Why not? Regime change has worked out so well for US interests over the last generation.
Of course, those earlier disasters in spreading democracy at gunpoint and JDAMs applied to regimes that had at one time been relatively friendly to us. We had sided somewhat with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War and at least had normal diplomatic and commercial relations before he invaded Kuwait. Moammar Qaddafi spent a couple of decades targeting US military personnel before getting the message when we pulled Saddam out his spider hole and ending his nuclear-weapons program in 2003. He got repaid with remote-war regime change anyway. Libya is now a failed state, and Iraq is barely better than a battleground between ethnic and religious factions. And let's not forget Afghanistan, where we spent 20 years setting up a fragile democracy only to cut and run in the worst possible way to hand the country back to the terrorists from whom we liberated it after 9/11.
In the past 20-plus years, we've done regime change by occupation, and regime change by JDAM, in a part of the world that hasn't exactly produced Thomas Jeffersons, John Adamses, or George Washingtons. We've ended up with a failed state, a state explicitly ruled by Islamist terrorists, and one (Iraq) somewhere in between, but perhaps with some potential to cohere at some point if Iranian influence gets eliminated. Regime change as US policy in the Middle East hasn't worked out well, regardless of the methods used to achieve it.
Which brings us to Iran, and the same question: Should we orient our policy toward regime change? Or should we just aim for cooperation with nuclear non-proliferation and counter-terrorism in international relations? Our experience over the last quarter century would suggest that we avoid Option One. However, the real question here is whether Option Two exists with the current regime.
All evidence here is that the answer is no, too. For as long as we have tried regime change in this region, we have tried negotiating for Option Two while eschewing Option One with the mullahs of Iran. The regime began pursuing nuclear weapons in the 1990s, largely undetected by the West until 2002, when the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) exposed the existence of the secret enrichment site in Natanz and the heavy-water plutonium production facility at Arak. That forced the Iranians to admit to these activities and accept IAEA oversight and inspections, but they spent the next two decades cheating on every agreement they made and further burrowing into Fordow to prevent detection of any more of their program. The Iranians have negotiated in bad faith every step of the way for more than two decades, and nearly got to the point of producing a nuclear weapon in the last couple of weeks, thanks mainly to the refusal of Western nations to grasp the determination of the Iranian regime to possess these game-changers as their opportunity to impose their hegemony on the region -- and specifically to deliver on their ragime promises, "Death to the Zionist entity" and "Death to America."
Even today, with the Israelis raining unprecedented destruction down on Iran, the mullahs won't budge. Reuters reported today that Iran's willingness to discuss enrichment 'limitations' was "BREAKING" news, but ...
BREAKING: Iran is ready to discuss limitations on its uranium enrichment, a senior Iranian official told Reuters on Friday.
— The Jerusalem Post (@Jerusalem_Post) June 20, 2025
That's not news at all. Iran has offered "limitations" on enrichment the last several weeks, but they've agreed to such limitations before and abrogated those agreements in the past. Furthermore, they blocked IAEA inspections at facilities known to conduct nuclear developments, and outright refused to allow any inspections at Fordow or other places where IAEA has discovered uranium isotopes that suggest new facilities for weapons development. Today's offer from the Iranians -- also covered by David earlier this morning -- is akin to the dog returning to his own vomit. Not only isn't it breaking news, it's the same deception offered by the regime for the last 20-plus years as stall tactics designed to get to the fait accompli of nuclear-arms status.
Bear in mind, too, that Option Two has to include Iran's state support of terrorism and terrorist armies, as well as its ballistic missile program, for it to be worthwhile. We have 46 years of experience on the former for proof of this regime's intentions toward Israel and the West, with the IRGC and Hezbollah in particular authoring terrorist attacks around the world, even as far away as Argentina, targeting Jews and Western interests. The current war demonstrates the necessity of controls on Iranian missiles, a point long made by Israel and also by Donald Trump in his first term in his rejection of the JCPOA -- which Iran was already violating by that point. This regime refuses to even discuss that linkage, let alone comply with international law on terrorism and support of terrorist networks.
How long will it take before we finally admit that Option Two is sheer fantasy?
