Whatever Happens Next, Iran Doesn’t Need To Be Made Safe For Democracy
Escalating our war with Iran by pursuing regime change and nation-building would be a colossal mistake.
Now that President Donald Trump has decided to bring the United State into the Iran-Israel war by striking Tehran’s major nuclear facilities, our goal should be to ensure Iran remains a non-nuclear power that’s unable to threaten the United States or its allies anywhere in the world.
What that goal doesn’t require, however, is a regime-change war with the aim of toppling the ayatollahs and imposing democracy in Iran. The American interest is not served by toppling regimes and nation-building — especially not in the Middle East. Whatever the wisdom of striking Iran’s nuclear facilities at this particular time, on the heels of Israeli strikes on Iran, President Trump’s aim now should be to limit escalation and avoid plunging the U.S. into a years-long quagmire in Iran.
Unfortunately, many people in Washington were hoping that Trump would strike Iran precisely because it might make room for the kind of escalation that would lead to a regime-change war. We still don’t know what Iran’s response will be to these strikes, and it might well lead to unavoidable escalation on our part. But that escalation should serve the purpose of rendering Iran harmless — not free, or democratic, or even stable. The internal politics of Iran are of no concern to us.
One hopes the president understands that, even as he acts to ensure that Iran cannot acquire nuclear weapons or carry out a major retaliatory attack on the U.S. Initially, there was reason to think he did understand. “Our objective was the destruction of Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity and a stop to the nuclear threat posed by the world’s No. 1 state sponsor of terror,” Trump said Saturday night from the White House.
But on Sunday, Trump posted a disturbing comment about how it’s not politically correct to use the term “regime change,” “but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!”
This is precisely the wrong view to take on Iran. The American interest in Iran is straightforward and strictly limited: that it should not be hostile to the United States. It can remain a repressive autocracy ruled by Islamic radicals — so long as they represent no threat to America. Whether the current Iranian regime is able to “make Iran great again” (whatever that means) is of no consequence to Americans. We don’t care whether Iran is great, middling, or riven by internal strife. All that matters for us is that Iran is not a threat. Here’s hoping President Trump has people close to him right now emphasizing that point.
Of course, that’s not to say Trump can completely stand down at this point. Having entered the war, the U.S. has changed it. Trump’s long-stated, legitimate goal is to prevent Tehran from acquiring nukes. Even the most isolationist MAGA supporters should embrace that goal. Indeed, the mountain facility at Fordow should have been destroyed by the U.S. when it was first discovered in 2009 (instead, Obama cooked up a deal that ensured Iran would eventually have nukes).
But the reality now is that these strikes are probably not the beginning and end of U.S. involvement in the Iran conflict. Trump said Saturday night that now Iran “must make peace,” and, “If they do not, future attacks will be far greater and a lot easier.” Whether future attacks will be easier remains to be seen, but in the near term there are practical and strategic matters that the president and his advisors will have to address.
Chief among them is to ensure the Strait of Hormuz remains open. About a third of the world’s LNG and a quarter of global oil consumption passes through the strait, which makes it a ripe target for possible retaliation by Tehran. Iran has previously threatened to close the strait in response to a U.S. or Israeli attack, and indeed Iran’s parliament reportedly voted to close the strait on Sunday, although the final decision lies with the Supreme National Security Council. If Tehran does move to close the strait, it will require American air and naval power to keep it open.
Even then, however, U.S. military action to keep the Strait of Hormuz open need not escalate to the regime-change war. The historical model — to the extent there’s a good one for the current scenario — is Operation Praying Mantis in April 1988, when the United States destroyed much of Iran’s navy in a series of limited engagements by U.S. warships and aircraft from the carrier USS Enterprise.
The operation was retaliation for Iran mining the Persian Gulf and nearly sinking a U.S. guided missile frigate, which had been escorting oil tankers as part of Operation Earnest Will, protecting them from Iranian attacks during the Iran-Iraq War. What ensued was the largest U.S. naval engagement since World War Two. The operation destroyed an Iranian oil platform, badly damaged another, sunk or crippled three warships and several gunboats.
After U.S. forces sank an Iranian frigate and badly crippled another, they were ordered to assume a de-escalatory posture to give Iran an off-ramp — which it took. Later that summer, thanks in part to the losses it suffered in Operation Praying Mantis, Iran agreed to a ceasefire with Iraq, ending the eight-year war.
The engagement stands as an example of how to deal with a hostile Iran without escalating into a wider regional war or toppling the Iranian regime. The idea that every war or military engagement has to end with the creation of a democratic regime friendly to the U.S. is a dangerous fantasy that has gripped Washington for a generation.
Iran hawks will reply by insisting that every war isn’t Iraq in 2003, which is true in a narrow sense. But Trump’s approach to American arms has been the exception, not the rule, over the past quarter-century. When he ordered a drone strike that killed Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in January 2020, without pursuing any further escalation, it represented a departure from how American military force had been used abroad since 9/11 and the Global War on Terror.
By taking out Solemani and leaving it at that, Trump was practicing a form of Jacksonian foreign policy that prioritizes and aggressively defends American interests, rather than the ideological priorities of neoconservative nation-building that had dominated American foreign affairs for nearly two decades.
That’s the approach we need now in the Middle East. The pressure on Trump to escalate from the intelligence agencies in particular will be intense. And there’s good reason not to trust those agencies. As Rachel Campos Duffy noted Sunday, the intelligence apparatus in place now is the same one that insisted there were WMDs in Iraq, that cooked up the Russia collusion hoax, that lied about Hunter Biden’s laptop. And we know from the first Trump administration that these agencies are willing to withhold or distort information to undermine Trump and advance their own agenda.
The danger we face now, then, is twofold: not just retaliation from Iran and its terrorist proxies, but machinations by establishment neocons and our corrupt intelligence apparatus to embroil us in a regime-change war in the Middle East. If Trump wants truly to embrace a Jacksonian foreign policy and advance his America First agenda at home, he’ll resist that temptation.
If he does, then we’ll hear no more talk of regime change or “making Iran great again,” which has nothing to do with America. There’s a reason that talk of regime change is politically toxic on the right, and Trump would do well to remember why that is.
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