War on Iran and the Folly of Regime Change

Early Saturday morning, Israel and the United States launched what Donald Trump called “massive” and “major combat operations in Iran,” bombing at least fourteen cities throughout the country. Citing unspecified “imminent threats,” the president pledged to “obliterate” Iran’s nuclear program, appealed to the Iranian people to “take over your government,” and stated that the attacks will continue. More than 100 children were reportedly killed in a bombing of a girls’ school, and strikes on Tehran killed supreme leader Ali Khamenei.

The assault marks a dramatic escalation of Trump’s increasingly belligerent foreign policy, despite his having campaigned against war and military adventurism. “I’m not going to start wars,” Trump declared on election night in 2024. “The War Department will not be distracted by democracy-building, interventionism, undefined wars, regime change,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in December.

In a 2011 forum essay condemning regime change in the wake of U.S. military intervention in Libya, political scientist Alexander B. Downs examined “what the historical record tells us about the capacity of externally imposed regime change to bring peace, stability, and democracy to target countries.” Far from a historical exception, the “bloody aftermath of regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq,” he concluded, was the rule. Moreover,

not only is regime change difficult and unpredictable, but it is usually strategically unnecessary for the United States because so few countries pose any threat. It has fallen out of fashion to say so after 9/11, but the United States enjoys a high level of security. . . . In most of the places where U.S. leaders will contemplate future regime changes—Iran, Syria, Pakistan, Sudan, Burma—intervention is more likely to produce chaos than calm.

Read the whole essay here, with responses by Greg Grandin, Neta C. Crawford, and others.

Further reading from the BR archive:

+ Journalist Alex Shams’s recent essay on the U.S.- and Israel-backed propaganda campaigns positioning Reza Pahlavi, son of the Shah overthrown in 1979, to assume leadership in Iran:

Pahlavi is fond of pretending that his “restoration” to the crown is a fait accompli. He spent the twelve-day war in June insisting that the Islamic Republic was on its last legs and that he would return to Tehran on the back of U.S. tanks and Israeli missiles, going so far as to boast of plans for his first hundred days in office. There is more than a whiff here of the delusion promoted by Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi exile who hyped the 2003 U.S. invasion. . . . The governments of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United States, alongside private actors, have spent millions building up Pahlavi and regime-change sentiment more broadly while promoting attacks on those who oppose him.

+ Trita Parsi, cofounder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and expert on Iranian politics, in conversation with political scientist Rajan Menon about last summer’s U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran:

Gaza exposed to the Iranians and the rest of the world the falsity of the belief that the United States would constrain Israel and that, as a result, conventional force would be sufficient to deter Israel. There is no more confidence in this view after seeing how the Biden administration allowed Israel to do whatever it wanted, while only putting forward a pretense of a resistance. I think this is one of the biggest stories that has not been told: so much of Israel’s military success reflects the lifting of all U.S. constraints on how Israel could use force, breaking all codes of conduct.

+ Aslı Ü. Bâli and Aziz Rana on the significance of Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal in his first term:

For many in the Republican Party, not to mention allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel, it is Obama—rather than Trump—who should be viewed as the outlier and threat to national interests. For all the ways that the Obama years continued the basic orientation of U.S. foreign policy—highlighted specifically by the intervention in Libya and the arming of factions in Syria—the one break was his focus on using diplomacy with Iran to deescalate any nuclear confrontation. In truth, this effort [to secure the nuclear deal] was the single most significant foreign policy move in recent decades consistent with the old American postwar vision of multilateralism and faith in international legal arrangements. But it cut against the right’s growing Islamophobia as well as the desire of elites in Saudi Arabia and Israel for the United States to directly confront their regional nemesis.

Hear Bâli and Rana discuss their most recent BR essay, “The Path to the Trump Doctrine,” in a Quincy Institute webinar tomorrow, March 2, at 12 p.m. EST.

Further context from around the web:

+ British-Israeli historian Avi Shlaim questions Danny Ayalon, former Israeli deputy foreign minister and ambassador to the United States, on an episode of Mehdi Hasan’s Head to Head in 2019:

Iran is not an existential threat to Israel but it is a strategic threat. Now, let’s compare the records of these two countries. Iran has never attacked a neighbor; Israel has repeatedly attacked its neighbors. Iran signed the non-proliferation treaty; Israel has refused to sign. Iran submits to inspection by the international nuclear energy agency; Israel refuses to submit. Iran has no nuclear weapons; Israel has between 75 and 400 nuclear weapons, so Israel poses an existential threat to Iran. . . . For the last forty years Israel has conducted a systematic campaign of disinformation about Iran. Why the lies? Why the double standards? Why the hypocrisy?

+ Political scientist John Mearsheimer discusses Trump, Iran, and the changing world order on Piers Morgan Uncensored in January:

Mearsheimer: At first it looked like [Trump] was not going to do regime change because he promised that when he was running as a candidate. But if you look at what he’s doing, he’s quite deeply engaged in regime change. I think this whole business in Iran is basically a major-league American-Israel regime change operation. Same thing in places like Venezuela. And he does it in a very different way than we have in the past. He’s not interested in using boots on the ground or employing boots on the ground to have regime change like we did in Afghanistan, like we did in Iraq and assorted other places. He likes to do regime change on the cheap without boots on the ground.

[…]

The reason you got a revolution in 1979 and you got Khomeini in charge was because Iran was such a repressive regime under the Shah. I agree that the regime under Khamenei is repressive. My view is that’s the Iranians’ business. It’s not your business or my business to go in to Iran and rearrange the politics of Iran. I believe in sovereignty. I don’t like the idea of countries coming into the United States and interfering in our politics.

[…]

Morgan: Iran is no threat to the United States?

Mearsheimer: No, it’s not. Why is it a threat to the United States?

Morgan: Maybe because the Ayatollah has repeatedly threatened the United States publicly.

Mearsheimer: He can repeatedly threaten the United States till he’s blue in the face. Who cares? The question is, does he have the military capability to do harm to us?

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