Stephen Holmes, Professor of Law at New York University School of Law and the Richard Holbrooke Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, is the co-author (with Ivan Krastev) of The Light that Failed: A Reckoning (Penguin Books, 2019).
The US may believe removing Tehran’s rulers removes the threat. But eliminating a visible adversary does not neutralize the underlying threat; it merely transforms it into something elusive, decentralized, unaccountable, and impossible to negotiate with or monitor.
