Regime change in the Middle East: here we go again

For a President who, on the campaign trail in 2024, promised to keep America out of foreign interventions and “forever wars”, Donald Trump will go down in history as one of the most trigger-happy of US leaders. One who in his second term is far happier trying to re-order the rest of the world than to sort out many of America’s deep economic and social problems at home. Renaming the Department of Defense as the Department of War has turned out to be remarkably prophetic. Whereas failure is a great teacher, at least for leaders wise enough to draw and learn the lessons, success can breed hubris as leaders stop listening to their more sceptical advisers and start to believe in their own infallibility. Clearly Trump’s most recent attack on Iran, aided and abetted by Israel, was facilitated by the success of the quick overnight incursion into Venezuela (which led to the capture of Nicolas Maduro) and the last US operation against Iran in June 2025. These were “one and done” military strikes with very specific and limited aims. Capturing Maduro while leaving the Venezuelan regime essentially in place, in one case; degrading Iran’s nuclear capabilities to set its nuclear programme back by years, in the other. Elsewhere Trump has used single drone strikes to kill assorted jihadists and militants across the Middle East and as far afield as Nigeria. But US boots on the ground and any long-term US commitment in the name of nation- or democracy-building have been nowhere in sight.

This time round it is different. Trump has announced a much longer US military campaign backed up by a significantly reinforced US presence offshore in the Gulf and the Mediterranean (two aircraft carrier task forces), as well as at its dozen or so military bases across the Gulf. This gives Washington the wherewithal to keep its round-the-clock strikes against Iran going for several days, even weeks, although not indefinitely at the current level of intensity. After all, the Pentagon’s stocks of air defence missiles and precision guided bombs is not infinite, and Trump has already been complaining that his predecessor, Joe Biden, gave too many of these away free to Ukraine. Israel is also engaging up to 200 aircraft.

Trump has announced a much broader objective than simply destroying a few Iranian nuclear sites, air defence radars and missile launch pads.  He is seeking a change in the Iranian regime, but one carried out by the Iranian people rising up and taking advantage of the power vacuum that US and Israeli missile and air strikes will supposedly create. Trump is hoping that, bereft of its leadership, ability to communicate electronically and military command structure, the Iranian security forces (such as the Revolutionary Guards Corps or the Basij popular militia) will be as incapable of carrying out further domestic repression as they will be of retaliating against US and Israeli targets in the region. But the Trumpian definition of “regime change“ is hazy. In Venezuela, Trump was content to change only the man at the top and then sing the praises of the Vice President, Delcy Rodríguez, installed as provisional leader, as long as she and her government colleagues were willing to cooperate with Washington, halt commercial dealings with China and open up Venezuela’s oil industry to investment from the US oil majors. Trump rebuffed the leaders of the democratic opposition (despite their convincing victory in the last Venezuelan elections) and the Nobel Peace Prize winner, María Corina Machado, who now has no clear path to power. Will Trump do the same in Iran, particularly now that the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been killed in an air strike along with the Iranian defence minister and leader of the Revolutionary Guards Corps? The anti-regime Iranian protesters lack organisation and a programme even more than the electorally mandated Venezuelan opposition leaders.

Trump is notorious for switching his objectives from one day to the next. Just one day after proclaiming the goal of regime change, he was telling the US network CBS that he felt the success of the initial US strikes would bring the regime in Tehran back to the nuclear negotiations in Geneva. Asked by The Atlantic whether he would keep the campaign going long enough for a popular uprising to occur, the President was non-committal. Iranian protesters need to be cautious. Pitching in bombs from the air and hoping for the best is not a recipe for building democracy on the ground, and when the US has brought about regime change in the past, the results have been little short of catastrophic. Iraq after the US invasion in 2003, Afghanistan after 2001 and Libya after the NATO-induced fall of Gaddafi in 2011 are the most telling examples. Yes, Iraq is admittedly in better shape nowadays and has held no fewer than eleven elections since the international forces departed in December 2011. Yet the Iraqi stabilisation effort took 20 years and cost thousands of US and coalition forces casualties, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed and billions of dollars in security and reconstruction costs. Looking back, and on decades of chaos in Iraq caused by the US invasion, the achievement relative to the cost hardly justifies the decision of President George W. Bush to go to war, especially as his casus belli – Iraq’s alleged retention of nuclear weapons components – proved to be totally bogus. Israel tried its hand at regime change too by invading Lebanon in 1982 and occupying the south of the country. Instead of turning Lebanon into a friendly neighbour, it fragmented the country politically and reinforced the stranglehold of Hezbollah over the Lebanese state.

