‘Regime change'? Questions about Israel's Iran goal pressure Trump.

Boston Globe

18-06-2025

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That could leave Trump trying to avoid entanglement in the sort of conflict he has spent years portraying as the definition of insanity.
Israeli officials say their attacks are an urgent response to Iran's advances in its nuclear program. But there are growing signs that their aims are expanding.
During an interview on Fox News on Monday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel was asked whether regime change was an explicit goal.
'It could certainly be the result, because Iran is very weak,' he said. He added that 'the decision to act, to rise up, at this time, is the decision of the Iranian people.'
But Netanyahu has also appealed to Iran's population — which has risen in protest many times in recent years, only to be brutally repressed — to do just that. 'The time has come for you to unite around your flag and your historic legacy by standing up for your freedom from an evil and oppressive regime,' he said last week.
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In a Monday interview with ABC News, Netanyahu also said that Israel might choose to 'end the conflict' by killing Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
'This is the name of the game,' said Vali Nasr, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
'It's not how successful Israel is in taking out Fordo,' the Iranian nuclear facility buried deep in a mountain. 'It is now measured by how successful they can be in taking out the Iranian state.'
Nasr noted that Israel has been striking targets with no direct connection to Iran's nuclear program, including a Monday attack on the headquarters of Iran's state broadcasting network. 'They are trying to take away the coherence of the state — not only to conduct the war, but to function,' he said.
Trump has so far limited America's known role to the defense of Israel. But in a post on Truth Social on Tuesday, he suggested a willingness to eliminate Khamenei, saying 'we know exactly where' he is hiding. 'We are not going to take him out,' he wrote, adding: 'At least not for now.'
And the president associated himself with Israel's war effort, writing in a separate post: 'We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran,' with the support of US military hardware. (Despite Trump's use of 'we,' the United States is not flying missions over Iran, US officials say.)
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A full collapse of the Iranian state, meanwhile, would create new risks — including the need to secure Iran's nuclear material — that would greatly increase the prospects of US involvement in the conflict.
Israel's primary goal may be the destruction of Iran's nuclear program, said Michael Makovsky, president and chief executive of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, which has backed military action against Iran.
Makovsky added, however, based on his conversations with senior political and military officials there, that Israel has always known that such a campaign could also have broader political consequences.
'They've hoped that, because the regime was so weak, military action could lead to the people bringing down the regime,' he said.
Iran's leadership may share that assessment. In April, The New York Times reported that Khamenei agreed to nuclear talks with Trump this year only after top Iranian officials warned him that failure to negotiate could lead to attacks by Israel or the United States. That, they said, could threaten the survival of their government.
Even some supporters of using force to seek a change in Iran's government are careful to avoid the catchphrase that was used often during the Iraq War and subsequent Western interventions in the Middle East. They include the 2011 NATO air campaign in Libya that overthrew dictator Moammar Gadhafi but triggered years of chaos and civil war.
Trump himself has tried to engineer the fall of at least one foreign government, the leftist dictatorship of Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro, which he choked with economic sanctions in his first term. But he never described his policy as regime change.
'I use the term 'regime collapse,' versus 'change,'' Makovsky said, 'because the term 'regime change' is toxic in Washington. Everyone thinks about 2003.'
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In March of that year, President George W. Bush invaded Iraq and deposed its strongman, Saddam Hussein. The ensuing effort to install a friendly democratic government in Baghdad cost thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars, and to many, discredited US interventionism.
The key distinction, Makovsky said, is that a regime collapse strategy does not presume to remake Iran's government. 'My view is that we shouldn't do that. But our objective should be to pressure the regime every way possible so that the Iranian people bring it down.'
For now, Trump has kept some distance from Israel's war. But his supporters are divided on his approach, with some accusing Trump of betraying his principles.
On Monday, two of Trump's most prominent supporters, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and former Trump White House aide Steve Bannon vented their frustration on a radio show hosted by Bannon.
'The point of this is regime change,' Carlson insisted, arguing that Trump was being led by Israel into what could become a 'world war.' 'I don't want the United States involved in another Middle East war,' he added.
Bannon agreed, citing Netanyahu's comments on Fox and saying, 'This is a total regime change.'
'This thing has not been thought through,' he added. 'It does not have the support of the American people.'