Donald Trump’s ultimatum to Iran on 20 February conceals a question that no one in Washington is saying out loud: “what military option can resolve the Iranian issue?” The answer is: none.

Not because there is a lack of options – there are at least four, all studied in the Pentagon war rooms – but because they all lead to dead ends that history has already mapped out. Iran’s problem is not ballistic: it is structural. And to pretend to ignore it while the November mid-term elections loom on Trump’s horizon is to prepare oneself to repeat mistakes that the graveyard of imperial ambitions in the Middle East has already buried without appeal.

The four closed doors

1. The Caracas scenario is the first mirage. The success of the blitz operation against Maduro in January 2026 projected a dangerous optical illusion onto international chancelleries: if it worked in Caracas, why not in Tehran? Because Venezuela was a totally disintegrated state, with a military elite reduced to amnesty-seeking mercenaries. Iran is something different: an emptied state – an institutional mosque devoid of worshippers – but with an apparatus that manages its own collapse and has a plan to survive it. The Pasdaran are not Chavista generals on the run: they are the system. Decapitating the regime would not produce an orderly transition, but the ethnic fragmentation of a country with 40% minorities – Kurds, Azeris, Baluchis, Arabs – and a nuclear programme whose sites would be lost in the chaos. No one wants a failed and potentially nuclear state.

• The Larijani scenario – the piloted catapardism – is more sophisticated and more insidious. The idea is to negotiate, with the ‘pragmatic’ sectors of the Pasdaran and the moderates who have nothing moderate about them, a transition that sacrifices the theocratic façade while preserving the kleptocratic heart: the mythological ‘friendly dictator’ on the post-Morsi Egyptian model. But al-Sisi’s record in Egypt is the best argument against this fantasy. Egypt is now one of the countries with the most political prisoners in the world, a free-falling economy buoyed by Gulf bail-outs, and a destabilising regional actor that politically and militarily supports Haftar in Libya, maintains a transactional cynicism over the Gaza crisis, and fuels a wearisome showdown with Sudan and Ethiopia over the waters of the Nile, while cultivating a dangerous ambivalence with Russia to diplomatically blackmail Western partners. If the Egyptian model has produced this balance sheet with no nuclear programme, no proxy network and no Iranian strategic depth, what is to be expected from a Larijani-led Iran? To survive, an Iranian military junta would need the same weapons as the current regime: proxies as negotiating leverage and nuclear power as life insurance. It is the perfect gift for Moscow, which would continue to parasitise Tehran in order to survive.

• The parachuted opposition is the third Western mirage. The dream of the new Chalabi: a government-in-exile to be installed in Tehran on the wings of bombers. But the monarchists cultivate nostalgia for a regime they never regretted; the MEK bears the indelible mark of collaboration with Saddam; the diaspora has proved incapable of overcoming its own cross vetoes – the failure of the Mahsa Charter in 2023 is plastic proof of this. A leader perceived as a Pentagon official loses all legitimacy the moment he lands. It would beAfghanistan bis, with an infinitely larger, more populous, more heavily armed country.

• The land invasion is politically dead before it is even discussed. Trump is an election animal: he needs a movie hit to air on Fox News, not coffins coming home. Iran is four times California, 88 million inhabitants, a mountainous terrain where forty years of defence-in-depth have built redundancy, dispersion, concealment. And an attack during Ramadan would inflame global Muslim public opinion. Without boots on the ground, any air campaign remains superficial: it can destroy known sites, but not occupy territory or prevent reconstitution. Above all, an external aggression would activate that Iranian defensive nationalism that is older than the regime; the same one that in 1980 compacted an initially divided population around Khomeini, giving the ayatollahs eight years of military legitimacy against Saddam Husein.

The role of civil society

If every military option leads to failure, the answer is – as always – the least convenient for those seeking quick solutions. There is a force in Iran that none of the four scenarios takes seriously: internal civil society. The women who challenge the regime by removing their veils. The students occupying universities. The Nobel laureates who speak to the world from their cells in Evin with a legitimacy no diaspora leader can ever claim. This civil society does not demand invasion; it demands protection; it demands that the architects of repression be made politically radioactive on a global scale.

Since armed intervention has no hope of success, the West should launch a strong political initiative to lead strong, determined and strictly based action under international law. Through the creation of a ‘Judicial Shield’ and the application of the International Criminal Court’s Effects Principle, the consequences of planned crimes in Tehran could be prosecuted immediately when they manifest themselves in ICC member states – from threats against the diaspora in Europe to illicit financial flows and the trafficking of surveillance technology. Turning every violation into an indictment would prevent the Pasdaran’s catbirds from recycling themselves as presentable and respectable interlocutors, would make them international pariahs, not honoured guests in Geneva.

European role (?)

In this scenario,Europe – if it really wanted to become thatgeopolitical actor it has been talking about for years – would have a fundamental role to play. A democratic Iran reintegrated into global circuits would break Russia’s strategic parasitism – that predator-prey relationship that has turned Tehran into a battery to be drained for the war in Ukraine – and would reopen energy corridors to Europe that are today hostage to Moscow.

It is not idealism: it is national interest. It is not a spectacular solution. It does not produce news images. But it is the only strategy that respects a fundamental truth:Iranian democracy is not to be exported from outside, it already exists in the blood that has covered the streets of Tehran, in the prison cells of Evin, it exists in the voices of the many Iranian Nobel laureates who challenge the regime with the strength of a millenary culture. Iran should not be conquered. It must be left to those who pay the price to call it free.