Lebanonizing Iran: A Trump-Era Option on the Table
Two weeks after the ceasefire between Israel and the Islamic Republic, signs that Israel, backed by the United States and Western allies, is pursuing a policy of “Lebanonizing” Iran are beginning to materialize.
10 July 2025
Two weeks after the ceasefire between Israel and the Islamic Republic, signs that Israel, backed by the United States and Western allies, is pursuing a policy of “Lebanonizing” Iran are beginning to materialize.
In the aftermath of the ceasefire, Iran’s political actors face divergent crises. The Islamic Republic finds itself scrambling to restore its shaken authority. Its right-wing opposition is confronting the grim reality of foreign military strikes occurring without the regime collapse it had anticipated. Meanwhile, left-wing dissidents, having vocally opposed both war and the regime, claim a kind of hollow moral victory under the slogan “No to war, no to the Islamic Republic.”
On Monday, July 7, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a formal working dinner with former U.S. President Donald Trump, explicitly invoked the “Lebanon model”, a reference to Israel’s decades-long campaign of strikes in Lebanon under the pretext of targeting Hezbollah. Netanyahu reportedly sought a renewed U.S. commitment: a green light for strikes “anytime and anywhere” against Iran if suspected of enriching uranium.
Observers had already raised alarm following the ceasefire about Israel’s apparent determination to keep military pressure on Iran and pursue its gradual disintegration. Whether Trump agrees to this strategic vision remains unclear. During his meeting with Netanyahu, he struck a contradictory tone, threatening Iran with renewed military force on one hand, while smugly reiterating his openness to talks with Iranian leaders on the other. He spoke of achieving a “permanent deal” with Iran, yet the underlying message of sustained military threat loomed large.
Rarely have Iran’s political realities been so fraught, or its future so opaque. And seldom has the fate of the country, and its people, slipped so thoroughly from their own hands. From the morning of June 13 through the following two weeks, Israeli and American strikes were swift and forceful. In less than 24 hours after the first missiles hit, 128 lives were lost. The Islamic Republic’s ability to defend the country appeared paralyzed.
Even as the missiles rained down, opposition figures, on both left and right, focused their energies on a familiar, agonizing question: Can Israeli rockets and American bunker-busters bring freedom? It is a question that has haunted Iranian activists and ordinary citizens alike for decades.
The Opposition’s Miscalculation
In the post-ceasefire climate, with the threat of another Israeli strike hanging overhead, Iran’s political factions, regime and opposition alike, must reassess their priorities. If, before June 13, economic hardship and the dream of regime change consumed the daily lives of Iranians, the shattering of the Islamic Republic’s “deterrent wall” has now turned Iranian airspace into a potential missile corridor.
Aside from resolving the status of Iran’s 400-kilogram stockpile of enriched uranium, Western powers may now see little reason to return to negotiations with Tehran in the foreseeable future.
In this scenario, Iran’s post-ceasefire fate may begin to resemble Iraq’s slow descent into isolation following the oil-for-food sanctions era under Saddam Hussein, a future not unthinkable, even if further Israeli or U.S. attacks do not materialize.
The Islamic Republic’s only remaining leverage may be its uranium stockpile, which, if reduced or surrendered, could remove the last “official pretext” for another military campaign. Yet the regime had hoped to prolong its cold war with Washington until the terms of a new agreement could be brokered. That window may have closed.
Concessions on the nuclear front, urgently needed to prevent further escalation, will not in themselves patch the widening security vacuum. Only visible shifts in the regime’s stance toward the broader demands of society can begin to restore any semblance of internal stability.
The Missing Public
For nearly two decades, segments of the Iranian opposition have endorsed a logic of external intervention and regime change, one that now appears both politically bankrupt and morally compromised. Even moderates within this camp have argued that any foreign aggression against Iran, at any time, is the regime’s fault, that it provoked the conflict.
To challenge this narrative, in their view, is to play into the Islamic Republic’s hands. At best, this outlook reduces the opposition’s role to that of commentator and explainer, offering U.S.-friendly “analysis” on Persian-language satellite channels, rather than driving political change from within Iran, as one might expect of a credible counterforce.
But the nightmare scenario now materializing — sanctions, bombings, and continued regime survival — was perhaps too dark even for the pro-intervention right to imagine. Whether one frames the public’s hunger and repression as “uprising” and “rebellion” (in the language of leftist revolutionaries) or as “popular protest” (in liberal parlance), the combination of maximum pressure from abroad and maximum suppression at home has exhausted the public. It has brought the nation to the brink of war, but not to the end of the regime.
For those in the opposition not aligned with foreign intervention, the moment demands a different strategy: one rooted in pressure on the regime to substantially de-escalate with the West, not out of naiveté, but as a pragmatic response to the peril of becoming the next Iraq. Only such an approach can rekindle hope, arrest further collapse, and open a viable path to transformation. - M. P.
