President Donald Trump has made it clear that the new U.S.-Israeli air war against Iran is aimed at nothing less than the overthrow of the country’s clerical regime. Such an ambitious objective should not come as a surprise. Both the powerful Israel lobby and most of the conservative movement in the United States have endorsed the goal of forcible regime change in Tehran since the Islamic revolution overthrew the Shah in 1979. Even a sizable percentage of anti-war liberals have tended to make an exception with respect to policy toward Iran.
The ostensible goal embraced by nearly all of Tehran’s critics has always been to oust the mullahs and bring a secular democratic government to power. In December 2025, prominent conservative organizations, media outlets, and individuals in the United States and Europe voiced emphatic support for anti-regime protests that had erupted in Iranian cities. On January 15, 2026, Trump himself openly threatened to intervene militarily if Iranian security personnel continued to crack down on demonstrators.
Tehran’s adversaries in the United States and other Western countries insist that they want to see a secular, fully democratic government emerge in Iran. Trump’s rhetoric during the initial phases of his new war is consistent with that objective. The administration’s supposed embrace of an ambitious regime-change agenda for democracy in Iran, though, stands in dramatic contrast to Washington’s much more pragmatic conduct in Venezuela. Such a substantive difference raises justifiable uncertainty about the nature and extent of U.S. regime-change goals in Iran, even if the current war proves to be successful militarily.
Although the Trump administration ousted Venezuela’s left-wing dictator Nicolas Maduro in early January 2026, Trump allowed Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, and most other members of the regime to remain in power. That restraint infuriated libertarians and many conservatives in the United States. Most of them wanted to see Washington install in office opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and an outspoken advocate of free markets. Indeed, Machado is the darling of prominent libertarian organizations, especially the Cato Institute.
However, Trump and his policy team seemed perfectly content with continuing an authoritarian socialist regime in Caracas, as long as the leaders were willing to do Washington’s bidding. Policy concessions from Rodriguez’s government with respect to the treatment of the U.S. oil industry and a willingness to display less receptivity to China’s economic penetration of South America came quickly, and the White House appeared to be placated.
The cynical pragmatism of U.S. policy in Venezuela should make U.S. crusaders for Iranian democracy wonder about the sincerity of the Trump administration’s commitment to that value in Iran. There also are major elements in the internal movement opposing the clerical regime who appear to be more than a little unsavory and might be willing to play a role similar to Delcy Rodriguez’s adopted role in her country.
During the demonstrations that erupted in December and January, an especially visible spokesperson for anti-regime factions was Reza Pahlavi – the son of the late Shah. It is difficult to identify a more hated figure for millions of ordinary Iranians than the leader of the Pahlavi family. Although the younger Pahlavi officially embraces the goal of democracy, and one should not assume that he and other leaders of the current generation of anti-clerical activists are authoritarians like their parents and grandparents, we should reserve judgment and not casually assume that they are dedicated democrats either.
Another prominent and dubious faction among the anti-clerical forces is the MEK (Mojahedin-e-Khalq) – a domestic insurgent group that the U.S. government formerly listed as a terrorist organization. Despite that well-deserved reputation, some of the most prominent American and West European hawks have long embraced the MEK and touted it as a movement devoted to liberating Iran and establishing a democratic government.
Enthusiasts about Trump’s new regime-change war need to be wary for multiple reasons. The United States has launched a blatant war of aggression, setting yet another unhealthy precedent in world affairs and creating the prospect of more chaos throughout the Middle East and perhaps globally. It also is purely a war of choice on Washington’s part – something that proponents of a foreign policy based on realism and restraint hoped that Trump would repudiate . Even worse, it is explicitly a regime-change crusade, precisely the kind of disastrous, potentially open-ended venture that Trump vowed to avoid during all three of his presidential campaigns.
Finally, it is far from certain that even a successful war would produce a truly democratic Iran devoted to free markets and limited government. The prominence of both Reza Pahlavi and the MEK in the anti-clerical movement are not encouraging developments. Americans may discover that they will merely acquire another autocratic foreign client to support financially and militarily.
