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Renaud Girard
Renaud Girard is Chief Foreign Correspondent at Le Figaro. An advocate of political realism, he studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Ecole Nationale d’Administration. He has worked as a war correspondent and written books about the Middle East, geopolitics and international relations.
During January 2026, the President of the United States ordered the deployment of an armada around Iran, the size of which had not been seen since the Pacific War (1941-1945). This show of force is the big stick that Donald Trump believes he needs to communicate with the Iranian theocratic regime.
Theodore Roosevelt, who was president of the United States from 1901 to 1909, and one of the two American presidents cited by Donald Trump in his inaugural address on January 20, 2025, once said that one should speak softly and carry a big stick. Trump sometimes sounds more mocking than truly soft, but he certainly employs the big stick tactic. The question now is: to what end?
When questioned by the press on Sunday February 1, 2026, the 47th president of the United States said he "hoped to reach an agreement with Iran." Trump was responding to remarks made by the Iranian Supreme Leader a few hours earlier. Ali Khamenei had warned America of the risk of a "regional war" should it carry out its threat of military intervention against Iran.
What does Trump want? He wants the complete denuclearization of Iran, subject to inspections at any time from the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna), and which implies that Iran transfers its stockpile of enriched uranium to a third country—Russia, for example.
On February 2, 2026, the president of the Islamic Republic (who is the regime's second-in-command, although elected by universal suffrage) ordered his administration to begin negotiations with the Americans on nuclear issues. An international agreement on this matter had been signed in Vienna in July 2015, then transformed into a United Nations resolution, but it was unilaterally repudiated three years later by the first Trump administration.
The heavy hand currently wielded by the United States has undeniably pushed the Iranian regime to seek negotiations. It is regionally weakened, having largely lost its proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq. But it is very difficult to predict whether these negotiations will lead to a concrete result, as the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran are currently deeply divided between ideologues and pragmatists.
Israel would like the United States to go beyond mere naval posturing and intervene militarily in order to bring about regime change in Iran. A large part of the Iranian population is waiting for precisely that, especially since the Islamic regime fired on demonstrators during the January 2026 protests, likely killing more than ten thousand people across the country, which is three times the size of France.
It appears that Trump is very hesitant to follow the advice of his Israeli ally and launch a regime-change war. There are several reasons for this.
First, the American president, who wants anything but a military quagmire before the November 2026 midterm elections, is only considering an aerial bombing campaign. No boots on the ground. However, the examples of West Germany in 1943-1944 and North Vietnam in 1967-1975 show that air campaigns are never enough to change the course of a dictatorship. To oust a power declared as an enemy, a ground military operation is necessary, as was the case in Mullah Omar's Afghanistan (2001) or Saddam Hussein's Iraq (2003).
Even in the event of a ground invasion (which Trump vehemently opposes), the next step would be to establish a transitional government capable of effectively administering the "liberated" country. The president has undoubtedly reflected on the United States' failures to properly manage Afghanistan and Iraq after their "liberations." In Afghanistan, the United States handed power back in 2021 to those from whom they had seized it in 2001 (the Taliban); in Iraq, they fostered the rise of an organization far more dangerous than the government they had come to punish: the Islamic State.
Western "humanitarian" interventions in Muslim-majority countries already existed in the 19th century, and they will almost certainly continue into the 21st century.
But I think Western leaders would now be well advised to only launch such interventions after simultaneously fulfilling three conditions. First, having a credible alternative power readily available (which was not the case with the valiant American governor Bremer in Iraq in 2003, who didn't even speak Arabic). Second, being certain of providing the populations they are helping with a better situation after their military intervention than before (which was not the case in Gaddafi's Libya, attacked by France and its NATO allies in March 2011). Third, being sure of safeguarding their medium- and long-term interests (which were certainly not safeguarded for France from 2011 onward, with a chaotic Libya that became a major platform for illegal immigration into France).
It is the heart that speaks when one wants to intervene abroad against a dictatorship oppressing its people. But reason reminds us that there is something worse than dictatorship: anarchy. And worse than anarchy: civil war.
This blog was originally published by Chronique Internationale du Figaro (International column from Le Figaro).