America and Israel are at war with Iran, a fact that should be neither shocking nor surprising. Both countries have been targeted by the Islamic Republic since its inception in 1979. Both countries have engaged in painful battles with the regime’s proxies. Both nations battled Iran for 12 days last year; Israel targeted nuclear assets and other key military targets, paving the way for a crescendo of American strikes that hammered Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
But the regime refused to back down. It continued to pursue its nuclear program and its violent proxy project. Its ballistic missile stockpile also grew at an alarming rate.
Seven months after American planes did their damage, U.S. President Donald Trump parked a massive armada in the waters surrounding Iran. For weeks, he exhorted the regime to negotiate and surrender its illicit nuclear program. Concurrently, the Israelis threatened war if the regime continued to stockpile missiles.
The clerics refused to stand down, thus triggering a widening war. And so we begin anew the debate inside the United States since the last helicopter escaped the American compound in Saigon in April 1975. What is the role of the American military in achieving American aims, and should American aims include using force to change regimes we believe violate the international order and pose a long-term threat to us and to the West? Never mind that the Iranian regime has all but asked for this war since 1979. The conversation is not about Iran; it’s about the United States almost exclusively—with Israel thrown in as well. The 21st-century meaning of “America First,” the vague slogan that Donald Trump revived when he began his political career in 2015, is now being hashed out and defined in real time.
The moment war erupted, critics hammered Trump—and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Tucker Carlson called the war “disgusting and evil.” He declared, “Just because the prime minister of Israel wanted a regime change… It certainly wasn’t a good idea for the United States.”
Former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene lamented, “Trump, [Vice President JD] Vance, [Director of the Office of National Intelligence] Tulsi [Gabbard], and all of us campaigned on no more foreign wars and regime change.” She later stated, “We voted for America First and ZERO wars.”
The anti-Trump left piled on. Senator Elizabeth Warren released a statement saying. “‘America first’ doesn’t mean dragging the United States into another forever war built on lies while ignoring the needs of Americans here at home.” Representative Ro Khanna posted on X decrying the “illegal regime change war in Iran with American lives at risk.”
Critics on both sides seek to discredit Trump by invoking the phrase “America First” and claiming that it means something other than the war Trump launched in 2026. They suggest that he has betrayed his voters and tricked the American people by wielding those words and then using massive force against a faraway country many Americans know little about. To be fair, Trump did repeatedly declare that he would steer America away from costly foreign entanglements. But we don’t know the cost or impact of this war. Moreover, declarations and actions are two different things. Over the past few decades, presidents have fallen into the habit of speaking belligerently and then acting cautiously. Trump has done almost exactly the opposite and seems (as of this early writing) unfazed by the complaint that he has been untrue to his own doctrine.
Wars have a way of destroying presidential legacies or securing them. For Trump, his presidency’s success, both now and in history’s retelling, hinges on battlefield performance and a paradigm shift. He must first bring down the Iranian regime while limiting the spread of the conflict. But he also cannot commit to costly and futile nation-building. Finally, he must avoid Iran’s maddening complexities, especially its sectarian and nationalist baggage. In short, he must pursue “America First” regime change. But what does that mean, exactly?
Not all regime change is bad or disastrous. The U.S. has overthrown more than three dozen hostile regimes in modern history. Some have been remarkable successes.
The defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 was the product of total war culminating in Germany’s unconditional surrender. The Marshall Plan directed billions of dollars into rebuilding West Germany. Over time, Germany emerged as a stable and democratic European ally. Similarly, the defeat of Imperial Japan in 1945 ushered in a military occupation led by General Douglas MacArthur. U.S. authorities dismantled Japan’s institutions and oversaw the adoption of a democratic constitution and parliament. Today, Japan is one of Washington’s most important Asian allies.
In 1983, U.S. forces entered Grenada to evacuate U.S. citizens, restore stability, and prevent the spread of violence after the government collapsed. Approximately 7,000 U.S. troops, alongside Caribbean forces, rapidly defeated the Grenadian military and Cuban forces on the island. The United States then supported constitutional elections in 1984 that restored civilian democratic rule, which Grenada still boasts today.
