For years I believed the American president was the only person on earth who could truly frighten the Islamic Republic. The carriers are American. The B-2s are American. The bunker busters that went into Fordow in June last year were American. So when Donald Trump tells reporters to wait and see what he does to Iran, I take the sentence seriously, because the arsenal behind it is real.
The regime in Tehran doesn’t read the arsenal, though. It reads the calendar.
Trump doesn’t scare Iran’s rulers. Israel does. Not mostly. Not on a good day. Israel.
Tehran is playing out the American clock
Try a simple test. Who in this war has a deadline?
Washington does. The midterms are on November 3. Trump’s approval has fallen to 31 percent, and almost two in three Americans dislike how he’s handled the military campaign against Iran. Oil sits above $100 a barrel and American drivers feel it every week at the pump. A president in that spot needs a win he can announce, and he needs it soon.
Tehran knows this. Iranian officials have said out loud that they’re stretching the talks with the United States to shape the midterm vote. In April Trump announced that Iran had agreed to hand over its enriched uranium, his “nuclear dust.” Tehran denied it within days and called the material as sacred as Iranian soil. This month, sitting across the table in Pakistan, it again refused to move a single gram out of the country. That’s not the behavior of a government that’s afraid of the man making the threats. It’s the behavior of a government that has done the math on his term.
American power is enormous. American patience is short. The ayatollahs have outlasted eight presidents and they plan to outlast this one.
Ask who went after the Supreme Leader
Here’s a second test. When it comes to Iran, which country goes after the man and which goes after the building?
On February 28 the war opened, and it was an Israeli strike on a bunker in Tehran that killed Ali Khamenei, along with Iran’s defense minister and several Revolutionary Guard generals. It was the largest operation the Israeli Air Force has ever flown. That didn’t come out of nowhere. Israeli agents carried Iran’s nuclear archive out of a warehouse in southern Tehran in 2018. They killed Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the father of the weapons program, on a road outside the capital in 2020. They killed Ismail Haniyeh inside a guarded government guesthouse in Tehran in 2024.
No American administration has done anything like that run of operations. None has wanted to.
And here’s the part Tehran can’t wait out. Israel goes to the polls on October 27, yet nobody serious in that race is promising to drop the Iran file. Gadi Eisenkot, a former army chief and Netanyahu’s loudest rival, argued over timing, saying he saw no urgent reason to strike right now. He didn’t argue over principle. Governments in Jerusalem change. The Iran file doesn’t.
Kayhan already told us who it fears
The best witness here is the regime itself.
Kayhan is the hardline Tehran daily whose editor is appointed by the Supreme Leader. When it weighed how Iran should answer a possible American strike on Pickaxe Mountain, the fortified nuclear site near Natanz, it didn’t call for hitting American bases or American ships. It called for a merciless strike on Israel’s nuclear facilities. Washington makes the threat. Israel gets named as the enemy. That’s not confusion. That’s instinct.
The same instinct is on the billboards. The giant poster hung in Tehran’s Enghelab Square this month doesn’t mock the American president. It mocks the Israeli prime minister, alone in an empty hall. You don’t spend that kind of propaganda money on a rival you think is going away.
A government’s media tells you where its fear lives. Tehran’s media lives in Israel.
What I still don’t buy
None of this means Israel can finish the job by itself, and I don’t believe it can. Israel can’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz. It can’t keep tankers moving through the Gulf. It depends on American interceptors, American refueling and American diplomatic cover, and it will for years.
Killing the old Supreme Leader didn’t kill the regime either. His son Mojtaba sits in his place, and the Islamic Republic still holds the knowledge and the will to rebuild its missiles and its centrifuges. Fear is a lever, not a victory. I reject anyone who sells it as one.
Tehran can wait out a president. It has never waited out Israel.