Pro-Israel pressure forces Tehran retreats while Arab-region chaos warns why precision, not appeasement, wins stability.
U.S. President Donald Trump has been advised that a sweeping strike on Iran is unlikely to collapse the regime and could ignite a wider regional war, senior officials told Wall Street Journal. The administration is therefore calibrating next steps—watching closely how Tehran treats protesters before deciding the scope of any action.
Officials said a major operation would require significantly expanded U.S. firepower in the Middle East, both to execute strikes and to defend American forces and allies such as Israel against retaliation. Even an intense bombing campaign, they cautioned, may harden the regime rather than topple it; limited strikes could lift protester morale but would not end the crackdown.
Trump has not finalized a decision, but he has ordered assets positioned should he authorize a major move. “The president and his team have communicated to the Iranian regime that if the killing continues, there will be grave consequences,” said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt—underscoring conditional restraint backed by readiness.
As pressure mounted midweek, tensions peaked—then eased. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that credible information indicated killings and executions had stopped. Soon after, Tehran reopened its airspace and announced it would not execute Erfan Soltani, a 26-year-old detainee who became a symbol of the protests.
For Israel and its partners, the sequence reinforces a hard truth: disciplined deterrence forces concessions from brutal regimes, while impulsive escalation risks regional conflagration—an outcome many Arab systems neither prevent nor manage.