In 1986, the United States toppled Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos after fraudulent elections that rocked the country. As mass protests and military defections grew, U.S. officials worked to facilitate a peaceful transition. In February 1986, the U.S. evacuated Marcos to exile in Hawaii. Subsequent American efforts focused on democratic institutions and economic stabilization. Today the Philippines is among America’s oldest and most important allies in Asia.
In 1989, the United States removed Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega, a figure indicted in U.S. courts on drug charges. Approximately 27,000 U.S. troops were dispatched to the region. Noriega surrendered in January 1990 and then stood trial in the United States. After a period of transition, Panama remained stable and democratic.
More recently, America toppled the dictator of Venezuela, a narco-state that undermined American security and national interests in South America. The U.S. attempted to pressure President Nicolás Maduro to leave power under threat of military action and an oil blockade. Even with a massive fleet positioned off the coast of Venezuela, Maduro refused to yield. American forces arrested him in Caracas, removed him from the premises, and shipped him to America to stand trial. Trump then threatened Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s successor, with a “big price, probably bigger than Maduro” if she did not cooperate. She has since cooperated with American demands: passing pro-business oil laws, cutting off oil sales to American adversaries, and releasing hundreds of political prisoners.
Admittedly, not all regime change efforts have ended well. For example, in the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration overthrew Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz, whose Communist leanings also alarmedWashington. However, the new regime of Carlos Castillo Armas was unstable. He was assassinated in 1957, triggering a series of military takeovers, insurgencies, and weak civilian governments.
In the early 1970s, the Richard Nixon administration sought to derail the Chilean government of Salvador Allende. Economic pressure, diplomatic isolation, and covert support contributed to the 1973 military coup that marked the rise of General Augusto Pinochet—who did everything to derail efforts later in his rule to let free elections take place.
A more recent suboptimal outcome was the 2011 Libya intervention. The United States and allies combinedsanctions, diplomatic isolation, and limited military force to topple strongman Muammar Qaddafi during the Libyan civil war. NATO enforced a no-fly zone, enabling an air campaign that targeted Libyan military infrastructure while supporting rebel advances. Washington froze billions of dollars in regime assets to finance the new government. After Qaddafi fell, however, the Libyan government failed to consolidate power. Rival Muslim states backed opposing forces, yielding a deadlock that has endured since the re-eruption of the civil war in 2014.
Iraq and Afghanistan are America’s ultimate regime-change failures. In the case of Afghanistan, the war was just; the Taliban sheltered al-Qaeda leaders before the 9/11 attacks. President George W. Bush’s error was trying to forge Afghanistan into a flourishing democracy, using American taxpayer dollars, during an ongoing insurgency. The total cost reached $2.3 trillion, with more than 2,300 U.S. service members dead, before a cringe-inducing American withdrawal in 2021.
The 2003 war in Iraq was equally destructive but also less just. The rationale for intervention centered around allegations that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had “chemical and biological weapons” and was “seeking nuclear weapons.” That turned out to be wrong. But Bush’s gravest error in Iraq was the same one he made in Afghanistan. He sought to turn Iraq into a democracy during an asymmetric terror campaign to derail America’s efforts. The war cost American taxpayers morethan $2 trillion, with 4,300 U.S. service members dead.
America didn’t lose because regime change was bad. Regime change was hard, and it was made insuperably so due to the interference of one key player in both Iraq and Afghanistan. That player was Iran. Iranian training and material support for Iraqi militias enabled deadly attacks against American troops. The Pentagon assesses that Iran was behind 603 deaths (more than one-quarter) of American service members in Iraq. And while numbers are not available for Afghanistan, William Wood, former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, said, “There is no question that elements of the insurgency have received weapons from Iran.”
Questions linger as to why President George W. Bush chose not to widen the War on Terror to include the Islamic Republic. He included it in the “Axis of Evil,” after all. But given the long history of Iranian attacks against the United States, it’s fair to ask: Why did presidents over the course of 11 terms of office across 46 years refuse to act against the regime that was the most implacably hostile to America?
