For the past two decades, an influential band of foreign policy thinkers, politicians and activists in Washington clamored for regime change in Iran. These neoconservatives finally thought they were going to get what they always wanted when President Donald Trump, who ran for president on a false promise of avoiding regime change wars, joined Israel in launching a surprise war on Iran in February that began with the assassination of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
These dreams were shattered on Wednesday when Trump signed a memorandum of understanding with Iran’s new, more hardline leadership that looks like a total capitulation for the war’s initial aims. Trump, Israel and the neocons wanted to topple the Islamic Republic, permanently end its nuclear program, remove all enriched uranium from the country, end Iran’s ballistic missile program and debilitate Iran’s military capacities so that it could not threaten Israel. None of this was achieved, never mind Trump’s repeated bellicose insistence that he would only accept unconditional surrender.
Instead, the memorandum keeps Tehran under its new hardline leadership. It returns Iran’s nuclear program to an even less stringent set of limits than the status quo ante under the deal reached by President Barack Obama in 2015, which Trump withdrew from in 2018, with Iran affirming, yet again, that it won’t develop nuclear weapons. It expressly allows Iran to control and extract payments for shipping through the Strait of Hormuz — a massive change, for the worse, in the free movement of goods on the seas. It keeps Iran’s ballistic missile program in place. It also provides immediate sanctions relief for oil sales, with further relief promised later, the potential unfreezing of Iranian assets and $300 billion in financing to rebuild the country.
Let’s just say that the neocons and Israelis who thought Trump was dedicated to their cause are in shambles right now. New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, a proud neocon and war backer, called the deal a “debacle.” Over at the Washington Post, columnist Marc Thiessen, a former George W. Bush speechwriter and fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, labeled it a “complete disaster.”
“The Memorandum of Understanding between the United States and Iran hands the terrorist regime the one victory it could never have achieved on the battlefield. Financial reprieve,” Mark Dubowitz, the head of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a leading advocate of Iran regime change, wrote in the New York Post.
In Israel, the memorandum has been greeted as a stab in the back, with one TV analyst calling it a “diplomatic Oct. 7,” a reference to the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed nearly 1,200 people and sparked Israel’s expansionist wars in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Iran.
This is the culmination of the neocon and Israeli project of advocating regime change in Iran for at least the past 20 years. From Bush’s Axis of Evil speech through declaring Obama’s successful negotiations to limit the nuclear program the equivalent of treason, these neocons have only sought one thing: the overthrow of the Islamic Republic by any means necessary.
On the campaign trail in 2008, GOP presidential nominee John McCain, a longtime war hawk and neocon ally, jokingly sang “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb...” Iran, to the tune of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann.” Many other neocons and neocon allies long expressed a desire to overthrow the Islamic Republic.
“If we are going to pursue tougher international sanctions against Iran — and we should — the goal should be regime change in Iran, not stopping proliferation,” Dubowitz told Bloomberg in 2012.
“The more unstable we can help Iran to become, the better it is to actually secure peace if we can get rid of that theological regime one day,” Ari Fleischer, former press secretary to President George W. Bush, said in 2018.
John Bolton, the former Trump national security advisor-turned Trump enemy, wrote a New York Times op-ed amid the 2015 nuclear deal negotiations with the headline: “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.” “The United States could do a thorough job of destruction, but Israel alone can do what’s necessary,” Bolton wrote. “Such action should be combined with vigorous American support for Iran’s opposition, aimed at regime change in Tehran.”
Massive pressure through sanctions did not work. Neither did bombing Iran’s nuclear sites. Nor did supporting internal dissent. And, finally, the war completely backfired.
While the U.S. and Israeli war effort caused significant material damage — killing thousands of innocent civilians, including more than 100 little girls attending school — it allowed Iran to demonstrate that they could impose crippling economic damage on the entire world by seizing control of the Strait of Hormuz, causing oil, gas, fertilizer, helium and aluminum prices to skyrocket while using low cost drones to cause chaos in the Gulf Arab states.
The war that the neocons itched for turned out to be a total disaster — as opponents of war had always said. Their entire project has led to nothing, and they have nothing left to offer except further bellicosity and more calls for regime change. And for the past two decades, we’ve seen their dreams play out as disaster over and over again.