So, although he has talked of regime change, the US President, anxious to avoid multiple US casualties and a quagmire in Iran in a US election year, will probably prefer the predictability of dealing with an Iranian authoritarian strongman rather than the uncertainties of a democratic government subject to the will and passions of the average Iranian voter. In any case, if Iraq is a guide, democracy-building will be a long and painful process with political parties dividing along ethnic and religious lines (rather than political ideologies) and bitter rivalries between diaspora Iranians trying to make a comeback from outside (like the exiled son of the former Shah, Reza Pahlavi) and leaders from within the country emerging from the street protest movements and civil society. Regional fragmentation in Iran is possible as the country is made up of fewer than 60% ethnic Persians as well as 12 minority ethnic groups, including Kurds in the west, Azeris in the north and Sunni Muslim Arabs and Afghan refugees in the south. Given its long-standing demonisation of Iran, Israel might be content to see prolonged chaos inside the country following the collapse of the regime of the Mullahs, but this would be a short-sighted view. Chaos could provoke mass migration out of the country, as happened to millions of Syrians and Iraqis heading to Türkiye and Europe during the civil wars in their own failed states. The US and Israelis may have a common interest in hollowing out the current and residual military capability of the Iranian regime so that it is an empty shell and Iran is taken out of the geopolitics of the Middle East for a generation. But a country of 92 million people sunk into poverty, riven by internal turmoil and subject to outside interference could be just as much a security headache for its neighbours as the regime of the Mullahs with their nuclear programme, ballistic missiles and proxy militias.

In these early days of the US military campaign against Iran, anything can happen and all options are on the table – from a full democratic transition to the survival of the current repressive theocratic regime with new faces at the top, to something in between these polar opposites. But what is worrying is America’s lack of preparation for the day after.

When George W. Bush planned his dubious invasion of Iraq in 2003, he travelled across the US to make his case to the American public.  By contrast, Trump offered in the first few days of the campaign only two, highly scripted video statements and has not gone on US national TV to offer a detailed rationale to Americans (and a global audience beyond) for why the US is starting an unprovoked and controversial military action. According to a Reuters poll, only one in four Americans approve of Trump’s strikes against Iran, preferring him to concentrate less on foreign policy and more on the domestic issues for which he was elected. Unlike in 2003, we have seen no US Secretary of State go to the UN Security Council and explain why it is intolerable for Iran to acquire weapons of mass destruction – a bogus case in Iraq in 2003, as it turned out – but at least the Bush administration at the time took its public diplomacy seriously. It tried to get a Security Council Resolution in support of its intervention in Iraq (as Bush’s father had done before the Gulf War in 1991) rather than bypassing the UN altogether. It also went to Congress, as it was obliged to do under the US Constitution, and sought Congressional approval (as did Bush’s ally, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, vis-à-vis the House of Commons).

Trump has avoided political scrutiny of the rationale for his actions. For instance, how are pre-emptive strikes justified if there was no imminent threat from Iran to the US and no Iranian attack where retaliation would have been acceptable?  Trump was more eloquent speaking of past Iranian hostility to the US going back to the Islamic revolution of 1979 than in describing why US military action was necessary or had to happen now. His assertion that Iran was building an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the US was disproved by a report from the US Defense Intelligence Agency last year. Moreover, Trump did not explain why he had to abandon diplomacy and the nuclear talks with Iran now when the Omanis, acting as mediators, had reported progress and concessions that Tehran was willing to make.

It seems that the campaign was launched early on Saturday 28 February because of a target of opportunity and one that was too good to miss: namely a meeting of the top Iranian leadership convened by the Supreme Leader in his bunker in central Iran, which was identified by US and Israeli intelligence tracking and allowed the killing of the Supreme Leader and 48 of his most senior commanders in a single strike. This was clearly a combination of exquisite intelligence gathering by the CIA and Mossad and dumbfounding incompetence by the Iranian leadership in allowing itself to be so comprehensively penetrated by its adversaries and so casual about basic security protocols. The Israelis had hacked into the traffic control cameras on the streets of Tehran and followed the car journeys of senior Iranian personnel over several months to build a “pattern of life” picture of their daily routines and most frequented locations. Yet the deliberate assassination of a leader by a foreign power (as opposed to removal by his own people) sets a worrying precedent in international law and a further erosion of the rules-based order, a precedent that no doubt other powers will take advantage of.  We are moving rapidly from a world of “I should”, subject to rules, conditions and legal constraints, to a world of “I can”, where brute force and military advantage impose their own rules. This Iran war is being used as another pretext by administration officials and Trump apologists to claim that international law no longer has validity and can be conveniently disregarded because it has failed to prevent aggression, atrocities and acts of terrorism in the past. Admittedly international law is not perfect, but to ditch it altogether in the name of might is right is never going to produce a safer world or less human misery. It is an extremely dangerous as well as cynical argument. It is remarkable that few governments have shown concern regarding the killing of innocent civilians (over 550 in Iran and 52 in Lebanon so far) leaving this humanitarian duty to NGOs like the Red Crescent.

