Escalating our war with Iran by pursuing regime change and nation-building would be a colossal mistake.

JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON 

Now that President Donald Trump has decided to bring the United State into the Iran-Israel war by striking Tehran’s major nuclear facilities, our goal should be to ensure Iran remains a non-nuclear power that’s unable to threaten the United States or its allies anywhere in the world.

What that goal doesn’t require, however, is a regime-change war with the aim of toppling the ayatollahs and imposing democracy in Iran. The American interest is not served by toppling regimes and nation-building — especially not in the Middle East. Whatever the wisdom of striking Iran’s nuclear facilities at this particular time, on the heels of Israeli strikes on Iran, President Trump’s aim now should be to limit escalation and avoid plunging the U.S. into a years-long quagmire in Iran. 

Unfortunately, many people in Washington were hoping that Trump would strike Iran precisely because it might make room for the kind of escalation that would lead to a regime-change war. We still don’t know what Iran’s response will be to these strikes, and it might well lead to unavoidable escalation on our part. But that escalation should serve the purpose of rendering Iran harmless — not free, or democratic, or even stable. The internal politics of Iran are of no concern to us. 

One hopes the president understands that, even as he acts to ensure that Iran cannot acquire nuclear weapons or carry out a major retaliatory attack on the U.S. Initially, there was reason to think he did understand. “Our objective was the destruction of Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity and a stop to the nuclear threat posed by the world’s No. 1 state sponsor of terror,” Trump said Saturday night from the White House.

But on Sunday, Trump posted a disturbing comment about how it’s not politically correct to use the term “regime change,” “but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!”

This is precisely the wrong view to take on Iran. The American interest in Iran is straightforward and strictly limited: that it should not be hostile to the United States. It can remain a repressive autocracy ruled by Islamic radicals — so long as they represent no threat to America. Whether the current Iranian regime is able to “make Iran great again” (whatever that means) is of no consequence to Americans. We don’t care whether Iran is great, middling, or riven by internal strife. All that matters for us is that Iran is not a threat. Here’s hoping President Trump has people close to him right now emphasizing that point. 

Of course, that’s not to say Trump can completely stand down at this point. Having entered the war, the U.S. has changed it. Trump’s long-stated, legitimate goal is to prevent Tehran from acquiring nukes. Even the most isolationist MAGA supporters should embrace that goal. Indeed, the mountain facility at Fordow should have been destroyed by the U.S. when it was first discovered in 2009 (instead, Obama cooked up a deal that ensured Iran would eventually have nukes).

But the reality now is that these strikes are probably not the beginning and end of U.S. involvement in the Iran conflict. Trump said Saturday night that now Iran “must make peace,” and, “If they do not, future attacks will be far greater and a lot easier.” Whether future attacks will be easier remains to be seen, but in the near term there are practical and strategic matters that the president and his advisors will have to address. 

Chief among them is to ensure the Strait of Hormuz remains open. About a third of the world’s LNG and a quarter of global oil consumption passes through the strait, which makes it a ripe target for possible retaliation by Tehran. Iran has previously threatened to close the strait in response to a U.S. or Israeli attack, and indeed Iran’s parliament reportedly voted to close the strait on Sunday, although the final decision lies with the Supreme National Security Council. If Tehran does move to close the strait, it will require American air and naval power to keep it open.

Even then, however, U.S. military action to keep the Strait of Hormuz open need not escalate to the regime-change war. The historical model — to the extent there’s a good one for the current scenario — is Operation Praying Mantis in April 1988, when the United States destroyed much of Iran’s navy in a series of limited engagements by U.S. warships and aircraft from the carrier USS Enterprise. 

The operation was retaliation for Iran mining the Persian Gulf and nearly sinking a U.S. guided missile frigate, which had been escorting oil tankers as part of Operation Earnest Will, protecting them from Iranian attacks during the Iran-Iraq War. What ensued was the largest U.S. naval engagement since World War Two. The operation destroyed an Iranian oil platform, badly damaged another, sunk or crippled three warships and several gunboats.

After U.S. forces sank an Iranian frigate and badly crippled another, they were ordered to assume a de-escalatory posture to give Iran an off-ramp — which it took. Later that summer, thanks in part to the losses it suffered in Operation Praying Mantis, Iran agreed to a ceasefire with Iraq, ending the eight-year war.   

