The current war against Iran is best understood not as a regime-change campaign in the classic sense, but as a coercive military effort to destroy the main instruments of Iranian power projection and then terminate on terms defined unilaterally by Washington and Jerusalem.

The central question is not whether the United States and Israel would welcome regime collapse if it occurred. They clearly would.

The more important analytical point is that neither the structure of the campaign nor the public framing of its operational objectives suggests that regime change is the main executable military objective.

Rather, the campaign appears designed to degrade Iran’s ability to threaten Israel, U.S. regional forces, Gulf shipping, and the broader regional balance through three principal means: ballistic and cruise missiles (drones are a much smaller threat to Israel), naval and maritime coercive capabilities, and the infrastructure underlying Iran’s nuclear program.

Once those capabilities have been reduced to a level judged acceptable by Washington and Jerusalem, the most likely outcome is not a negotiated settlement with Tehran, but a unilateral declaration that the strategic objectives of the campaign have been met.

That distinction is important because the war’s most plausible end state is often mischaracterized.

There is a tendency to assume that wars must end through formal diplomacy or some mutually acknowledged ceasefire. In this case, that assumption is probably wrong.

The Iranian regime is unlikely to negotiate from a position of visible strategic defeat, particularly if doing so would amount to an explicit admission that its core deterrent assets have been stripped away. Tehran’s political culture, ideological posture, and long-standing habit of framing endurance itself as victory all argue against an overt negotiated termination under current conditions.

At the same time, there is little evidence that the United States or Israel require Iranian consent in order to end the campaign. Their likely termination model is simpler: continue striking until Iran’s remaining capacity for force projection has been pushed below a critical threshold, then declare that the principal objectives have been achieved and scale operations down accordingly.

Iran, in turn, would continue to denounce the campaign, claim survival as success, and preserve whatever residual capabilities it can. The war would end not with a signed understanding, but with one side deciding it has accomplished enough to stop.

This is a more coherent model of war termination than negotiated ceasefire scenarios for several reasons.