When one claims regime change as a military objective, one must take ownership of what comes next. But there are no indications of any planning in the White House and In Jerusalem for the day after military operations finish. Amazingly, Trump announced that the alternative leaders that the US had in mind for the Iranian transition (all from within the current regime leadership) were killed in the strike against the Supreme Leader’s bunker. Democrats are not known to flourish in situations of chaos but only extremists, or opportunists and a Monarchs v Military v Mullahs dilemma is hardly the Hobson’s Choice that most Iranians will be hoping for. Post-war stabilisation and reconstruction are extremely difficult as the US and its allies found to their cost in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US State Department planned in great detail and for over a year before the military occupation of Iraq post-Saddam Hussein – and still made a total mess of it. Since Trump returned to power, the State Department has been hollowed out, making its capacity to do any further post-war planning moot.

When it came to lessons learned from the Iraq experience, one of the key findings was: don’t destroy the local security forces if you are not willing or able to do the security job competently yourself. You need them to keep order and impose the authority of the state as well as keep the extremists at bay. Certainly, the leadership loyal to the ancien régime needs to be changed but the basic troop and police units have the local knowledge and ability to operate in the local environment that foreign forces (if they are available at all) lack. Plus, both the US and Israel have been hesitant about putting forces on the ground in Iran, ignoring the lesson that regime change from the air doesn’t work. So, whereas a strategy of taking out any residual Iranian nuclear facilities and ballistic missile production plants can be defended in principle, a prolonged campaign to destroy Iran’s economy, its industrial base, critical infrastructure, transport networks and telecommunications makes no sense as it will worsen the humanitarian crisis that Iran’s neighbours will have to deal with. It would be deeply cynical for the US and Israel to call for a mass uprising without providing Iranians with the long term financial, humanitarian and security support they will need to escape poverty and invest in their own future. Sanctions relief on Iranian oil sales, banking and critical supplies and services will be a prerequisite as much as Washington and Jerusalem will probably want to keep those sanctions in place as a hedge against another anti-Western regime coming to power in Tehran. Yet so far, as the rare US government commentators like to replay the theme of George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” and America’s military prowess and successes, there is little sign of any thought about what will happen to the Iranians on whose behalf apparently the operation is being conducted.

Warfare is always the clash of two strategies and the question of which ultimately will prevail over the other. “No plan survives the first contact with the enemy”, as Napoleon reminds us. Strategies frequently need to be adjusted as they are tested against an adversary and initial planning assumptions are either confirmed or refuted. As Trump has predicted that the US campaign may well continue for four or five weeks, both Washington and Iran will have opportunities to probe each other for weaknesses and try to sway global political opinion against the other.

Iran is undoubtedly the weaker party, having lost much of its air defence and many ballistic missile launch pads during the 12-day Israeli and US strikes last June. The US and Israel undoubtedly wanted to restrike Iran now while it is at its weakest and while the regime was still on the back foot from the wave of demonstrations at the end of 2025 and continuing last January. Iran lacks an air force, having mainly old Soviet SU-24s and some antiquated F14 Tomcats from the Shah period, which are not operational due to lack of a spare parts. But Iran does have stockpiles of home-made drones, such as the Shaheeds previously supplied to Russia, and ballistic missiles that can reach across the entire Gulf region. Iran must fire off its missiles while it still can before Israel and the US destroy its launchers and storage sites. The regime cannot match the US and Israel blow for blow and attacking well-defended aircraft carriers or military bases emptied in advance of their personnel makes no sense. But by firing off $35,000 apiece Shaheed drones that need to be intercepted by $1.2mn Patriot air defence rockets, the Iranians can hope over time to deplete US, Israeli and Gulf states defences and achieve greater penetration for their remaining hypersonic missiles and drone swarm

