Donald Trump told a Saudi audience last year that "Western interventionists and nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built." Months later, he launched a war against Iran with regime change at its center, calling on Iranians to "take over" their government.
Writing in Foreign Affairs, former Biden national security officials Rebecca Lissner and Mira Rapp-Hooper documented the contradiction between Trump's stated principles and his actions in Iran, "Hvylya" reports.
The 2026 National Defense Strategy explicitly proclaimed that the Department of Defense would no longer "be distracted by interventionism, endless wars, regime change, and nation building." Yet targeting decisions by the U.S.-Israeli coalition matched a regime change playbook: an initial strike killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and many members of his inner circle, followed by a campaign aimed at crippling the Iranian regime.
Realist thinkers have long rejected regime change as a worthy goal, the authors wrote, because they believe the material power of a country matters much more than its internal character and that the costs of changing that character run prohibitively high. The wars in Vietnam and Iraq served as cautionary examples.
Even as the Trump administration has signaled it may be stepping back from regime change as an objective, it has not explained what replaces it. The administration, the scholars argued, has offered no alternative endgame - leaving "the risk of political failure in conflict unacceptably high."
Vice President JD Vance pledged his loyalty to Trump on the basis that he would start no new wars. The Iran conflict has tested that promise in ways Vance's supporters did not anticipate.
Also read: why the Middle East's real problem runs deeper than Iran and regime change will not solve it.