The engagement stands as an example of how to deal with a hostile Iran without escalating into a wider regional war or toppling the Iranian regime. The idea that every war or military engagement has to end with the creation of a democratic regime friendly to the U.S. is a dangerous fantasy that has gripped Washington for a generation.

Iran hawks will reply by insisting that every war isn’t Iraq in 2003, which is true in a narrow sense. But Trump’s approach to American arms has been the exception, not the rule, over the past quarter-century. When he ordered a drone strike that killed Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in January 2020, without pursuing any further escalation, it represented a departure from how American military force had been used abroad since 9/11 and the Global War on Terror.

By taking out Solemani and leaving it at that, Trump was practicing a form of Jacksonian foreign policy that prioritizes and aggressively defends American interests, rather than the ideological priorities of neoconservative nation-building that had dominated American foreign affairs for nearly two decades.

That’s the approach we need now in the Middle East. The pressure on Trump to escalate from the intelligence agencies in particular will be intense. And there’s good reason not to trust those agencies. As Rachel Campos Duffy noted Sunday, the intelligence apparatus in place now is the same one that insisted there were WMDs in Iraq, that cooked up the Russia collusion hoax, that lied about Hunter Biden’s laptop. And we know from the first Trump administration that these agencies are willing to withhold or distort information to undermine Trump and advance their own agenda.

The danger we face now, then, is twofold: not just retaliation from Iran and its terrorist proxies, but machinations by establishment neocons and our corrupt intelligence apparatus to embroil us in a regime-change war in the Middle East. If Trump wants truly to embrace a Jacksonian foreign policy and advance his America First agenda at home, he’ll resist that temptation.

If he does, then we’ll hear no more talk of regime change or “making Iran great again,” which has nothing to do with America. There’s a reason that talk of regime change is politically toxic on the right, and Trump would do well to remember why that is.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

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         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

Israeli-fueled fantasy to bring back Shah has absolutely no juice
There is a reason why Reza Pahlavi has been cozy with Netanyahu and everyone knows it, which makes his return even more unlikely.

ELFADIL IBRAHIM

The Middle East is a region where history rarely repeats itself exactly, but often rhymes in ways that are both tragic and absurd. 

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the current Israeli campaign against Iran. A campaign that, beneath its stated aims of dismantling Iran's nuclear and defense capabilities, harbors a deeper, more outlandish ambition: the hope that toppling the regime could install a friendly government under Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran's last Shah. Perhaps even paving the way for a monarchical restoration.

This is not a policy officially declared in Jerusalem or Washington, but it lingers in the background of Israel’s actions and its overt calls for Iranians to “stand up” to the Islamic Republic. In April 2023, Pahlavi was hosted in Israel by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog. 

During the carefully choreographed visit, he prayed at the Western Wall, while avoiding the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount just above and made no effort to meet with Palestinian leaders. An analysis from the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs described the trip as a message that Israel recognizes Pahlavi as "the main leader of the Iranian opposition."

Figures like Gila Gamliel, a former minister of intelligence in the Israeli government, have openly called for regime change, declaring last year that a "window of opportunity has opened to overthrow the regime." 

What might have been dismissed as a diplomatic gambit has, in the context of the current air war, been elevated into a strategic bet that military pressure can create the conditions for a political outcome of Israel's choosing.

The irony is hard to overstate. It was foreign intervention that set the stage for the current enmity. In 1953, a CIA/MI6 coup overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s last democratically elected leader. While the plot was triggered by his nationalization of the British-controlled Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the United States joined out of Cold War paranoia, fearing the crisis would allow Iran's powerful communist party to seize power and align the country with the Soviet Union. 

The coup reinstalled the Shah, whose autocratic rule and dependence on the West bred a potent mix of anti-imperialist sentiment and religious fervor.

The 1979 Islamic Revolution, in its own way, was a delayed reaction to 1953, a radical assertion of national sovereignty over foreign interests. Now, Israel and the U.S. seem to believe that a new foreign-backed intervention could be the solution to a problem the last one helped create.

Since June 12, Israel’s military campaign has gone beyond targeting nuclear facilities. Strikes have hit state institutions and state television headquarters. In its most symbolic attack yet, Israel also struck Evin Prison, the primary site for jailing political opponents. 

