Dr. Nikolaos Stelgias
On Friday, March 6, 2026, U.S. President Donald Trump declared via Truth Social that there would be no deal with Iran except “unconditional surrender.” One week into a joint U.S.-Israeli military campaign that has killed over 1,300 Iranian civilians and at least six American service members, Trump further asserted the United States’ right to approve Iran’s next leader following the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the initial strike. He dismissed the succession of Mojtaba Khamenei as “unacceptable,” declared his indifference to whether Iran becomes a democracy, and drew an explicit parallel to the U.S.-backed transition in Venezuela, where Nicolás Maduro had been removed and replaced by a more pliable figure. The slogan “MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN” capped a rhetorical performance that signals something far more ambitious than military degradation: it signals what might be called sovereign receivership—the unilateral arrogation by an external power of the right to reconstitute another state’s political leadership.
Our new analysis situates Trump’s articulated endgame within the relevant international relations scholarship, drawing on the literatures of sovereignty, neo-trusteeship, and foreign-imposed regime change to assess both the strategic logic and the structural risks of the approach.
Sovereignty as “Organized Hypocrisy”
The most illuminating theoretical framework for understanding Trump’s posture is Stephen D. Krasner’s concept of sovereignty as “organized hypocrisy.” Krasner argues that sovereignty has never functioned as the inviolable norm its defenders claim; rather, powerful states have routinely violated both Westphalian sovereignty (the exclusion of external authority from domestic structures) and international legal sovereignty (recognition of juridically independent entities) whenever their interests demanded it. The mechanisms of violation include contracts, conventions, coercion, and outright imposition—the last of which is precisely what Trump’s rhetoric describes. What distinguishes the current case is its transparency: most great-power violations of sovereignty rely on institutional cover or plausible deniability. Trump is dispensing with both.
Ironically, Krasner himself—while serving as Director of Policy Planning at the State Department under Condoleezza Rice—proposed institutional alternatives for post-conflict governance that bear a surface resemblance to Trump’s vision. In a landmark 2004 article in International Security, Krasner called for “shared sovereignty” arrangements and de facto trusteeships involving international organizations, regional bodies, and the target state itself. The crucial distinction is that Krasner envisioned joint authority structures with at least nominal consent. What Trump describes is not shared sovereignty but unilateral receivership: a single external power claiming the exclusive right to vet, approve, and install new leadership. This goes beyond anything in the post-Cold War institutional repertoire, including the UN-administered transitions in Kosovo, East Timor, or Bosnia.
The Neo-Trusteeship Literature and Its Warnings
The academic literature on neo-trusteeship—the post-Cold War practice of external actors assuming governance functions in weak or collapsed states—is directly relevant and almost uniformly cautionary. Fearon and Laitin’s seminal 2004 analysis described how the post-9/11 environment drew Washington toward what they termed “postmodern imperialism”—complicated mixes of international and domestic governance structures. David Lake and Christopher Fariss tested these arrangements empirically and found no evidence that states under trusteeship develop greater capacity or better provision of public goods than comparable states not under trusteeship. Their explanation is inherently political: trustees pursue their own interests, and politicians within newly constituted states develop strategies that subvert the trusteeship’s stated goals.
This is precisely the dynamic that would be expected in a post-war Iran. Any U.S.-installed or U.S.-approved leader—whether Reza Pahlavi or an unnamed figure from the administration’s vetted list—would face an immediate and severe legitimacy deficit. The IRGC, Basij, and various militia structures constitute an enormous pool of armed, ideologically motivated personnel who would not simply demobilize. The postcolonial IR literature adds a deeper layer: William Bain’s work on trusteeship demonstrates that such frameworks inherently rest on a civilizational hierarchy—the assumption that certain peoples are not ready for self-governance. Trump’s explicit statement that he “doesn’t care whether Iran becomes a democracy” unwittingly confirms this paternalistic logic.
Foreign-Imposed Regime Change: The Statistical Record
Perhaps the most directly applicable body of scholarship is Alexander Downes’s work on foreign-imposed regime change (FIRC). Drawing on a comprehensive dataset of all regime change operations over two centuries, Downes demonstrates that FIRC increases the likelihood of civil war and violent leader removal in target states while failing to reduce the probability of conflict between interveners and their targets. The mechanisms are twofold: first, overthrowing a foreign government can cause its military to disintegrate, creating a pool of armed insurgents; second, externally imposed leaders face irreconcilable pressures from their foreign patrons and their domestic public—the “dual audience” trap. Both mechanisms are directly operative in the Iran scenario.
Downes and Jonathan Monten’s analysis of democratization outcomes is equally sobering: prodemocratic institutional reforms succeed only where favorable preconditions exist—high economic development, societal homogeneity, and prior experience with representative governance. Trump’s explicit indifference to democratic outcomes paradoxically makes the prospects worse, since it signals no institutional planning whatsoever—merely a leadership swap. As Bueno de Mesquita and Downs have observed, interveners prefer pliant leaders even when democracy is the stated goal; Trump is at least being transparent about what the scholarship says interveners actually want.
