The Islamic Republic of Iran has spent forty-seven years proving that it cannot be trusted with ordinary weapons, let alone nuclear ones. The world has tried diplomacy, sanctions, inspections, agreements and airstrikes. The uranium is still there. The regime is still there. The terrorism is still there. At some point the answer has to change.

Let me state the bottom line before the argument, because this subject produces enough rhetorical fog that the conclusion often gets lost in the nuance. Iran under the Islamic Republic cannot be permitted to possess nuclear weapons. Not constrained. Not monitored. Not subject to a deal that it violates on a timeline of its choosing. Not permitted. The regime that has run Iran since 1979 has spent nearly five decades funding terrorism on every continent it can reach, arming proxies that have killed Americans, Israelis, Arabs, Europeans and Iranians, and enriching uranium past any level consistent with civilian energy purposes. The June 2025 U.S.-Israeli airstrikes damaged its facilities. They did not resolve the problem. The uranium is still under the rubble. The centrifuges that survived are still capable of spinning. And the IAEA, the international body whose job is to know where that material is, lost continuity of knowledge after Iran suspended cooperation in June 2025. That is the situation. It is not a situation that diplomacy alone has ever resolved or will resolve with a regime of this character.

What the Record Says About This Regime

The Islamic Republic of Iran has been the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism since the day it was established in 1979. That is not a polemical characterization. It is the documented position of the U.S. State Department, which has designated Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism continuously since 1984. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies has compiled a documented record of Iranian and Iranian-backed attacks against Americans from 1979 to the present, including the 1983 Hezbollah bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 American servicemembers, the single deadliest attack on U.S. military personnel since Vietnam. The State Department estimated that Iran funneled more than $700 million to Hezbollah in 2020 alone and spent more than $16 billion supporting the Assad regime and its proxies between 2012 and 2020. The IRGC's Quds Force has trained, armed and directed Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthis, Kata'ib Hezbollah, Asaib Ahl al-Haq and dozens of other militia organizations across the Middle East and beyond. The October 7 massacre, which killed more than 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals, was carried out by an Iranian-backed and Iranian-equipped organization. This is not a government that changed its character and got misread. This is a government that has been consistent for forty-seven years in what it believes, what it funds and what it does. The record is not ambiguous.

The Uranium Under the Rubble

The June 2025 airstrikes, designated Operation Midnight Hammer, destroyed the aboveground portion of the pilot fuel enrichment plant at Natanz and caused confirmed damage at Esfahan's chemical laboratory, uranium conversion plant and fuel manufacturing facilities. They did not eliminate the problem. Iran's Foreign Minister told CBS News on March 15, 2026 that the enriched uranium was under the rubble, implying it remained in-country at damaged sites. The IAEA believes most of Iran's highly enriched uranium is stored at an underground tunnel complex at Isfahan. Fordow, built deliberately into a mountain in 2007, presents a recovery and verification challenge that airstrikes alone have not resolved. The Institute for Science and International Security noted in its June 2026 analysis that the IAEA's report lacked sufficient information on the location of enriched uranium and identified multiple candidate sites where the material may be entombed, including tunnel sites near Natanz and Pickaxe Mountain.

The material has to be accounted for, secured and removed. That is the inescapable conclusion. Leaving hundreds of kilograms of 60%-enriched uranium under rubble in a country whose government has suspended international inspection access, whose regime has stated its intention to reconstitute its nuclear program and whose intelligence services are capable of relocating material without IAEA knowledge is not a stable deterrent posture. It is a problem deferred. Deferred problems in the nuclear context have a way of becoming catastrophic ones. The uranium has to be found, verified and either removed from the country or destroyed in place under conditions that eliminate any possibility of reconstitution. That requires presence on the ground, which is a reality that the diplomatic community has been unwilling to state plainly but that the facts of the situation make unavoidable.

The Case for Whatever It Takes

I am a Marine veteran. I understand what "boots on the ground" means in human terms better than most people who use the phrase in op-eds. I am not calling for the deployment of American forces lightly or without recognizing what such a commitment costs the people who make it and their families. I am saying that the alternative to taking the Iranian nuclear program off the table permanently is living in a world where the most aggressive state sponsor of terrorism in modern history acquires the weapon that makes it immune to conventional deterrence. A nuclear-armed Islamic Republic does not become more manageable. It becomes less manageable, permanently, because every policy confrontation is now conducted in the shadow of a threat that cannot be called. Every proxy attack, every hostage-taking, every missile barrage from an Iranian-backed group operates with impunity that no response can credibly threaten. The calculus does not improve. It collapses.

Whatever it takes means exactly what it says. It means full accounting of the enriched uranium stockpile, including ground-level access to the sites where it is buried. It means securing and removing material to locations outside Iran under international control. It means destroying centrifuge infrastructure, nuclear knowledge networks and reconstitution capability in ways that airstrikes at altitude cannot fully achieve. It means accepting that this is a generational commitment to ensuring the Islamic Republic never completes what it started, whether through the current regime's defeat or its replacement by a government that accepts genuine civilian nuclear use under full international verification. None of those outcomes come without cost. All of them are preferable to the outcome that occurs if the world decides the cost is too high and accepts a nuclear Iran as inevitable.