Indeed, Iran’s strategy is to use its limited capabilities to cause as much disruption as it can across the Middle East, hitting targets in eight different countries from Cyprus to Iraq. It has chosen not just US military bases in the Gulf states but softer targets such as oil refineries and gas terminals. Qatar has been forced to stop production of LNG pushing the global gas price up 50% overnight. Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz where 25% of global oil supplies transit to markets in Europe and Asis. It has caused explosions on oil tankers causing major shipping companies to halt all transit through the Strait. The oil price has instantly spiked 13% to $82 a barrel. These increases are less than what we witnessed after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 but if the war continues energy prices will soar and inflation will tick up.

Putin will be delighted to see Trump’s new war in the Middle East boost his oil revenues for his own war in Ukraine and attract more buyers of Russian oil as supply from the Gulf is impeded. Already the US Treasury Department has announced a 30-day suspension of the embargo on Russian oil sales to keep global oil markets functioning. Good news for Russia, bad news for Ukraine. China, which imports most of its oil from the Middle East, could be particularly affected if there is no ceasefire soon. The global economy will slow down. Iran is inflicting added pain on the Gulf countries by striking luxury hotels, airports and tourist attractions, stranding thousands of foreign tourists and the hundreds of thousands of expatriates who live and work in the Gulf. Airports have closed and thousands of flights have been cancelled.

Iran has also used its proxy forces in Lebanon and Iraq to launch rocket and drone attacks too. The Iranian strikes are risky because the Gulf states will not forgive Iran for wrecking the image of stability, modernity and economic achievement that they have tried so painstakingly to construct. They were gradually improving their relations with the Islamic Republic and made clear to the US that they did not support further military action against Iran. Yet even Oman, the country that was helping Tehran by hosting the nuclear talks with the US, saw one of its ports struck by an Iranian missile. The Gulf countries will face a hefty bill for reconstruction, which may make it difficult for them to give expensive gifts, like Boeing 747 aircraft, or investment promises to the US President. For the time being, their main concern is to obtain as many air defence systems from the US as they can to withstand the Iranian onslaught.

Iran, on the other hand, is focused entirely on regime survival and its main strategic aim is to put so much pressure on the Gulf states and on the global financial and energy markets that they exert in turn pressure on the US to halt its operations. Yet this strategy could backfire if the Gulf states absorb so much damage from Iran that they come off the fence and use their air forces to join the US and Israel in attacking Iran too.

The US is not as supreme as it may seem. Trump has rushed into war without presenting a coherent case for why now and why having “obliterated” the Iranian nuclear programme last June. The country still represents a clear and present danger to US security, requiring the US to see its operation as the “last best chance” to hit Iran before it becomes an existential threat to the US and its allies. Such contradictions and untruths used to justify the war as well as the shifting war aims announced by different members of the Administration, have worried the US Congress, including many Republicans. The latest twist from Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, is that the US attacked Iran because it worried that an Israeli strike would lead to Iranian retaliation against the US – a highly speculative assumption. Democrats will try to convene Congress to apply the War Powers Act to limit whereby the US President needs to seek Congressional approval for military deployments lasting more than 60 days. However, the biggest problem for the Administration is between a short operation, limiting US casualties but leaving the current Iranian regime in place (able to resume its nuclear and missile programmes in due course), and a much longer US operation, possibly involving the use of ground troops, allowing Washington to change the regime but under an Iraq-style US occupation and stewardship. In short, precisely the quagmire that the MAGA movement hates more than anything.

The other dilemma is how much damage does Trump need to inflict on Iran before the goal of setting back the Islamic Republic’s nuclear and missile programmes for several years is achieved? Although the US says that it is targeting only military sites, over 1,200 buildings and sites have been destroyed so far and many of these are civilian or public properties. If Tehran is willing to resume the nuclear talks and make more concessions, what is the point of destruction for destruction’s sake?  At what point does the US declare victory and stop?  Although if the result is merely to resume nuclear talks, which were going on in Geneva anyway before the US strikes, American (and international) public opinion may well wonder if all the destruction and disruption of an attack on Iran was worth the outcome? There may well be tensions too between the US and Israel as the latter is intent on regime change while Washington is increasingly backing off from this objective. What will happen if the US wants to stop while Jerusalem wants to keep going? Will the dog wag the tail or vice versa?

Finally, what is the role of Europe in all this?

