The American concept of “regime change” – the term only entered common usage at the end of the 20th century – was actually born in Iran. In 1951, at the start of the Cold War, Mohammad Mosaddegh, an intellectual and ardent anti-imperialist, became prime minister and immediately set about nationalizing Iran’s oil industry. Harry Truman, on his way out of the White House, appeared unimpressed by British attempts to persuade him to remove a democratically elected foreign leader; Dwight Eisenhower had no such scruples. His newly formed CIA – led by Allen Dulles, brother of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles – staged what appeared to the world to be a popular uprising, Overthrew Mosaddegh in 1953 and restored the rule of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran.
The illusion of free regime change
At least Mosaddegh’s life was spared. (He spent the rest of it under house arrest.) America’s subsequent targets tended to be less fortunate. Under Eisenhower and his successors, the CIA targeted a number of nationalist leaders – Guatemala’s Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán (driven into exile), the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo (assassinated with US support), Congo’s Patrice Lumumba (also), Chile’s Salvador Allende (apparent suicide). This is by no means a complete list. Covert operations seemed, for a long moment in the American century, the perfect, cost-free way to shape the world to one’s will. A president nodded, a hostile leader disappeared, and Americans, vaguely aware of news from distant lands, continued to enjoy peacetime prosperity.
This moment didn’t last. What began as another covert operation against Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam deepened over time into the most painful military debacle in American history. By the time that war officially ended, a congressional committee had already begun its investigation into the CIA’s secret adventures, all with unintended consequences that inevitably led to suffering and instability. (This was just before the shocking takeover of Iran by radical Islamists, whose first act after three decades of brutally repressive rule by the Shah and his secret police was to take 66 American hostages in retaliation.) The illusion of free regime change evaporated like an Agent Orange cloud.
War with and without Congress
Three times in the early 21st century—twice in Iraq and once in Afghanistan—the United States went to war with the goal of eliminating (or at least disarming) a foreign regime. But in the run-up to these wars, the two presidents who pushed the cause – both named Bush – made their case persistently to the public and secured congressional approval. One can argue whether these were good or bad decisions (the second Iraq War pretty clearly qualifies as the latter), but the point is: no one pretended that these wars were painless. The cowboy era of overthrowing dictators without “boots on the ground” – as it was called at the time – was considered over.
And yet new technology was once again changing the way America waged war—laser-guided missiles and precision drones, satellite imagery so detailed you could track a delivery driver from halfway around the world. Few people in the public were more openly concerned about this than the late John McCain, the last of the American statesmen, who feared that America would be tempted to start a new series of secret wars, largely waged from remote CIA bunkers. “Since when is intelligence supposed to be some kind of drone air force that flies around and kills people?” he asked in 2013. McCain believed that if the military controlled these new devices, our leaders would be held more accountable.
Painless as a fake coup
He was too optimistic. Thirteen years later, Donald Trump had no reservations about leading us into all-out war without congressional or voter approval—largely because all that seductive technology, now in the hands of the military, made it seem as painless as a fake coup. That’s not to say there weren’t casualties: As I write this, several American soldiers have tragically died (in ways that seem entirely avoidable), and the number of civilian casualties in Iran is rising rapidly. But no one thinks of an Iraq-style occupation, and Americans wake up in the morning with their coffee and find little has changed – apart from slight fluctuations in the stock market and the price of gasoline.
War as a video game
As with their warm-ups in Venezuela and Nigeria, Trump and his colleagues are talking about the war in Iran the way they want us to see it – as a kind of video game with mobs and bosses instead of real people. As Pete Hegseth, our sleekly dressed avatar of a Secretary of Defense, put it: “America is winning decisively, devastatingly and without mercy.” That adolescent boast of cruelty — the kind of statement you’d expect to hear in a Discord chat during a heated game of “Overwatch” — would have made McCain’s head explode.
And so here we are, more than 70 years after the CIA expelled Mosaddegh, again overthrowing an Iranian government and this time killing its leadership – largely because we can. Our methods of regime change are more spectacular and devastating, but the basic premise is exactly the same today as it was throughout the Cold War: why not make the world the way you want it, as long as there is no obvious price?
From the start, Trump’s justification for suddenly entering the war seemed almost like a focus group exercise – throwing out new ideas until something stuck. Initially, the government framed regime change as a moral imperative because the Iranian regime was massacring thousands of protesters. A difficult premise to refute; Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s suppression of dissent was evil, and no one outside the purview of Sharia believed he deserved a far better fate than that which befell him. And yet, like all pleas for humanitarian intervention, this argument lacked moral consistency. Why Iran and not, say, Sudan? Why were the lives of Iranian protesters worth so much more than those of Palestinian children?
Dubious reasons for war
However, there was no need for serious answers to these questions – because before we could even think about it, Trump had already come up with the next, highly questionable justification: immediate threat. The idea was that Iran was close to possessing a nuclear weapon and wanted to unveil ballistic missiles that could reach our shores. That might have been Trump’s strongest argument—true imminent danger is perhaps the only legally and morally tenable justification for preemptive war—if it weren’t for the fact that we’ve all been down that road before, and you simply couldn’t find a single expert to confirm that Iran was even remotely close to threatening Alaska. The Pentagon’s own Defense Intelligence Agency estimated last year that it would be a decade before an Iranian missile could endanger us.
And then finally Marco Rubio, Secretary of State and what felt like twelve other titles, told congressional leaders that Israel was going to attack Iran anyway, which is why Trump decided we might as well go along for the ride. This immediately sparked storms of cross-party protest as it gave the impression that Trump was simply Louise’s to Bibi Netanyahu’s Thelma, and that America no longer controlled its own foreign policy. It took Rubio about ten minutes before he frantically started backtracking – and he didn’t stop.
The truth, as with everything surrounding Trump’s presidency, is probably more personal than politically driven. Trump has now mentioned several times that the Ayatollah had planned to assassinate him. (“I caught him before he could catch me.”) On foreign policy matters, he seems to trust no one more than his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his close friend Steve Witkoff, both of whom have deep business ties to Iran’s regional rivals and close ties to Israel. In the end, Trump does everything in his own interest, and the only doctrine behind it is whatever bullshit you concoct after the fact.
Physics instead of biology
However, our past shows us that interventionism is more physics than biology; You don’t remove a cancer cell, you set off a chain of unpredictable reactions. The invasion of Iraq, itself a response to the 2001 terrorist attacks, led to a domestic political crisis that led policymakers to ignore an economic bubble, which in turn led to a stock market crash and the election of the first black president, fueling the reactionary movement that ultimately gave us Trump. In the parallel world where George W. Bush would have retreated, President McCain is currently getting his monument.
Trump’s war may accelerate liberalism in Iran and the region – but it is just as possible, even more likely, that an even more hardline regime will rise from the ashes. Domestically, this image of Trump as Israel’s enforcer is already fueling anti-Semitism on the far right, which will no doubt be seized upon by pro-Palestinian Democrats; the real possibility of dark days for American Jews looms large. And you have to ask yourself what effect all of this is having in Moscow and Beijing, where those in power are taking up Trump’s signals about what is now permitted in this post-ordered world. With America’s coalition divided and its forces exhausted, will the Chinese move on Taiwan? Is Vladimir Putin suddenly thinking beyond Ukraine, towards the borders of Poland or Finland?
The costs of regime change will not be clear for a while. That there are always costs – always unforeseen – is the inescapable truth of the last century.