That leaves us with Option One, whether we like it or not. The mullahs of Iran are not interested in peaceful co-existence with the West, and especially not with Israel. They are determined to continue their support of terrorist armies and their pursuit of nuclear weapons to achieve their non-rational goal of immanentizing their radical eschaton, so to speak. No rational negotiations are possible with this Islamist hardliner regime. The only way to even attempt to achieve peace is to facilitate their departure, and as soon as possible.
That is no guarantee of success, as we have learned in the past. The only hope would be that the far more ethnically coherent Iranians don't fall into sectarian strife (as in Iraq), tribal dominance (as in Afghanistan with the Pashtuns under Taliban rule), or just a collapsed and failed state like Libya. There's reason to think that such an outcome has a decent chance of success, but only if the regime falls under its own weight and/or gets pulled down in a popular uprising. An American or Israeli military conquest of Tehran not only would be unlikely to succeed, it would create the conditions for failed-state status.
Benjamin Netanyahu grasps this point and has tuned his messaging accordingly:
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that the change or fall of Iran’s leadership was not a goal of Israel’s attacks but could be a result.
“The matter of changing the regime or the fall of this regime is first and foremost a matter for the Iranian people. There is no substitute for this.
“And that’s why I didn’t present it as a goal. It could be a result, but it’s not a stated or formal goal that we have,” Netanyahu said in an interview with Israel’s Kan public television.
So how does Trump thread the needle on Option One? An essay in Foreign Affairs by Eric Edelman, Reuel Marc Gerecht, and Ray Takeyh urges the West to focus on organic change from within, supporting groups that can organize resistance on the street and whose focus is oriented to secular and Western-style engagement:
Although Israel has killed a lot of very important people in the country, all the pathologies of the Islamic Republic are still intact. It remains a theocracy drowning in corruption. Core institutions, such as government ministries, are in an advanced state of decay and social inequality, especially in the wake of soaring inflation, has deepened. Some observers imagine that Israel’s attack will stimulate a nationalist fervor that would help insulate the regime. But the bonds between state and society are too severed for such an outcome. In past demonstrations, the Iranian people have blamed their regime and not outsiders for their predicament. Another major protest movement will undoubtedly arise. The question is what Israel and the United States will do to tilt the scales in the movement’s favor. ...
Given how weak the Iranian government may be after the current Israeli assault concludes, it might not take much to keep the Islamic Republic politically unstable. And an intense American propaganda campaign through social media and other channels should continuously highlight the calamitous and corrupt rule of the mullahs. The Iranian elite stashes a lot of money abroad. At a minimum, the U.S. Treasury should track and expose those funds. And whatever and wherever opposition forces emerge inside Iran, the United States should aid them with financial backing and technological assistance to the extent possible, as long as these forces aren’t politically extreme.
Iran belongs to the Iranians. They are the only ones who can in the end determine the direction of their country. They have taken to the streets in 1906, 1922, and 1979, and they can be counted on to do so again. All the United States and Israel can do is weaken the regime and accentuate its vulnerabilities. The Islamic Republic has never faced a crisis like the one unleashed by this month’s attacks. It’s a great irony that Israel—disparaged relentlessly by the Iranian leadership as a savage, illegitimate colonial settler state aiming to humble Muslims everywhere—may, just possibly, have opened the door for a new future for the long-suffering Iranian people.
The US had that opportunity in 2009, when an obviously rigged election put Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the presidency and outraged the Iranian electorate, particularly in Tehran. Rather than support that "Green Revolution," the Rob Malley-led foreign policy of Barack Obama instead chose to recognize the "legitimacy" of that election, and to use that to appease the mullahs into a nuclear agreement that eventually became the JCPOA. Joe Biden had a similar, if smaller, opportunity three years ago when Iranians rose up against the murderous Basij storm troopers after the death of women who defied the Iranian morality laws.
We can't afford to waste another opportunity if it arises, and we can't be afraid of regime change under the circumstances. This particular regime has spent nearly a half-century sponsoring terror, promoting genocide, and actually conducting a war on the US and on Israel, even if we haven't been honest (or courageous) enough to acknowledge it. If Option Two actually existed, we could try it, but Option Two is a fantasy for the pusillanimous leadership the West has produced for the last several generations. We really only have one option, whether we like it or not, because its only alternative is to surrender to annihilation -- first Israel, then the Middle East, and eventually us.
And that is no option. It's suicide.
