The Administration Faces a Series of Challenges
As the U.S./Israeli-Iranian War closes out its second week, questions of regime change are swirling. One of the chief divides on the Right is over whether the United States should carry out a regime-change war. Understanding this sentiment, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth recently contended in a 60 Minutes interview that the United States is not undertaking regime change in Iran in the sense that the Bush administration did in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, regime change in the most expansive sense is not the only available definition.
The classical political philosophers can help provide us with more clarity on the topic of regime. Aristotle taught in the Politics that the regime (politeia) is far more than a legal structure—it encompasses the entire “way of life” of a political community. (That some movement conservatives would call this “statism” shows how much even the most basic elements of politics are badly misunderstood in our age.) More specifically, the regime involves the character of the ruling offices (politeuma).
Drawing deeply on Aristotle’s teachings on this question, Pavlos Papadopoulos outlines a three-tiered approach to evaluating if a war involves regime change. Does it (1) remove the ruler(s), (2) eliminate the members of the ruling class, and (3) alter the form of government? While the U.S. has completed the first and partially accomplished the second steps, members of the Trump administration, including Hegseth, have stated that they have no interest in promoting democracy in the country. Fortunately, it does not look like a campaign similar to the catastrophic de-Baathification program in post-Saddam Iraq will happen in Iran.
However, this model clearly indicates that, as understood by classical political philosophy, the Trump administration is attempting to undertake regime change.
After all, President Trump has said that the Assembly of Experts’ selection of the new Supreme Leader of Iran, Mojtaba Khamenei—the son of the recently deceased Ali Khamenei—is “unacceptable.” Trump maintains that he should have a say in who Iran’s next leader will be.
Khamenei the younger has been described as a hardliner supported by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It’s possible that he could drive a further wedge between those who zealously support the mullahs and those who pine for a more Western-style way of life, potentially leading to another Iranian revolution. That could take years, however, since there doesn’t seem to be any resistance at scale in the country currently.
This is also related to the pertinent question of how long the war will last. Will it be over in a matter of weeks, or will it turn into something like the infamous COVID-era slogan, “15 days to slow the spread”? All told, it’s highly unlikely that airpower alone will be enough for the U.S. to secure a better leader in Iran—especially in the short timeline that has been floated by members of the administration.
The decapitation of the top level of Iran’s political class should be a warning to regimes closer to home—especially to Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez. Cutting off its oil in Venezuela, Cuba’s former vassal state, has exacerbated Cuba’s myriad internal energy issues. Widespread blackouts and a faulty, ancient power grid have been wreaking havoc. The energy crisis is layered on top of longer-term issues such as food shortages and garbage piling up in the streets. Even Cuba’s hospitals, much lauded by the American Left, are showing signs of stress, as doctors turn patients away.
It should not be a shock if a fundamental change in the U.S.’s relationship with Cuba occurs sometime this year—and that someone more friendly to U.S. interests comes to power. After all, Secretary of State Marco Rubio (who can speak Spanish fluently) and his team have been having clandestine talks with the grandson of Raúl Castro, the caretaker of the 94-year-old dictator who remains the country’s political kingmaker, and other influential Cuban leaders.
The Trump administration may even leave the current Cuban regime mostly intact, which would certainly anger Miami Cubans. But that’s the kind of realpolitik art-of-the-deal the president has made in Venezuela, allowing Delcy Rodríguez to become president and leaving much of the Maduro regime unscathed.
But to be the hegemon in our backyard, let alone project power elsewhere, requires that the U.S. address the state of its declining arsenal.
Will Thibeau of the Center for the American Way of Life has noted that our arsenal has been depleted over the past 20 years due to a combination of neoconservative enthusiasm for war and nation-building and a lack of attention to keeping up the defense industrial base. For example, Thibeau writes, “The FY2025 budget requested zero new Tomahawks for the Navy.” He also points out that “Standard Missile-3 Block IB interceptor procurement” went “from 153 over five years to zero.” Thibeau focuses on Secretary Rubio’s recent testimony, which highlighted that while Iran produces over 100 ballistic missiles per month, the U.S. is woefully behind. Current estimates are that the United States is only able to build between six and seven THAAD interceptors during the same period.
“The Trump Administration inherited the worst industrial hand any wartime president has held since the early months of Korea,” Thibeau writes, “when American troops fought with World War II leftovers because the postwar drawdown consumed the U.S. arsenal.”
The Trump administration needs to contend with another problem: warning signs in the polls. Despite the support of hardened plan trusters, polls show between 85 and 90% of self-described “MAGA Republicans” support for the war. But even having 10% of that group—and 20% of average Republicans—not supporting the war, or at least being undecided, is not good news for the administration, and foretells a tough midterm election.
Gas prices are another concern. Brent crude increased to over $120 per barrel before falling precipitously on Monday after President Trump said the U.S. had already achieved many of the war’s objectives. Though the U.S. has sunk numerous Iranian vessels that are laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz, seven commercial ships so far have been attacked. Although plans are in the works for the U.S. Navy to escort civilian ships, they’re not yet operational. In an effort to stabilize oil prices, the International Energy Agency said that its member countries will release 400 million barrels of oil. But that will be of limited help in a crisis that may soon intensify, especially given that Iran’s new Supreme Leader says he won’t reopen the Strait.
This is likely why discussions among administration officials about the need to choose a faster exit plan have been leaked to the press. It has been reported that unnamed advisors to President Trump have real concerns that a protracted war could decimate the existing support even among the president’s most fervent supporters. Though Donald Trump has been an Iran hawk since at least the late 1980s, he shouldn’t cast aside his numerous pledges to be more restrained on the world stage.
This isn’t to say that virtually every military scenario hasn’t already been gamed out well in advance. They all have, which undercuts one popular criticism of the war. But it is to say that the president may shift to following one of the short-term scenarios rather than one that’s more drawn out.
After all, the administration needs to remain vigilant at home. Reports indicate that there could be sleeper cells outside of Iran that may have been activated after the first missiles hit. Especially with the open-borders policies of the Biden administration, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that our adversaries, including Iran and China, could have exploited that weakness and embedded themselves in the U.S.
Finally, another problem the Trump administration faces is one of perception. This hasn’t been helped by those like Senator Lindsey Graham, who reportedly traveled to Israel multiple times in recent weeks, meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu and members of Mossad. “They’ll tell me things our own government won’t tell me,” Graham told the Wall Street Journal. Netanyahu allegedly coached Graham “on how to lobby the president for action,” even giving President Trump the intelligence that convinced the president to go to war with Iran. There is a good reason why U.S. Representative Tim Burchett said, “Lindsey hasn’t seen a fist fight he hasn’t wanted to turn into a bombing raid.”
Giving the perception in any way that the U.S. is doing the bidding of another country, even if it’s a long-time ally like Israel, doesn’t sit well with the motto of America First. American sovereignty rests on the idea that our political leaders are doing what is in the interest of our own country. Undermining this key principle would be a major mistake—especially given a political class that, absent Trump, the American people have little trust in.
