the United States and Israel to monitor Iranian movements and respond effectively to missile launches or other military operations.

Second, by targeting US bases in multiple countries across the region, Iran is sending a clear message that the conflict will not remain geographically contained.

In practical terms, this means that any country hosting American military facilities risks becoming part of the battlefield.

Iranian officials have repeatedly emphasized that these strikes are directed at US military infrastructure rather than the sovereignty of host nations. Nevertheless, the message is unmistakable: if regional territory is used to launch attacks on Iran, that territory may also become a site of retaliation.

READ: Iran’s Assembly of Experts selects Mojtaba Khamenei as new Supreme Leader

This approach reflects a major shift away from Iran’s previous policy of measured responses and limited escalation.

Instead, Tehran appears to be pursuing a strategy designed to overwhelm the enemy on multiple fronts simultaneously, raising the political and military cost of continuing the war.

Economic warfare

Alongside its military operations, Iran is also leveraging one of the most powerful tools at its disposal: the geography of global energy supply.

The Strait of Hormuz—through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply passes—has effectively become a war zone. Although Iran has not formally declared a blockade, the conditions created by the conflict have produced a functional shutdown of the waterway.

Missile exchanges, naval deployments, maritime attacks, and the growing threat environment have drastically reduced the willingness of commercial shipping companies to operate in the area. Insurance costs for tankers have surged, while several shipping operators have suspended or rerouted voyages altogether.

In practice, this means that the strait is not closed by decree but by the realities of war.

This distinction is important. Iran does not need to announce a blockade to achieve the strategic effects of one. The instability itself disrupts energy flows, drives oil prices upward, and injects uncertainty into global markets.

The consequences are felt far beyond the Gulf.

European economies—already weakened by energy shocks following the war in Ukraine—are particularly vulnerable to renewed volatility in oil and gas markets. Rising shipping costs, supply disruptions, and market speculation all compound the economic pressure.

For Tehran, this dynamic serves as a powerful form of indirect leverage.

The longer the war continues, the greater the economic consequences for the global system that underpins Western power. In this sense, the Strait of Hormuz functions not merely as a geographic chokepoint but as a strategic pressure valve capable of transmitting the costs of the conflict far beyond the battlefield.

Domestic cohesion

Another key pillar of Iran’s strategy lies within the country itself.

Western analysts had widely speculated that sustained military pressure—or a leadership decapitation strategy—could produce internal instability or even trigger a political crisis within Iran.

The killing of senior political and military figures, including high-ranking officials, appeared to be designed in part to create such a vacuum.

Yet the anticipated fragmentation has not materialized.

Instead, Iranian authorities have focused on projecting unity and political cohesion. Mass rallies and public demonstrations have taken place across multiple cities, with large crowds gathering in public squares to express support for the government and condemnation of the attacks.

These displays serve an important political function.

By filling public spaces with supporters, the government is attempting to pre-empt the emergence of alternative movements that might claim to represent a popular response to the war.

In effect, the strategy denies external actors the ability to argue that military intervention is intended to support domestic opposition or restore democratic governance.

For Washington and Tel Aviv, the assumption that internal unrest could become a decisive factor appears to have been a significant miscalculation.

Calibrated diplomacy

Despite the widening military confrontation, Iran has also sought to maintain a careful diplomatic balance with Arab governments.

Iranian officials have repeatedly emphasized that their strikes are directed at US military installations rather than the countries that host them.

This distinction is important.

Tehran’s broader objective appears to be preventing Arab states from becoming full participants in the conflict. While warning that any government enabling US military operations could face retaliation, Iran has simultaneously signaled that it does not seek confrontation with the region as a whole.

The message to Arab governments has therefore been dual-layered: do not allow your territory to be used for attacks on Iran, but if you avoid direct involvement, Iran does not consider you an enemy.

Such messaging reflects Tehran’s understanding that regional alignment could dramatically reshape the war’s dynamics.

READ: US intelligence assessment questions whether war could topple Iran’s regime

Strategic weaknesses

Despite the coherence of Iran’s overall approach, several weaknesses remain.

