What Does Trump Think ‘Regime Change’ Looks Like?
The assassination of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is a monumental event, even in the context of President Donald Trump’s unprecedented foreign-policy moves this year. Khamenei’s despotic leadership accelerated the oppressive architecture of the modern Iranian state, but his death doesn’t necessarily signal a brighter future for Iranians.
One of Trump’s justifications for the unauthorized war has been to foment regime change, which he seems to believe killing the Ayatollah will accomplish. In an interview with The Washington Post, Trump said that “freedom” for the Iranian people was the goal; in a video address, he urged Iranian citizens to “take over your government” once the U.S. and Israel had finished bombing the country. But exactly how that’s supposed to work, and in what direction it’s supposed to change, aren’t clear.
More from Ellen Ioanes: Board of Peace Is a Board of ProfitsOn Friday, Trump reiterated that he wanted to “clean out everything” related to the current regime. “We don’t want someone who would rebuild over a ten-year period,” he said in an interview with NBC News.
Regime change, whatever that is supposed to look like, is probably only part of the rationale behind last week’s attacks; the administration also likely wants to control Iran’s illicit oil trade and other resources, credulously supports Israel, and demonstrates a “might makes right” foreign policy. Trump has no plan for ending the war, and indeed it only keeps expanding, threatening the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Lebanon, and Jordan, and threatening to draw in Turkey, Iraq, and parts of the Kurdish ethnic group.
The Trump administration’s speedy work in Venezuela, capturing President Nicolás Maduro and putting the country in the hands of his deputy Delcy Rodríguez, is no analogue for Iran either politically or militarily. The Venezuelan armed forces, though quite strong compared to other Latin American militaries and well integrated into the civilian government and economy, cannot compare to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s (IRGC) capacity, nor its embeddedness in Iran’s governance and economic structures.
“The U.S. presence on the ground engaged elements of the Maduro regime for years—it was engaging with Maduro directly as well, but it doesn’t have the same understanding of the Iranian system,” Ali Vaez, director of the Iran program at the International Crisis Group, said in a January interview with the Prospect. “And you know, coming to some sort of an arrangement with elements of a very entrenched regime is not as easily achieved as has been the case in Venezuela.”
The kind of high-level political or military defections and denunciations that one might expect during a coup, for example, don’t seem to be happening, and there’s no indication that they will anytime soon. The Islamic Republic’s Interim Leadership Council, composed of President Masoud Pezeshkian, Chief Justice Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i, and Ayatollah Alireza Arafi, assembled to discuss potential successors to Khamenei.
“Even though the Supreme Leader really constituted the backbone of the Iranian regime, it is really not a one-ruler state—you get rid of the Supreme Leader, the whole system collapses,” Mehrzad Boroujerdi, dean of the College of Arts, Sciences, and Education and an expert on Iranian politics at Missouri University of Science and Technology, told the Prospect. “And I think we are beginning to see that, [despite] all those folks eliminated in the Twelve-Day War last year and then this round, and still, the government is very much continuing in its practice.”
Trump has claimed that certain officials the U.S. was eyeing to replace Khamenei had been killed in U.S. and Israeli strikes. In the meantime, the Assembly of Experts, the body tasked with choosing a new leader, announced Monday local time that Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the late Ayatollah, will be the next Supreme Leader. The choice indicates a desire to maintain the status quo and consolidate power in a chaotic time.
Regime change tends to be more successful when there are powerful enough elements of the military that are willing to take a chance and change sides, or if the military is so depleted that it no longer has the willingness or capability to protect the state. Neither of these dynamics seems to be true in the Iranian context, likely because the IRGC is so deeply embedded in the economy and governance structure of Iran and benefits enormously from sanctions-busting industries like the oil trade.
Furthermore, there’s no major political opposition to defect to, even if leadership wanted to do so. Opposition groups, such as they are, both within and outside Iran are incredibly fractured; there are monarchists who support the leadership of Reza Pahlavi, the U.S.-based son of the Shah who was toppled during the 1979 revolution, though no one knows what kind of support he actually has inside the country. There are reformists, Kurds, and other groups, but none on its own has much real power to challenge the regime.
“It seems like, for the Americans and the Israelis, they don’t really care what Iranian opposition force they can utilize, [whether] it’s the Kurds or the monarchist camp,” Boroujerdi said. “Doesn’t matter—the game plan is to try to challenge the Iranian regime, right? But these groups have major differences among themselves.”
That has not stopped the U.S. from potentially mobilizing Kurdish forces in Iran and Iraq to mount a ground invasion, though no concrete plan or agreement to that effect has yet materialized, according to Allan Hassaniyan, a senior lecturer in Middle East studies at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies (IAIS) at the University of Exeter and a specialist in Iranian Kurdish politics. “From the Kurdish point of view, the major issue is, how long-lasting this Trump-Kurdish, American-Kurdish partnership will be,” he said.
Though they still maintain fighting forces, Iranian Kurdish parties have focused on civil society and political organizing in the past three decades. Still, these groups have also been marginalized and isolated by the regime—and they have never engaged with larger international powers.
However, based on the possibility of a U.S.- and Israeli-backed ground invasion, the regime has already started attacking Kurdish cities, political headquarters, and military installations, Hassaniyan said. Furthermore, parties are discussing the risks of collaborating with the U.S., “taking into account things that happened in Syrian Kurdistan, Rojava—Tom Barrack and Trump himself withdrew all responsibility and left the region in a matter of a few weeks.”
Trump’s aim to eradicate the Iranian regime, to be replaced with an unknown person of his choosing, seems for now like an unlikely scenario. The most likely positive outcome, according to Boroujerdi, is a weakened but pragmatic regime that reaches out to reformists and creates some kind of unity government. “I think that might make a lot of sense for them to at least try to increase their own base, right, rather than see the gaps and cleavages increase at this moment.”
But it’s also possible that, once the bombing stops, Boroujerdi said, the regime could decide, “OK, time for settling the scores with anybody who was a fifth column of the enemy, anybody who has said anything critical—meaning we end up with a more militarized, securitized state.”
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