President Trump on Monday announced that an agreement had been brokered between Iran and Israel to stop the fighting, a ceasefire that as of this writing, was still largely unconfirmed. It came hours after Iran had launched a limited attack on the U.S. base in Qatar,. The missiles were intercepted and no injuries were reported.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has openly framed the conflict as a pathway to liberation for Iranians. Operation Rising Lion, the name given to the air assault, is itself a nod to Iran’s pre-revolutionary flag, a symbolic gesture toward the monarchy’s legacy.

“As we achieve our objective,” Netanyahu said in a video address to the Iranian people, “we are also clearing the path for you to achieve your freedom.” 

For all the talk of regime change, however, there is little clarity about what, or who, should come next. Publicly, Israeli officials insist the Iranian people will choose their own leaders. Yet their public embrace of Iran's exiled crown prince tells a different story.

Reza Pahlavi has spent decades cultivating an image as a democratic statesman-in-waiting. In interviews, he speaks of a future decided by a popular referendum, backed by detailed proposals like a 100-day transition plan. To Israel's delight, his alignment extends beyond symbolism to the core of Israeli strategic thinking. 

During his 2023 visit to Tel Aviv, he articulated the very logic driving Israel’s current attacks against Iran, dismissing nuclear negotiations as a “waste of time” and insisting that the “quickest way to eliminate all threats” was to invest in an alternative to the regime itself. 

Moreover, he envisions a future rooted in what he calls the “Cyrus Accords,” a revival of the ‘ancient friendship’ between the Persian and Jewish peoples, a vision reinforced by powerful personal gestures, such as his daughter’s recent marriage to a Jewish-American businessman.

But this vision, compelling as it may be in D.C and Jerusalem, is almost entirely detached from Iranian realities. For many critics, even within the fragmentedopposition, this democratic messaging is a calculated strategy to rehabilitate the monarchy’s image and position Pahlavi as the only viable successor. 

His high-profile meetings with foreign leaders—most notably in Israel—and his calls for Western support are seen not as statecraft for a future democracy, but as efforts to secure foreign backing for his own return to power.

The Pahlavi name remains tainted for many by memories of SAVAK torturechambers, lavish corruption, and dependence on foreign powers for viability. While dissent against the Islamic Republic is widespread, slogans from the 2022 “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests — sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini in custody over the mandatory hijab — reveal a deep-seated rejection of both autocracies with chants like, “Death to the oppressor, be it the Shah or the Leader.”

The monarchy Israel hints at reviving was not merely overthrown in 1979, it was actively rejected by a powerful coalition of Islamists, leftists, and nationalists united against the Shah’s repression. This legacy of popular rejection severely curbs Reza Pahlavi’s appeal today. 

While opinion pieces in Israeli media frame the choice for Iran as one between chaos and a restored monarchy, Pahlavi commands little tangible support inside a country where many see his movement as “opportunistic” and “disconnected from the Iranian people.”

For Israel to imagine a different outcome in Iran is to ignore the region’s bitterest truths. From the sectarian carnage of post-Saddam Iraq to the militia-ruled wastelands that now scar Libya, Yemen, the last two decades have taught the brutal lesson that foreign-imposed regime change does not produce compliant allies, but rather vacuums filled by extremists, proxy wars, and humanitarian catastrophes. 

It is this painfully learned lesson that drove the Arab Gulf states pivot to diplomacy with former rivals like Iran.

The Israeli hope that airstrikes and assassinations are “creating the conditions” for the Iranian people to “rise up,” as Netanyahu stated, is not only ahistorical—it is dangerous. 

Even among Iran’s opposition, there is deep skepticism about foreign intervention. As exiled activists have told Western media, Iranians want to topple their leaders themselves, they do not want a “made-up state” or a new regime imposed by outsiders. 

In addition, the fantasy that a successor regime in Tehran would be inherently friendly to Israel ignores deep-seated suspicion embedded through decades of conflict, propaganda, and animosity now being cemented by overt foreign intervention. Even Reza Pahlavi, if somehow installed, would likely face immense pressure to distance himself from any perception of being ‘Israel’s man in Iran.’

Israel’s campaign may weaken the Islamic Republic, but it cannot conjure a new, friendly Iran from the ashes, least of all by championing a successor from a fallen dynasty that Iranians have long since rejected.

In the end, the future of Iran should be decided not in Jerusalem or Washington, but by Iranians themselves — on their own terms, in their own time.

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/shah-iran-regime-change/

READ FROM TOP.

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

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