The Iranian People Are Not the Iranian Regime

This is the distinction that Western policy has failed to make clearly for forty-seven years, and it is the most important one. The Islamic Republic has never had the genuine consent of the Iranian people. The 1979 revolution replaced one form of authoritarian rule with another and has maintained power through repression, executions, imprisonment of dissidents, forced hijab laws, economic mismanagement that has gutted the Iranian middle class and a security apparatus that answers to clerical authority rather than to the population it governs. The Women, Life, Freedom protests of 2022 and 2023, which followed the death of Mahsa Amini in morality police custody, produced one of the most sustained and geographically widespread protest movements in the Islamic Republic's history. The regime's response was imprisonment, torture and execution of protesters. Hundreds were killed. Thousands were arrested. The world watched and issued statements.

The Iranian people are among the most educated, historically sophisticated and culturally rich populations in the world. Persian civilization predates the Islamic Republic by two and a half millennia. The majority of Iranians living under this government did not choose the theocracy, cannot remove it through elections that the system controls and have paid the full price of a regime whose foreign policy priorities, global terrorism, nuclear ambition and regional hegemony, have diverted resources that could have built a functional modern economy and cost Iran its place in the international community. Any serious policy toward Iran has to distinguish clearly between the regime and the people and has to commit to the latter's reconstruction and reintegration into the global community as part of any endgame. Punishing Iranians for their government's choices is both morally wrong and strategically counterproductive. A post-regime Iran with American support for rebuilding its economy, its civil society and its international relationships is a different strategic environment than the one the Islamic Republic has created. That outcome is worth working toward and worth paying for.

What Rebuilding Has to Look Like

The lesson of Iraq is not that rebuilding is impossible. It is that rebuilding without a serious plan, without adequate resources, without genuine commitment to the population's wellbeing and without distinguishing between removing a regime and constructing a functioning replacement produces a humanitarian disaster and a security vacuum. Iran is not Iraq. It has a stronger civil society tradition, a larger educated professional class, a more developed pre-existing institutional infrastructure and a diaspora of several million people, many of them in the United States and Europe, who represent an extraordinary reconstruction resource if given the opportunity and the incentive to return and contribute. A post-regime Iran that sees American and international investment in its infrastructure, its universities, its medical system, its rule of law institutions and its economic reconstruction is a country that has every reason to become a stable partner rather than a permanent adversary.

That rebuilding commitment has to be genuine, long-term and tied to the Iranian people's own priorities rather than to American or Israeli strategic preferences. It cannot be a temporary stabilization operation followed by withdrawal and abandonment. It has to include a credible path to full reintegration into international economic and diplomatic relationships, the lifting of sanctions tied to specific verifiable behavioral changes rather than to regime approval, and support for the Iranian civil society organizations, journalists, lawyers, educators and activists who have been maintaining the institutional knowledge required for a functional democratic transition under conditions of brutal repression. Those people deserve support. They have been doing the hard work without it for decades. The world owes them more than statements.

My Bottom Line

Forty-seven years is long enough. The Islamic Republic of Iran has had nearly five decades to demonstrate that it can be a responsible member of the international community. It has used those decades to fund terrorism across four continents, arm proxy groups responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans and others, imprison and execute its own citizens for dissent, and enrich uranium to levels that serve no civilian energy purpose. The airstrikes of 2025 and 2026 have set the program back. They have not ended it. The uranium is still there. The regime's intent is still there. The technical knowledge is still there. Permanent denuclearization of the Islamic Republic requires an endgame that includes either the regime's willingness to accept conditions it has never accepted or the regime's replacement by a government that will. The former is unlikely given forty-seven years of evidence about this regime's character. The latter is what the Iranian people have been asking for and what the world has failed to support with sufficient commitment. The Iranian people deserve a country that reflects their history, their education, their cultural sophistication and their aspirations rather than a clerical oligarchy that has exploited them as hostages to its own ideological project. They have suffered more than enough. It is past time for the world to act as though that suffering matters.

The Iranian people did not choose the Islamic Republic. They have been imprisoned by it for forty-seven years. Denuclearization and regime accountability are not the end of the story. The beginning of what comes next for Iranian citizens is the obligation that follows.

Why This Matters

A nuclear-armed Iran changes the strategic calculus of the entire Middle East permanently. Every Iranian proxy, every Hezbollah rocket, every Houthi missile, every IRGC-backed militia operation is conducted under the umbrella of a regime that can no longer be credibly threatened with the consequences that currently constrain it. Saudi Arabia's nuclear calculus changes. Turkey's changes. Egypt's changes. The regional proliferation cascade that follows an Iranian bomb does not produce stability. It produces a Middle East in which multiple state and non-state actors are operating in the shadow of weapons of mass destruction, some of them controlled by governments with no institutional history of deterrence management. That is the world that follows from accepting Iran's nuclear program as inevitable. The cost of preventing it is real and measurable. The cost of failing to prevent it is incalculable and permanent.