The trail of blood began in 1979, with the hostage crisis during which 52 Americans were held by the nascent Iranian regime for 444 days. President Jimmy Carter appeared feckless, hoping to resolve the crisis with diplomacy. The election of Ronald Reagan ended the ordeal, but Tehran was not deterred. In 1983, the regime was behind a suicide bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut that killed 63 people, including 17 Americans. The culprit was Hezbollah, an Iran-backed terror group. Later that year, Hezbollah carried out a truck bombing at a Marine compound in Beirut, killing 241 service personnel. The following year, Hezbollah kidnapped CIA station chief William Buckley in Beirut, later killing him. Hezbollah then managed to hijack two different airplanes, killing three Americans. Reagan followed the advice of his defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, and repeatedly stood down.
President George H.W. Bush had an early brush with Iran-backed Hezbollah when it killed U.S. Marine Corps Colonel William Higgins after kidnapping him in Lebanon. Result: nothing.
President Bill Clinton was no more challenging to Iran than his predecessors had been. During the 1990s, amid an American push for Middle East peace, Iran armed and funded proxies in the Palestinian arena, where it shed more American blood. Car bombings and suicide bombings by Hamas and Islamic Jihad not only derailed America’s foreign policy but also killed and wounded scores of Americans.
The regime grew bolder. In 1996, a truck bombing rocked Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 Americans. The Iran-backed Hezbollah Al-Hijaz was blamed. Then, with the assistance of Hezbollah, al-Qaeda bombed the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people, including 12 Americans, and wounding thousands. Clinton’s flaccid response to terrorism in the 1990s is the greatest foreign policy stain on his reputation.
By contrast, President George W. Bush’s War on Terror was expansive. But it was arguably not expansive enough. The 9/11 Report concluded that Tehran enabled the travel of 9/11 terrorists, noting “strong evidence that Iran facilitated the transit of al Qaeda members into and out of Afghanistan.” Bush declined to hold the regime accountable.
Similarly, Bush appeared paralyzed during the second intifada (2000–2005), when Iran-backed terrorists embarked on a terrorism rampage in Israel. Hamas suicide bombings continued to claim American lives. In 2003, Iran-backed terrorists even killed three U.S. diplomatic personnel in Gaza.
The Barack Obama presidency was marked by appeasement. The 2013 Joint Plan of Action (JPOA) yielded hundreds of millions of dollars to the regime in exchange for the mullahs’ agreeing to sit at the table. The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) gave the regime billions in exchange for fleeting restrictions on its illicit nuclear program. The agreement never addressed terrorism.
President Donald Trump’s first term saw a spike in Iranian aggression, particularly after he exited the JCPOA in 2018. In 2019 and 2020, attacks by Iran-backed militias targeted American forces in Iraq. This prompted Trump’s famous drone strike, which felled Iran’s top general, Qassem Soleimani. Iran, however, was not deterred. In September 2020, American intelligence exposed a plot to assassinate the U.S. ambassador to South Africa.
The presidency of Joe Biden began with a push for renewed diplomacy with the regime. This did not halt Iranian aggression. Iran-backed militia attacks killed or wounded American soldiers and contractors in Iraq and Syria between 2021 and 2023. Then, the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, plunged the Middle East into chaos. Iran-backed Hamas killed at least 48 Americans and kidnapped at least 12 Americans that day. As the war widened, American service members were hit with multiple Iranian proxy attacks, resulting in dozens of injuries and three deaths.
In 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice announcedcharges against an Iranian national and two American accomplices for plotting to assassinate President Trump. A U.S. jury then convicted agents of Iran for plotting to assassinate Iranian-American activist Masih Alinejad. Former U.S. officials Mike Pompeo, Brian Hook, and others were also targets of Iranian assassination plots. In March, as the bombs were falling on Tehran, a man working for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was convicted of entering the United States in 2024 with the intent of killing former Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley.
In short, Iran’s war against America has been relentless. There is no question as to whether the current war is just. It is. The debate is not about Iran. It’s about America’s role in the world.
None of Trump’s war critics question American military competence right now. What they question is the cost of the war, Trump’s endgame, and what they perceive as similarities between this action and the wars of the Bush era. In essence, Trump is being pressed to explain how the “America First” president who vowed to avoid foreign entanglements intends to steer America through this war.