One of the most significant challenges lies in the realm of communication.

Iranian media outlets, operating under heavy pressure and frequent targeting, have struggled to project their narrative effectively to global audiences. Compared with the sophisticated international media infrastructure available to Western governments and Israel, Iran’s messaging often fails to reach wider international publics.

This limits Tehran’s ability to frame the conflict on its own terms.

A second challenge concerns the global anti-war movement.

While protests against the war have emerged in various cities around the world, they have not yet reached a scale capable of exerting decisive political pressure on governments supporting the conflict.

For Iran, the expansion of such protests could become a critical factor in constraining the military options available to Washington and its allies.

A war of strategy

Taken together, Iran’s actions suggest a leadership attempting to wage war according to a clearly defined strategic framework.

Military escalation, economic disruption, domestic mobilization, and diplomatic signaling all appear to function as parts of a single integrated approach designed to raise the cost of the conflict beyond what its adversaries may be willing to bear.

Whether the strategy ultimately succeeds remains uncertain.

What is increasingly evident, however, is that the war is evolving into a contest not only of military capabilities but also of strategic coherence.

For now, Iran appears to be operating according to a calculated plan, while its adversaries continue to search for a sustainable path forward in a rapidly expanding conflict.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 

Keir Starmer explains that UK is participating defensively in Trump and Israel's criminal war for Israel's genocidal expansion in Iran and states that he supports Zionism "without qualification".
Keir Starmer explains that UK is participating defensively in Trump and Israel’s criminal war for Israel’s genocidal expansion in Iran and states that he supports Zionism “without qualification”.
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Donald Trump warns against following the https://onaquietday.org blog, says that it’s easy atm, she only needs to report war crimes supporting Israel’s genocidal expansion.

Continue ReadingThe war Iran prepared for: How Tehran is raising the cost of war

Trump’s Venezuela Drug War Gambit and the Militarization Playbook at Home

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This article by Michelle Ellner republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

National Guard troops are deployed to the Washington Monument as part of US President Donald Trump’s mobilization of law enforcement on August 12, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Andrew Leyden/Getty Images)

Whether it’s a wall in the desert or barricades in front of the White House, the message is the same: Perceived threats, real or manufactured, are met with troops, not talks.

US President Donald Trump has quietly authorized the Pentagon to carry out military operations against what his administration calls “narco-terrorist” networks in Latin America. On paper, it’s a counter-narcotics policy. In practice, it serves as a green light for open-ended US military action abroad, bypassing congressional approval, sidestepping international law, and stretching the definition of “national security” until it becomes a catchall justification for the use of force.

The directive allows the US to target groups unilaterally labeled as both criminal and terrorist. Once that designation is made, the military can operate without the consent of the targeted country, a move that violates international law. In a region with a long history of US-backed coups, covert wars, and destabilization campaigns, the risk of abuse isn’t hypothetical; it’s inevitable.

While the order applies across Latin America, Venezuela stands at the top of the list. The Trump administration has accused President Nicolás Maduro’s government of working with transnational cartels, and has doubled the bounty on him to $50 million (double the bounty for Osama bin Laden). It’s a lawfare tactic designed to criminalize a head of state and invite mercenaries and covert operatives to participate in regime change. The accusations fueling this escalation have grown increasingly far-fetched casting Maduro in turn as a partner of Colombia’s FARC, the head of the “Cartel de los Soles,” a patron of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua, and now, as an ally of Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel. a charge even Mexico’s own president says has no evidence, revealing how politicized and unfounded this allegation is.

The core premise of the accusation is that Maduro is involved in a cocaine trafficking network of Venezuelan military and political figures called Cartel de los Soles. The Venezuelan government denies the cartel’s existence, calling it a fabrication to justify sanctions and regime change efforts. Multiple independent investigations have shown no hard evidence exists and that this narrative thrives in a media-intelligence echo chamber. Reports from outlets like Insight Crime cite anonymous US sources; those media stories are then cited by policymakers and think tanks, and the cycle repeats until speculation becomes policy.

