Trump does not seek regime change in Iran… except incidentally

By leaving it to the people of Iran to take over their government, Trump is in fact sidestepping regime change

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In announcing the start of hostilities against Iran today (February 28, 2026), U.S. President Donald Trump told its people: “when we are finished, take over your government, it will be yours to take. This will probably be your only chance for generations”. Contrary to the immediate interpretation many have put on his announcement, he was not declaring regime change as the objective of American combat operations, even if degrading the regime’s political and institutional grip is unavoidably one of their direct outcomes. Rather, by leaving delivery of actual regime change to the people of Iran, Trump is in fact sidestepping it. He is moreover signalling that American military action will not be open-ended, no matter how devastating it may be while it lasts. So what are its intended outcomes?

To begin with, Trump’s urging the Iranian people to take matters into their own hands is a convenient cover narrative, but is clearly not related to any meaningful assessment of how regime change can actually take place. Regardless of one’s view of the Iranian regime, it has deeply embedded paramilitary networks and a significant social constituency, who will very likely fight back against any domestic opponents even if the regime is decapitated.

As importantly, Iranian opposition within the country is poorly organized and in no shape to seize power, while its diasporic counterpart is divided. These weaknesses might be outweighed by the degradation of the clerical regime, but a critical obstacle is that Iranian opposition figures in exile—including Reza Pahlavi, who is being presented as a potential leader and unifier for a post-clerical Iran—cannot expect to fly into Iran aboard U.S. jets in the way that Iraqi opposition leaders in exile returned to their country on the back of U.S. tanks after the American invasion in 2003. There will be no magic carpet ride for the Iranian exiles: the U.S. is not going to take physical control of Iran, which requires a massive commitment of ground troops, in order to hand power to them.

The preceding leads to two conclusions.

First, despite rhetoric suggesting broad regime change, the U.S. may intend to halt its military campaign while enough of the current Iranian regime is still in place to accept a Venezuela-style outcome. Of course, Iran is unlike Venezuela, where opposition leaders and parties retained a meaningful presence inside the country and contested elections, and so engineering a transfer of power to the Iranian opposition is unlikely. But the Trump administration and its military planners may nonetheless envisage a re-run in Iran of the Venezuelan outcome, in which the ruling party took over from itself, so to speak, in the wake of President Nicolas Maduro’s abduction and is complying with Trump’s wishes.

Second, U.S. military action could degrade the Iranian regime’s ability to control its population and govern the country to the point where it breaks down. But if the U.S. is unable to capitalize on this to engineer some kind of transition of power, however ambiguous, then it will instead create conditions for extensive fragmentation and generalized violence around the country. Coupled with an already parlous economic situation, water scarcity, and socio-political polarization, this will leave Iran looking more like any one of a number of countries in chronic post-conflict breakdown—Afghanistan post-US withdrawal, Syria in Assad’s final years, and Libya and Yemen post-2014 all come to mind—than post-2003 Iraq.

Either way, the ongoing confrontation is unlikely to be open-ended. Not because the Iranian regime will stand and fight back indefinitely. Nor because it will probably run out of the military means to threaten U.S. military assets in the region or attack Israel, and can therefore be largely contained and ignored once a certain amount of damage has been inflicted on it—which is exactly what happened with Iraq between 1991 and 2003. Rather, an ongoing confrontation is unlikely because the U.S. doesn’t need to wage one. Its principal objective is to inflict irreparable damage on the regime’s military capabilities and command and control structure, and, as Trump has explicitly said, its missile and nuclear programs.

Achieving this objective naturally puts the Iranian regime’s political future in doubt. But the more pressing operational question, from the U.S. perspective, is how to ensure that Iran does not once again reconstitute any part of its strategic deterrence once the current combat ends. This goal could be achieved if a pliant “regime-lite” emerges that agrees to permanently and verifiably relinquish Iranian missile and nuclear programs—in the manner Libyan dictator Muammar Qadhafi dismantled his weapons of mass destruction program in 2003, for example. Failing that, the U.S., and possibly Israel or other Western allies, would conceivably selectively attack Iranian military facilities for years to come, much as they did in Iraq in 1991-2003 or as Israel has done against Hezbullah in Lebanon since their “big war” ended in November 2024. As Hamidreza Azizi has argued, U.S. combat operations form “the opening phase of a structured campaign aimed at rapidly weakening Iran’s governing and military capacity, thereby creating conditions for sustained pressure in subsequent stages.”

Degrading the Iranian regime’s grip is integral to achieving any of these outcomes from an American perspective, but regime change is more likely a bonus than even a secondary goal.