Trump has already rejected the Pottery Barn Rule, a heretofore-unknown principle adduced by Secretary of State Colin Powell that supposedly required the United States to repair Iraq once we had “broken” it. Trump’s rejection is commendable. Just because America stands up to another country’s aggression does not mean that its taxpayers must finance the removal of rubble, let alone the rebuild. This was a novel precept, and it is one that Americans broadly eschew. Americans today seem to understand that the world is a dangerous place and that dangerous actors may require overwhelming responses—but they want to prevent the spilling of American blood or treasure for the benefit of others.
The Venezuela model for regime change is therefore, on the surface, an appealing model for the future. Minimal risk, all-but-certain mission success, and the promise of oil profits all sound ideal. However, surgical opera-tions with little destruction or bloodshed were never in the cards when it came to engaging Iran. Hundreds of top leaders and thousands of targets have been wiped out, with oil facilities in flames. The United States may yet find an Iranian Delcy Rodríguez should the regime begin to buckle. Then again, it’s hard to overestimate the ideological nature of the Islamic Republic. The task of finding pragmatists inside the regime may prove Sisyphean.
Here is where it is useful to remember that the people of Iran are arguably the country’s greatest resource. They are educated. A less radical, more pragmatic regime existed in Tehran in the memories of everyone older than 55, and the experience of living under theocratic tyranny has been the only experience young Iranians know.
Is Iran ripe for regime change? In 2009, Iranians overwhelmingly voted for liberalization, only to have the mullahs fix the result—leading to an uprising that had to be crushed, though not nearly as brutally as the killing spree in January 2026 that showed the regime’s truly murderous colors in the mass slaughter of tens of thousands. Indeed, Iranians have in recent memory sought to carve a different path and, just two months ago, were in open revolt. This is not a quiescent population whose will has been shattered.
Unfortunately, little is known about the opposition on the ground right now. But Iranian unity will be crucial to any effort to reach a stable end state in this war. We’ll soon see if the Persian-speaking majority can join forces with the complex patchwork of Iranian minorities.
Self-defined experts on these matters look at the prospect of Iranian common cause with deep skepticism. But we Americans are hardly the best judges of the ways to achieve common ground. Our divisive politics have in recent decades rendered American foreign policy schizophrenic, with key principles shifting violently every four or eight years. The debates over military intervention, regime change, and even America’s place in the world have yielded chaos and confusion, both at home and abroad.
While Americans have been exceptionally vociferous in expressing their varying political views in recent years, the Iran war has finally brought a major fault line to the surface. This heated battle on both the left and the right is between neo-isolationists and interventionists. For those who believe no good can come of war and that America fails when it fights, no argument exists that will penetrate their hard shell of determinist defeatism. But foreign policy theorists in the neo-isolationist camp—those who do not want to appear to be isolationist but rather realist—warn that whatever America does is merely a distraction from the real issue of the 21st century. That issue is our “great power competition” with China. Any cent we spend for any purpose other than countering China is a penny wasted. Of course, since China is allied with Iran and sees Iran as an extension of its sphere of interest, an American defeat of Iran would serve the purpose of putting China on notice that we will not look kindly on another totalitarian regime’s effort to spread its shadow across the globe. Nor will we sit idly by.
The task before Donald Trump is finding a middle ground that appeals to the isolationists and interventionists, on the left and the right, all of whom fervently believe that they are putting “America First.” To secure his place in American history, and to end this war on his terms, he must find a way to validate both camps while engineering a decisive victory in Iran that heralds a new Middle East, sets back rivals like China and Russia, and does not empty out the U.S. Treasury.
None of this is simple or intuitive. But history is replete with American regime-change experiments that did not bankrupt America and did not thrust it into a forever war. Should Trump find a way of repeating that history, and not the failures of the early 21st century, while vanquishing the greatest threat to American interests in the Middle East, “America First” won’t just be a political slogan. It will be a blueprint for other important battles amid the litany of geopolitical challenges that lie ahead.
Photo: Anton Petrus/Getty Images
