A banner featuring Iran's late supreme leaders Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, left, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, centre, next to newly elected supreme leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, in Tehran on Sunday.ATTA KENARE/AFP/Getty Images
John Bolton served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006, and as national security advisor from 2018 to 2019 in the Trump administration. He will be appearing at INTERSECT/26 in Toronto on April 22.
To hear Donald Trump last week, one could believe Iran had all but surrendered, and that peace was at hand, in Henry Kissinger’s phrase. Friday’s stock markets followed Mr. Trump, rising sharply, as did oil futures, falling sharply.
Unfortunately, no one told Tehran, which announced Saturday morning that it was again closing the Strait of Hormuz due to Washington’s continuing blockade of maritime shipments to and from Iran. Iran’s parliamentary speaker says the two sides “are far from a final agreement.”
Beyond doubt, Mr. Trump wants out of the Iran conflict. He has repeatedly shifted his geopolitical objectives, even while insisting that his military objectives (e.g., destroying Iran’s navy) never changed. Ultimately, of course, the broad national-security goals are the ones that matter most, and it is precisely on those that Mr. Trump has been vaguest.
If the goal was regime change, which he suggested both during the massive anti-ayatollah demonstrations in January and on Feb. 28 at the outset of U.S.-Israeli military strikes, that has not been accomplished. Nor has Mr. Trump achieved the end of Iran’s nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile programs, nor its drone programs. He has not ended its support for international terrorism and key proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas, Yemen’s Houthis, or the Shia militia in Iraq. Nor has he demonstrated that Iran’s grip on the Strait could be defeated by military force.
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In short, Mr. Trump has achieved no broad strategic objectives. It is certainly true that Iran’s military capabilities have been severely degraded by six weeks of sustained attacks. For that, we can be grateful. But there is nothing conclusive about this destruction. Iran was already rebuilding its nuclear-weapons program at Pickaxe Mountain following 2025’s Twelve-Day War.
Considering the underlying fanaticism at the heart of the Islamic Revolution of 1979, all the threats the regime posed before Feb. 28 will re-emerge, given time and money, and perhaps even more menacing than before. Nor did decades of failed diplomatic efforts sweet-talk Iran out of its antagonism toward the Great and Little Satans (America and Israel), nor toward “heretics” among its fellow Muslims.
All this was foreseeable when Washington and Jerusalem began their “excursion” (Mr. Trump’s word) into Iran. Bibi Netanyahu has long understood that the only logical alternative to living with Iran’s threats, or more endless doomed diplomacy, was to destroy the ayatollahs’ regime. What did Mr. Trump not get? And not just Mr. Trump, but many people in the United States and the Western world generally.
Iranian woman wave the national flag and hold up an image of Iran's new supreme leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei in Tehran.-/AFP/Getty Images
Why is regime change so hard for so many to accept when reality and logic show it is the only responsible option to eliminate Tehran’s threat, rather than just retard it? Regime-change opponents point to contemporary “failures”: Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan. However popular, this rebuttal is deeply flawed in its substance. That the Taliban now control Afghanistan is not due to American intervention but American withdrawal, a strategic blunder shared by both the Trump and Biden administrations. In Libya, Libyans themselves ultimately ended Moammar Gadhafi’s regime, not Western military attacks; today, Libya is engaged in civil conflict between its east and west, a fault line dating to the Roman Empire’s break-up in 395 AD. That is hardly Washington’s fault.
That leaves Iraq, where regime change did succeed in achieving U.S. objectives. Saddam Hussein was not just removed, but executed after trial. Iraq today is not pursuing weapons of mass destruction. The country’s current disarray is due in part to failed U.S. and allied efforts at nation-building, something conceptually and operationally different from regime change. The decision to overthrow Mr. Hussein did not lead inevitably to a decision to engage in nation-building, something entirely separate and distinct. America’s mistake in Iraq was not in overthrowing Mr. Hussein, which was an unalloyed victory, but in not immediately empowering Iraqis themselves to rebuild Iraq, if it was ever to remain whole.
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So too with Iran, following a theoretical regime change. If the ayatollahs and the IRGC fall, the immediate aftermath would be turbulent, likely followed by a military government – one hopefully far-sighted enough to see that the Iranian people need profound consultations on their future constitutional arrangements. That is not for us to decide, but for Iranians.
Some say the outcome could be worse than the present regime. Seriously?
Right now, the outcome in Iran remains uncertain. If, however, the regime escapes again, and is able to rebuild, that would be a U.S. failure. There is still time to prevent this failure. Whether Mr. Trump can grasp this point is anybody’s guess.