An Iranian protester tears up a flag during a demonstration in front of the U.S. Consulate in Milan, Italy, on Tuesday.Luca Bruno/The Associated Press
Proponents of regime change in Iran are urging U.S. President Donald Trump to intervene on behalf of the brave protesters rising up against their cruel theocratic rulers, warning that a failure to do so now would condemn another generation of Iranians to the isolation, decline in living standards and oppression the country has faced since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Previous U.S. presidents turned their backs on Iranians when they revolted against the regime in 2009 and in 2022, deeming diplomatic efforts to curb Tehran’s nuclear program a more pressing U.S. priority than the suffering of the Iranian people. It is now clear, or should be, that Iran’s duplicitous leadership has used nuclear negotiations as a distraction as it continues to suppress, imprison and kill its own citizens.
Even The New York Times editorial board, hardly a fan of either Mr. Trump or American military intervention abroad, now dismisses the prospects for diplomacy as long as Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is calling the shots in Tehran. “The Khamenei regime is too depraved to be reformed,” it wrote this week. “It had plenty of chances to choose another path … The ayatollahs chose extremism and subjugation instead.”
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Mr. Trump, emboldened by successful military operations to bomb Iranian nuclear sites in June and arrest Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro this month, may be tempted to strike Iran now for the wrong reasons – including feeding his own ego or advancing his might-makes-right foreign-policy ethos as he applies pressure on Greenland to surrender to U.S. ownership.
For some advocates of U.S. intervention, that doesn’t matter. Ousting the mullahs is what counts; that is Iranians’ only chance (even if it’s no guarantee) for a brighter future.
“[W]e have known since Machiavelli that a man without virtue can, unknowingly, perform a virtuous act,” French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy wrote this week in Tablet Magazine. “We have known since Hegel that the great turning points of History are often accomplished, as if by ruse, by men who have no idea what they are doing – and even less what they are unleashing.”
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Still, any U.S. attempt to achieve regime change in Iran, no matter how defensible on moral grounds, would be fraught with risk – for Iran, the United States and the entire world. After all, American interventionism in Iran is what led to the Islamic Revolution in the first place.
The Council on Foreign Relations this week unveiled a ranking of the best and worst U.S. foreign-policy decisions of the past 250 years, based on a survey of more than 350 members of the Society for the Historians of American Foreign Relations. While the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the experts’ hands-down choice as the worst-ever U.S. foreign-policy move, the 1953 CIA-backed overthrow of Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, which consolidated power in the hands of Iran’s repressive monarchy, was deemed to be the fourth-worst.
U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower’s backing of Iran’s pro-Western Shah was aimed at keeping Tehran in Washington’s orbit after Mr. Mosaddegh’s government nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company amid Cold War concerns the country could fall into Moscow’s sphere of influence. But that coup would later lay the groundwork for the Islamic Revolution.
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“[T]he Shah’s brutal elimination of both the nationalist and communist opposition led to a political vacuum that was filled by Islamic clerics, some of whom Washington had paid in 1953 as part of its campaign to oust Mosaddegh,” Philip Gordon, a Middle East expert and veteran of the Barack Obama and Joe Biden administrations, wrote in his 2020 book, Losing the Long Game. “With no other outlets for dissent, the Islamic movement became the leading voice for Iranian resentment of the Shah and his close ties to the United States, providing fuel for what would eventually become the 1978-79 revolution.”
The question now is whether Mr. Trump should intervene militarily to correct past U.S. mistakes in Iran. An early assessment of the U.S. President’s intervention in Venezuela should serve as a sober reminder to Iranian dissidents that the promotion of democracy is not a Trump priority. Expanding his own power and dominating his rivals is what he lives for.
Yet, that does not mean that ending the murderous regime in Tehran would not serve the interests of both Iranian democracy and global security.
“If Trump, by caprice, narcissism, or calculation, were to decide to strike the Iranian regime – and if, by striking it, he were to hasten its collapse – he would be absolved of nothing,” Mr. Lévy wrote. “But History would have to be seen as it is: ironic, unjust in its instruments, but just in its effects – and one would say of the act that it was great, even if the man was not.”