Once again, the Europeans are forced to watch from the sidelines as the Trump administration launches another military operation deeply affecting their security and economic interests but over which they were not consulted. Already, an EU member state has been attacked by Iran in reprisal, notably Cyprus, where the UK maintains an air base at Akrotiri. Would this trigger Article 42.7 of the EU Lisbon Treaty, providing for mutual assistance in responding to an attack against an individual member state?  The UK base was attacked even before London had given its authorisation for the US to use US bases on UK territory, particularly Fairford and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

Once more, the Europeans are divided. Some give rhetorical support to the US in its actions against an Iranian regime that they have long seen as a threat to European states, while others like Spain, are distancing themselves from an operation that they view as contrary to international law, unprovoked and certain to kill large numbers of innocent Iranian civilians, as well as others in the region as the conflict spreads. As on previous occasions, many European countries are sitting on the fence, deeply uneasy about the means the US is using to act against its adversaries even while they will not shed a tear for the Iranian Supreme Leader and an Iranian theocracy that has been implicated in multiple terrorist attacks inside Europe and consistently destabilised the Middle East while assisting Russia’s war against Ukraine with its drone exports.

Once again, and at a time when transatlantic relations are in a fragile state and the US commitment to NATO questionable, Europeans will be loath to be too critical of Trump’s actions publicly for fear of drawing further presidential ire from the mercurial Trump and producing an even weaker US security guarantee. On the other hand, as the US made clear at the recent Munich Security Conference that it is no longer prepared to go full in for Europe, Europeans will question why they should go full in for the US, especially in another Middle Eastern adventure where US objectives are unclear, the results are likely to be worse than the status quo ante, and their own leverage over the various belligerents is limited.

In the short term, there are a number of tricky issues that the EU and the NATO allies need to address, and urgently. If Iran attacks Türkiye, a NATO member and host to some large US air bases, would Türkiye trigger Article 5 of the NATO treaty and pull the Europeans into the conflict, either defensively or even against Iran? Should Europe respond favourably to the appeals of the Gulf countries to send more of their air defence assets to the Gulf to defend oil and gas installations on which their economies also depend?  Or to protect European commercial investments and facilities in the region that run into the billions? Should there be a coordinated European plan to evacuate its citizens from the Gulf region as happened during the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021? What is the capacity of Iran to harm Europe in terms of remaining ballistic missile capacity, cyber offensive capabilities or terrorist cells ready to carry out attacks? The UK intelligence service, MI5, tracked 20 Iranian plots against UK targets in 2025 alone. What is the coordinated threat assessment and how much additional surveillance and security needs to be implemented at critical sites and infrastructure? The economic fallout will also be a major concern for the European economies if inflation takes off again and energy prices soar at a time when the EU is taking its final steps to end its oil and gas links with the Kremlin. This is not the moment to be deprived of oil and gas from the Middle East as well.

The situation in Ukraine is also a concern as the US will need its Patriot air defence systems, Tomahawk cruise missiles and long-range artillery in the Gulf and may well no longer be able to supply Ukraine via European purchases. Putin may well double down on his offensive in eastern Ukraine, believing that the Europeans will be distracted by the need to reinforce the protection of their forces in the Gulf region (France and the UK both have military bases in the region or personnel co-located with the Americans or their Gulf partners). Of course, it might be foolhardy for Iran to strike European targets as it could only draw some European allies more directly into the conflict on the side of the US and Israel. But the longer the war goes on, the greater the chance there is of a spillover into Europe. The problem here is that the Europeans are between a rock and a hard place. Already, Trump and US Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, have criticised Europeans for “hand wringing” and half-hearted support and made accusations of “too little, too late”. But European backing for the US, if largely rhetorical, may make them sufficiently complicit in the eyes of the Iranians to justify retaliation and attacks.

In its first week of operations, the US campaign against Iran is the last thing that Europe or the transatlantic security alliance needed. At a moment when Europe was trying to repair its relationship with Washington after Greenland, divisions over Ukraine and the Trump tariffs, another setback seems inevitable, no matter how the Gulf crisis plays out. As we have little idea of where this campaign is headed, it is too soon to answer the many questions that will worry Europe’s leadership and policymakers. But the Iran conflict demonstrates that Europe can be as much the collateral damage of US actions as of direct transatlantic disputes. It is another tough lesson for Europe to absorb as it works to increase its resilience, reduce its vulnerabilities and build its own autonomous capacity to defend itself.

The views expressed in this #CriticalThinking article reflect those of the author(s) and not of Friends of Europe.