Trump Seems to Embrace ‘Regime Change’ in Iran, Saying U.S. Already Achieved It by Killing Leader
· Time
Almost a decade ago, Donald Trump campaigned against what he described as his Democratic opponent’s “failed policy of nation building and regime change.” After his 2016 election, he promised to “stop racing to topple foreign regimes.”
Now, he’s bragging about having done just that.
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Aboard Air Force One on Sunday, the President told reporters that his Administration is having “very good” negotiations with Iran to end the war, though he raised concerns about the Middle Eastern nation’s unpredictability that could hamper any potential deal.
“We’ve had regime change,” Trump said. “If you look already because the one regime was decimated, destroyed. They’re all dead. 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.”
The U.S., in joint strikes with Israel, killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the head of the country’s theocratic, conservative regime that began after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. But Khamenei was succeeded by his son, Mojtaba, whom Trump has criticized as “unacceptable.”
Other Iranian leaders have also been killed since the war broke out. Among them were Ali Larijani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, and Gholamreza Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Basij force—a plain-clothes militia unit of the influential and powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Other casualties include Iranian Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh, IRGC commander Mohammad Pakpour, IRGC navy commander Alireza Tangsiri, and the Iran Defense Council Secretary Ali Shamkhani.
But key leaders remain alive, including President Masoud Pezeshkian, Chief Justice Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i, and Ayatollah Alireza Arafi.
The U.S., meanwhile, is reportedly in talks with Iran’s Parliament speaker, Mohammed-Baqer Qalibaf, and is reportedly eyeing him as a potential U.S.-backed leader for Iran. Qalibaf has denied having direct negotiations with the Trump Administration, while officially Pakistan is serving as the intermediary between the U.S. and Iran. Trump claimed the Iranians Washington is now dealing with are “very reasonable” and that “you can’t do much better than that.”
But the shifts in Tehran’s leadership ranks do not constitute a regime change, Danny Citrinowicz, senior researcher in the Iran and the Shi'ite Axis Program at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, posted on X. Rather, he said, we’re seeing “a transformation within the regime itself, one that has made it more extreme.”
‘Not politically correct’
Trump has apparently warmed to the notion of regime change that he once promised to oppose. Earlier this year, his Administration intervened in Venezuela to arrest its sitting leader. And last year, Trump foreshadowed the current military campaign when he warned that the “not politically correct” term might be necessary for Iran, even as Administration officials such as Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio insisted “we don’t want a regime change” and “we’re not into the regime change business here.”
Trump later balked at his own suggestion, saying later that June that regime change “takes chaos, and ideally, we don’t want to see so much chaos.”
In the lead-up to the current war amid rising tensions between the U.S. and Iran, however, on Feb. 13, Trump said that a change in Iran’s power structure “would be the best thing that could happen.” Still, in the early days after the war broke out on Feb. 28, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that the operation is “not a so-called regime change war.”
Now, amid ongoing negotiations to end the war, which is unpopular among most Americans, Trump has seemed to stretch the definition of regime change in order to embrace it, reportedly insisting to CNBC last week that it’s an apt descriptor for what the U.S. has already achieved in Iran.