Shaping Tehran, Not Toppling It: The Trump Strategy on Iran

Analyst Andrew Latham argues that Trump’s Iran policy seeks “regime reorientation”—keeping the government in place but forcing a change in its external behavior—through a mix of economic pressure, gray‑zone operations, limited military actions to degrade capabilities, and coordinated diplomacy to constrain Tehran’s options and deter nuclear escalation, proxy warfare, and alignments with Russia and China, drawing a Venezuela‑style parallel of pressuring the regime without overthrow.