With President Trump approaching the sixty-day statutory deadline for congressional authorization of hostilities and publicly musing that maybe no deal at all is preferable to a bad deal, John Bolton, former national security adviser to President Trump and former US Ambassador to the United Nations, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to assess the state of the Iran campaign and offer his prescription for what comes next. His verdict on the ceasefire period was blunt: it was a mistake that benefited Iran, the three weeks of negotiations were a waste of oxygen, and the only sensible path forward is to resume and complete the military campaign.
Bolton said the fundamental error in the ceasefire decision was the assumption that the Iranian regime contained pragmatic elements genuinely interested in producing an agreement Trump could accept. He said that premise was never realistic given who is actually running the regime, which is the IRGC hardline faction that has no interest in any arrangement that would compromise Iranian nuclear ambitions, proxy financing, or control over the Strait of Hormuz. Three weeks of negotiations produced nothing because there was never going to be anything to produce, and the pause gave Iran exactly what it needed: time to dig out storehouses of missiles and drone launchers that had survived the initial campaign and prepare them for potential future use. He said reports suggest approximately twenty-five percent of Iran’s missile, drone, and related military capacity remains intact, and that having been allowed three weeks to regroup and reposition, those remaining assets now need to be destroyed again from scratch.
He endorsed General Jack Keane’s framing of the options available to the president, which Proft had laid out from a recent Fox News analysis. The options as Keane described them include resuming strikes against the full target set including remaining leadership figures, ballistic missiles, nuclear program remnants, drone storage facilities, and energy infrastructure; taking action to militarily force the Strait of Hormuz open to non-Iranian traffic; and potentially destroying Kharg Island to cut off the regime’s last meaningful source of revenue and force an eventual economic collapse. Bolton agreed with the general thrust while differing on Kharg Island specifically. He said as long as the blockade is working effectively, there is no reason to destroy Kharg Island because a post-regime Iran will need that oil infrastructure to rebuild its devastated economy, and destroying it would compound the humanitarian and economic crisis the Iranian people will need to manage once the regime falls.
His central argument, which he said has been true for twenty years even if policymakers have been unwilling to face it, is that the only durable solution to the Iranian nuclear threat and Iran’s role as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism is regime change. Any negotiated arrangement that leaves the current regime in power will eventually be circumvented, as every previous agreement has been, because the regime’s fundamental objectives, acquiring nuclear weapons and exporting revolutionary Islamist terrorism, are incompatible with any agreement the United States could accept. The regime that agreed to the Libya arrangement in 2003 and 2004, under which Muammar Gaddafi allowed American and British teams to box up his nuclear program and transport it to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was a regime that had made a genuine strategic decision to survive by abandoning its weapons ambitions. The Iranian regime has made no such decision and shows no signs of making one.
He said the administration has not fully deployed what he considers its most powerful available instrument, which is direct material support to the Iranian internal opposition. He acknowledged the opposition is widespread but poorly organized and underresourced. The Kurdish and Baluch populations are both armed and organized ethnic minorities with genuine capacity to create internal pressure. The more important target for support is defectors from the regular Iranian military, which predates the revolution and has been left largely intact by the American campaign, and civilian figures from the regime apparatus who can see the ship is going down and are calculating whether to go down with it or seek an exit. He said telecommunications assistance, money, and weapons could help these disparate elements coalesce into something capable of pulling the regime down from within, without requiring American ground forces and without requiring a government in exile with a ready plan for who would take over. The most realistic immediate post-regime scenario, he said, is a military government to restore order while the Iranian people work out their long-term political future, a process that will take years regardless of what outside powers prefer.
He was dismissive of European NATO allies who responded to Trump’s failure to consult them in advance by declaring this was not their war, calling their reaction petulant and analogous to schoolchildren. He said Iran’s ongoing commitment to nuclear weapons, international terrorism across four continents, and the demonstrated capacity to extort the global economy by closing the strait represent threats to the entire Western world, and that European governments failed both strategically and morally by treating Trump’s failure of consultation as sufficient reason to sit out a campaign against a regime that has been killing Westerners for forty-seven years.
On the domestic political picture, Bolton noted a Harvard Harris poll from the third week of April showing seventy-four percent of Americans believe the United States is winning the war in Iran, including sixty percent of Democrats, ninety-one percent of Republicans, and seventy percent of independents, numbers he said give Trump sufficient political capital to do what Keane and Bolton are both recommending. He said Trump has unambiguously demonstrated a willingness to see the campaign through that contrasts with every predecessor over the past half century, and that having given Iran three full weeks of ceasefire without receiving anything in return, no reasonable person can accuse him of not having tried the diplomatic path. The Iranians were given an offramp. They declined it. Bolton’s conclusion is there is nothing left to do but go back and finish the job.