The Venezuela Analogy: Appeal and Structural Limits
Trump’s repeated comparison to Venezuela is instructive for what it reveals about his strategic imagination. The Venezuela playbook—capture the incumbent, install a pliable successor, declare victory—fits his instincts for personalistic, narratively simple outcomes. But the analogy is structurally flawed. Venezuela’s Chavista regime was a personalist-clientelist structure that could be decapitated with the removal of Maduro. Iran’s system is radically different: nested, overlapping centers of power—the IRGC, the Assembly of Experts, the Guardian Council, the Basij, the clerical establishment—cannot be neutralized by removing one figure. Iran’s geography (1.65 million km², 88 million people, mountainous terrain) and its position at the intersection of multiple active conflict zones further distinguish it from the Venezuelan theater. Aaron Rapport’s research on cognitive biases in regime change decisions is apposite here: policymakers who are most inclined to pursue regime change tend to focus on the desirability of the goal rather than on the steps required to achieve it, and overconfidence in quick success is a psychological prerequisite for signing off on such operations.
The “Unconditional Surrender” Formula: Historical Genealogy and Misapplication
Trump’s specific invocation of “unconditional surrender” carries a historical weight that deserves scrutiny. Roosevelt’s use of the phrase at Casablanca in January 1943 was designed to prevent a repetition of the post-WWI “stab in the back” myth, to reassure Stalin, and to signal total commitment. Critically, however, the WWII doctrine was accompanied by a massive, institutionally dense occupation apparatus—SCAP in Japan, the Allied Control Council in Germany—involving years of preparation and hundreds of thousands of personnel. It aimed, as Roosevelt himself clarified, not at the destruction of enemy populations but at the destruction of the philosophies of conquest. Trump’s version strips away the institutional content and retains only the rhetorical maximalism. “MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN” is a slogan superimposed on a policy vacuum.
Conclusion: Negotiating Maximalism and the Iraq 2003 Shadow
The most plausible reading of Trump’s endgame is that the “unconditional surrender” demand and the Venezuela comparison function as negotiating maximalism—setting the ceiling as high as possible so that any eventual outcome can be presented as a win. The preferred outcome is a pliable successor, permanent military degradation, and U.S. strategic dominance over the Persian Gulf. The realistic floor is a Pezeshkian-led or institutionally mediated transition in which Iran accepts severe military constraints in exchange for regime survival—closer to Iraq 1991 than Iraq 2003. The dangerous middle ground—and what the scholarship overwhelmingly predicts—is a prolonged conflict with no clean resolution, where military superiority cannot be translated into political control. The encouragement of Kurdish forces is a telling hedge, suggesting Washington is already activating internal fault lines, which historically leads to fragmentation rather than reconstitution.
The scholarly consensus is stark: what Trump describes has been attempted many times across two centuries, and it almost never works as intended. Sovereign receivership is not a strategic framework; it is a rhetorical posture that the international relations literature treats as a reliable predictor of protracted instability.
Works Cited
Bain, William. Between Anarchy and Society: Trusteeship and the Obligations of Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Bueno de Mesquita, Bruce, and George Downs. “Development and Democracy.” Foreign Affairs 84, no. 5 (2005): 77–86.
Downes, Alexander B. Catastrophic Success: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Goes Wrong. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021.
Downes, Alexander B., and Jonathan Monten. “Forced to Be Free? Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Rarely Leads to Democratization.” International Security 37, no. 4 (Spring 2013): 90–131.
Downes, Alexander B., and Lindsey A. O’Rourke. “You Can’t Always Get What You Want: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Seldom Improves Interstate Relations.” International Security 41, no. 2 (2016): 43–89.
Fearon, James D., and David D. Laitin. “Neotrusteeship and the Problem of Weak States.” International Security 28, no. 4 (Spring 2004): 5–43.
Krasner, Stephen D. Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Krasner, Stephen D. “Sharing Sovereignty: New Institutions for Collapsed and Failing States.” International Security 29, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 85–120.
Krasner, Stephen D. “The Hole in the Whole: Sovereignty, Shared Sovereignty, and International Law.” Michigan Journal of International Law 25, no. 4 (2004): 1075–1101.
Lake, David A., and Christopher J. Fariss. “Why International Trusteeship Fails: The Politics of External Authority in Areas of Limited Statehood.” Governance 27, no. 4 (2014): 569–587.
Mathieu, Xavier. “Sovereign Myths in International Relations: Sovereignty as Equality and the Reproduction of Eurocentric Blindness.” International Politics 57 (2020): 585–600.
Rapport, Aaron. “The Cognitive Psychology of Foreign-Imposed Regime Change.” In Waging War: Alliances, Coalitions, and Institutions of Interstate Violence. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015.
Graphic: Gemini