Trump talks regime change, but history shows that could be very hard
Barely an hour after the first US and Israeli missiles struck Iran, President Donald Trump made clear he hoped for regime change. “Now is the time to seize control of your destiny,” he told the Iranian people in a video. “This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass.”
Doesn’t sound complicated. After all, with Iran’s fundamentally unpopular government weakened by fierce airstrikes, some of its top leaders dead or missing and Washington signalling support, how hard could it be to overthrow a repressive regime? Possibly very hard. So says history.
Washington has a long, complicated past when it comes to regime change. There was Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s, and Panama in 1989. There was Nicaragua in the 1980s, Iraq and Afghanistan in the years after 9/11, and Venezuela just weeks ago. There was also Iran. In 1953, the CIA helped engineer a coup that toppled Iran’s democratically elected leader and gave near-absolute power to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. But as with the shah, who was overthrown in Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution after decades of increasingly unpopular rule, regime change rarely goes as planned.
Attempts to usher in US-friendly governments often start with clear intentions, whether to support democracy in Iraq or to back an anti-Communist leader in Congo at the height of the Cold War.
But often those intentions stumble into a political quagmire where democratic dreams turn into civil war, once-compliant dictators become embarrassments, and American soldiers return home in body bags.
That history has long been a Trump talking point. “We must abandon the failed policy of nation-building and regime change,” he said in 2016.
“In the end, the so-called nation-builders wrecked far more nations than they built,” he said in a 2025 speech in Saudi Arabia, deriding US efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. The “interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand.”
Now, after Saturday’s actions, a key question emerges: Does today’s US government understand what it’s getting into?
It’s unclear what regime change would even mean: Iran’s economy is in shambles, and dissent remains strong even after a brutal January crackdown on protests left thousands of people dead and tens of thousands under arrest. Many of the nation’s key military proxies and allies — Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Assad government in Syria — have been weakened or eliminated. And early Sunday, Iranian state media confirmed Israel and the United States had killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