The communities in Caracas and Los Angeles, in the Venezuelan plains, and in the US-Mexico border may seem worlds apart, but they are facing the same war machine.

Fulton Armstrong, a professor at American University and a former longtime US intelligence officer, has stated that he knows no one in the intelligence community, apart from those currently in government, who believes in the existence of the Cartel de los Soles.

Drug monitoring data also contradict this narrative. The Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) reports that only about 7% of US-bound cocaine transits through the Eastern Caribbean via Venezuela, while approximately 90% takes Western Caribbean and Eastern Pacific routes. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s 2025 World Drug Report likewise confirms that trafficking remains concentrated in major Andean corridors, not through Venezuela. Yet Venezuela is targeted anyway, not for its actual role in the drug trade, but because neutralizing its government has become a pillar of US foreign policy, seen in Washington as a step toward reshaping the country’s political system and prying open its economy to foreign control.

The “narco-terror” label put on Venezuela also attempts to rope Venezuela into the US fentanyl crisis, despite the absence of evidence that the country plays any role in fentanyl trafficking. Even US drug enforcement assessments make no mention of Venezuela as a source or transit point.

This link exists only in political rhetoric, a way to fold Venezuela into a domestic public health crisis and recycle the same logic used to brand it a “national security threat.” That accusation dates back to 2015 when then-President Barack Obama created the legal and political scaffolding for an open-ended campaign of coercion. Once the “narco-terror” framework is in place, Washington can sustain and escalate military measures over time, regardless of the immediate pretext.

This framing turns a political standoff into a declared security imperative. It broadens the range of permissible military tools, from ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) to direct action.

The pattern is familiar. In Panama (1989), Colombia (2000s), and Honduras (2010s), US militarized antidrug campaigns failed to dismantle supply chains or reduce trafficking volumes. What they did accomplish was shifting routes, militarizing criminal actors, and destabilizing governments, and left societies more fragile—costing lives and destroying communities in the process.

The Mirror at Home: Militarization and Communities of Color

The same militarized logic driving US policy in Venezuela is being applied inside the United States. In August 2025, President Trump signed an executive order placing the DC Metropolitan Police Department under federal control and deployed the National Guard, citing a public safety “emergency,” despite official data showing violent crime at multiyear lows. Even US law enforcement statistics contradict the White House narrative, but the administration dismissed them, casting the city as overrun by “roving mobs,” “wild youth,” and “drugged-out maniacs.”

DC is only one example. The same militarized logic has sent thousands of troops to the US-Mexico border, converted military bases into detention centers from Texas to New Jersey, and stationed soldiers inside Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities in over 20 states. In Los Angeles, Marines and National Guard units patrolled immigrant neighborhoods in a show of force, a deployment beaten back only by mass community resistance and the threat of labor action.

Whether it’s a wall in the desert or barricades in front of the White House, the message is the same: Perceived threats, real or manufactured, are met with troops, not talks. The playbook never changes: In Venezuela, the “threat” is cast as narco-terrorism; in the US, it’s a “border surge” or a manufactured public safety emergency built on racially coded depictions of Black and brown communities. In both cases, the logic is identical: Treat political disputes and social crises as security emergencies, sideline diplomacy and community solutions, usurp greater executive powers, and make military force a routine tool of governance.

The Real Threat

Trump’s “narco-terror” authorization uses the language of fighting drugs and crime to mask a deeper project: expanding the military’s role in governance and normalizing its use as a tool of political control both at home and abroad.

In Latin America, that means more interventions against governments the US wants to topple. At home, it means embedding the military deeper into civilian life, particularly in Black and brown neighborhoods.

The communities in Caracas and Los Angeles, in the Venezuelan plains, and in the US-Mexico border may seem worlds apart, but they are facing the same war machine. Until we reject militarization in all its forms, the targets will keep shifting, but the people under the gun will look the same.

This article by Michelle Ellner republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue ReadingTrump’s Venezuela Drug War Gambit and the Militarization Playbook at Home