President Trump has indefinitely extended the cease-fire with Iran, even though the core issues that triggered the war remain unresolved.
That doesn’t change one basic fact: The Islamic Republic has been badly weakened — militarily, economically and politically.
At least half of its missile arsenal and launchers have been destroyed or degraded.
Ballistic missile production has fallen from 100 missiles a month to zero.
Former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who ruled for 37 years, is dead.
Key military and internal security commanders have been eliminated.
The regime has suffered an estimated $300 billion in war damage, and a US naval blockade is costing Tehran nearly $450 million a day.
Inflation is in triple digits, the currency has collapsed and unemployment is soaring.
Since Khamenei’s elimination in the opening hours of the war, the regime has entered a leadership crisis, with growing reports of tension among the IRGC, Mojtaba Khamenei — the supreme leader’s badly wounded son and successor — and Iran’s senior political leadership.
Its terrorist proxies have taken heavy blows, from Lebanon to Gaza to Iraq and Yemen — even as they remain determined, as Abdul-Malik al-Houthi declared this week, to defeat the “Zionist plan” and drive America from the Persian Gulf.
Iran’s nuclear infrastructure is badly degraded.
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Yet its stockpile of enriched uranium — enough for several nuclear warheads — remains intact.
So is Pickaxe Mountain, a deeply buried facility still under construction that Tehran intends to use for nuclear enrichment and weaponization.
Once completed, it could be beyond the reach of the most powerful US and Israeli bombs.
All these circumstances create both opportunity and danger for Washington.
In announcing the cease-fire extension, Trump said the regime was “seriously fractured,” and that he agreed to a Pakistani request to pause military action until Tehran’s leaders could present a unified proposal.
That’s where the danger begins.
A weaker regime is not necessarily a weaker negotiator.
The Islamic Republic is more exposed than it was when the Obama administration signed the 2015 nuclear deal — but Tehran has not forgotten how to negotiate under pressure.
Talk of internal division helps the regime in two ways.
First, it buys time.
Pakistan — more Iran’s lawyer than a neutral mediator — has already succeeded in arguing that Tehran needs more time and space, with no deadline attached.
Second, Iranian negotiators can weaponize the appearance of division.
If Washington accepts the idea that IRGC leaders like Maj. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi are the hardliners while political figures like parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi are moderates, pressure for dangerous concessions to strengthen those so-called moderates will grow.
The nuclear file is where that danger is greatest.
A temporary enrichment moratorium would leave the rest of the nuclear program intact — preserving its research projects, missile development and breakout capacity.
As in the fatally flawed 2015 deal negotiated by President Barack Obama, Iran would retain its patient pathways to the bomb.
And because Washington will not want to threaten force every time a dispute emerges, Tehran could again block intrusive inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
That’s not the only danger.
Even as the blockade squeezes Iran’s economy, Tehran’s threats in the Strait of Hormuz continue to hold the global energy market hostage.
Shipping remains disrupted, oil prices are seesawing, and nearly a fifth of the world’s traded energy supply remains exposed to Iranian coercion.
Without constant military, economic and diplomatic pressure, the regime will do what it has always done: preserve its core assets, wait out the West, and advance when the world looks away.
If it succeeds, Iran will emerge in a far deadlier position.
The regime will immediately prioritize rearmament over any other consideration, fast-tracking toward an arsenal containing nuclear-armed ICBMs, thousands of ballistic missiles, a Chinese- and Russian-built military, hundreds of thousands of attack drones, a fully operational terror network and hundreds of billions to harden its economy.
At that point, reopening Hormuz may no longer be possible — and Tehran would hold a permanent chokehold over the global economy.
So the United States cannot afford to abandon its current advantage.
American military might has already brought Iran’s regime to its knees through an unprecedented campaign that did not incur heavy casualties on the US side or involve a ground invasion.
The goal was to neutralize the external threat posed by Iran.
We are closer to achieving that outcome than at any time since 1979, when the regime first seized power.
The task now is to prevent Iran from twisting the cease-fire from a source of pressure into a lifeline that will present an even greater threat in the months and years to come.
Mark Dubowitz is chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the presenter of “The Iran Breakdown” podcast. Ben Cohen is a research fellow at FDD.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
