Regime change has occurred in Iran. Or it hasn’t. It is a goal of the war. Except it isn’t.
Those are some of the dizzying messages that have come from President Trump and his aides in recent days. The phrase “regime change” has flown from lips this week like fighter jets crisscrossing the Persian Gulf.
But there appears to be disagreement among top administration officials on what the phrase means, or whether the United States and Israel have achieved it in four weeks of war against Iran.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made an unequivocal declaration about the Iranian government at a news conference on Tuesday: “This new regime, because regime change has occurred, should be wiser than the last. President Trump will make a deal. He is willing.”
A common definition of regime change is a forced transformation of government or leadership that results in structural alterations in policies, politics and governance. In Iran, a theocratic leadership that is authoritarian and anti-American — and that continues to wage war — remains in place.
On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also the president’s national security adviser, expressed some doubt in an interview with ABC News about whether anything had really changed in Iran.
“The people who lead them, this clerical regime, that is the problem,” he said. “And if there are new people now in charge who have a more reasonable vision of the future, that would be good news for us, for them, for the entire world. But we also have to be prepared for the possibility, maybe even the probability, that that is not the case.”
Later, speaking to Al Jazeera, Mr. Rubio made it clear that destroying Iran’s weapons was important because the current leadership — the new regime, as Mr. Hegseth puts it — is an adversary.
“I think the best way to stability, given the people who are in charge in Iran, is to destroy the ability of Iran in the future to launch these missiles and these drones against their infrastructure and civilian populations,” Mr. Rubio said.
He added that “our objectives here from the very beginning had nothing to do with the leadership.”
Mr. Trump opened the war on Feb. 28 by working with Israel to carry out a strike that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, and other top officials. Hours later, he called for Iranians to overthrow their government sometime after the bombing stopped. The uprising, which was promised to Mr. Trump by Israeli leaders, has not materialized, but the president is saying mission accomplished on regime change.
In fact, he said, the United States has been so successful that it has ended not just one, but two Iranian regimes.
“We’ve had regime change, if you look, already because the one regime was decimated, destroyed. They’re all dead,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Sunday aboard Air Force One. “The next regime is mostly dead. And the third regime, we’re dealing with different people than anybody’s dealt with before. It’s a whole different group of people. So I would consider that regime change.”
To emphasize the point, he said, “Regime change is an imperative, but I think we have it automatically.”
Mr. Trump’s talk of the destruction of two regimes appeared to refer to the initial attacks that killed Mr. Khamenei and other senior officials and also injured his son Mojtaba Khamenei, who was later appointed by a group of clerics to be Iran’s new supreme leader. Iranian and Israeli officials say the son suffered leg injuries, and he has not appeared in public during the war.
The younger Mr. Khamenei is considered a hard-line ally of a powerful arm of the Iranian military, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. The government in Tehran vows resistance and continues to fight the United States, Israel and Arab partners, and to block energy shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, disrupting the global economy.
“There has been personnel change in Iran, not regime change,” said Karim Sadjadpour, a scholar of Iran at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. “Different men with the same ideology.”
Mr. Trump’s remarks about regime change have muddied the waters. But his military actions and coercive economic warfare against a handful of nations — Iran, Venezuela and Cuba — are aimed so far at decapitating leadership to put in power someone who will accede to U.S. demands, rather than effecting a wholesale transformation of the political system.
The president’s aim is to create client states by coercing regime compliance, part of a greater project of resurrecting empire. And he constantly talks about a template: the U.S. military’s violent incursion into Venezuela in January to seize Nicolás Maduro, the country’s president, and Mr. Trump’s subsequent negotiations over oil and other matters with the acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, who like Mr. Maduro is a hard-line leftist.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said at a news conference on Monday that the United States and Israel had to kill the older Mr. Khamenei and some of his aides after it proved too difficult to do diplomacy with them. Those previous leaders “are now no longer on planet Earth,” she said, “because they lied to the United States and they strung us along in negotiations, and that was unacceptable to the president, which is why many of the previous leaders were killed.”
Mr. Trump’s braggadocio over accomplishing what he calls regime change is fairly new. In 2016, when he was running for president, he criticized the wasteful U.S. “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying that “we must abandon the failed policy of nation-building and regime change.” In May, he gave a speech in Saudi Arabia in which he said that “in the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built, and the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand.”
Despite his embrace of war and military violence, Mr. Trump’s instinct to refrain from committing the United States to completely transforming hostile nations appears to persist for now.
The president’s remarks this week asserting that leadership decapitation is regime change can be interpreted as an attempt to redefine the phrase so that he can say his original war goal has been met.
“The administration as a whole seems to be moving away from deep regime change as a goal of the war,” said Rosemary Kelanic, the director of the Middle East program at Defense Priorities in Washington. “A real regime change war in Iran would require boots on the ground — and a lot of them — and Trump wisely doesn’t want to commit that level of effort when the costs and risks far outweigh the benefits.”
Edward Wong reports on global affairs, U.S. foreign policy and the State Department for The Times.
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