Retirement experts note the folly of retiring from something, which drives what most people do, and the wisdom of retiring to something, a rarer but far superior choice.

The analogy holds when it comes to what just happened this weekend in Iran.

Especially if you look at what took place in Venezuela, the previous example of Donald Trump-led regime change, albeit on a smaller scale than his disruptive and deadly new initiative in Iran, the 17th most populated country in the world. Trump gets the “from” far better than the “to.”

Trump and his Israeli partners knew what they did not like in Iran and we don’t disagree.

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei led a repressive, theocratic, medieval regime that sponsored terror, threatened the security of Israel, repressed women and brutally murdered thousands of brave Iranian dissidents, a situation met mostly with silence from the river-to-the-sea protesters because it didn’t easily fit their anti-colonialist narrative. Russian President Vladimir Putin hailed Khamenei, found dead in the rubble of Tehran this weekend after yet another example of the precision of Israeli intelligence and the depth of its sources, as “an outstanding statesman who made an enormous personal contribution to the development of friendly Russian-Iranian relations.”

Putin is entitled to his opinion. But we won’t miss the man or his enforcers. Or his plans for a nuclear weapon. Nor will those celebrating on the streets of Tehran who are rightly hailing what looks to them like a very helpful blow in the direction of winning their own personal freedoms, although that group is by no means all of Iran’s 93 million people.

Still, as the European Union’s chief diplomat, Kaja Kallas, rightly put it on Sunday morning: “What comes next is uncertain. But there is now an open path to a different Iran, one that its people may have greater freedom to shape.”

One can only hope that turns out to be the case.

Indeed, Trump and his Israeli partners have a moral and practical obligation to do all they can to ensure that is the case. To pay attention to the “to.”

Whatever Americans think about what occurred this weekend, with the attendant death, economic disruption and other horrible human costs of war, to wish for anything other than that is to betray the brave Iranian people and its worried but hopeful diaspora, amply represented in our city.

We only wish we had more confidence in Trump’s follow-through skills.

We’ve said many times before that we don’t care for how Trump operates. Here is a president who promised a time of peace and yet whose rabid personal ambitions have stoked one destabilizing global conflict after another, the new one being the riskiest of them all. He operates on the global stage like a despotic real estate gambler, a volatile leader who dispenses with the requisite advice and consent of Congress, and perhaps even his own generals, and who thinks that leadership means shooting from the hip, ever confident in his own hunches. Such leaders are always vulnerable to outside manipulation and while Israel certainly has any number of very good reasons for wanting, even needing, regime change in Iran, Trump is inclined to forget that, in the era of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli and U.S. interests are not always the same. Nor are those of the Iranian people.

Trump’s presence in power makes the world a less safe place and only years from now will we fully understand the true, long-term consequences for America’s global standing. It’s perfectly logical to believe that and yet also be glad that the Khamenei regime has been skillfully ousted, if that indeed proves to be the case.

There’s the rub, of course.

Has it?

If we look to Venezuela, the most recent example of a Trump foray, we don’t exactly see the coming of nirvana.

The current interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, is the former vice president, and the Venezuelan National Assembly remains dominated by lawmakers sympathetic to the ideas of the ousted former president, Nicolas Maduro. Rodríguez might have deftly massaged Trump’s ego as needed with flattery born of the need for self-preservation, but she told NBC News last month that she still believes Maduro is that nation’s “legitimate president.” Not exactly what Trump was promising.

So that’s the nightmare scenario here: the Revolutionary Guard, a many headed-hydra, simply reasserts control, perhaps with some rhetorical concessions to stop the U.S. bombs from raining down on Tehran, and then goes about reasserting its brutal interpretation of Sharia Law and killing and repressing the Iranian people as usual. Or, perhaps even more likely, Iran devolves into a morass, a chaotic power struggle that destabilizes the entire powder keg of a region. Such an outcome would have broad economic consequences and allow despots yet unknown to reassert control even as Trump moves on to, say, Cuba.

There is reason to worry. But the world only spins forward and Americans, who elected Trump, now have to hope that the consequences of that election result in a better scenario for Iran and its long-suffering people.

May they progress to the freedom they deserve.

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