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According to President Trump, Iran has gone through not one, but two regime changes already this year—and the new regime is more “sensible” than its predecessors. “One regime destroyed, destroyed, all dead. The next regime most of them are dead,” he told reporters on Air Force One this weekend. “With a third government, we are dealing with a different people than anyone has dealt with before.”
Trump and his Cabinet have been enjoying those words change of administration since the beginning of his second term. It’s a big change from what he campaigned on. In addition to his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in 2016, he was calling on the country to “get away from the failed policy of nation-building and regime change,” and he reiterated that sentiment in his recent bid for re-election. Last year, when Trump decided to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, he called the two words “politically incorrect,” seeming to understand rhetorical link to America’s failed “eternal wars” in the 2000s and 2010s. Still in that Social Reality posthe began to approach this saying: “But if the current Iranian Administration can’t MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a change of Administration??? MIGA!!!” In the weeks before last month’s attack on Iran, Trump he said that regime change would be “the best thing that could happen” to the country.
In his comments this weekend, Trump is offering a change of government as a sign of progress in the war. He points-perhaps in hopes of settle down oil markets—that the United States has already won an important victory. At the same time, he is escalating the conflict in other ways, threatening the complete destruction of Iran’s most important energy infrastructure while the Pentagon prepares. weeks of ground operations. But the change of government has not happened. Although the US and Israeli attacks have taken out Iran’s top leaders, their replacement is still a large part of the existing system.
Iran’s current supreme leader is preacher Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who was assassinated late last month. Other officials who have been killed, such as the heads of the Supreme National Security Council and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, have been replaced through normal governmental channels—that is, by the Iranian president and his allies. (Trump has claimed that Mojtaba is seriously injured, but on Sunday, the Iranian government deployed a contempt messageallegedly written by him, through the state media.) Iran’s government is the same theocratic that it has been since the revolution of 1979 and the overthrow of the shah. That any of the new nominees have completely different attitudes towards the United States than the former leaders had, despite Trump’s assurances, is far from certain.
People use it often administration referring to the government of one political leader – especially one they don’t like, or who was not democratically elected – but like my colleague David Graham for support. he explained last week, administration it actually refers to a system of governance that does not change every time the head of state does. “One could argue,” he wrote, “that the United States has had the same ‘government’ since 1789, when the Constitution went into effect and George Washington became president.” Arash Azizi, a scholar of Iranian history and a contributing writer at Atlantiche told me that “the war and the beheadings have affected the internal balance of the groups, but they have not changed the regime. There is definitely more government cohesion now than there was before the war.”
As for what real regime change in Iran might look like, Azizi said that it would “include the dismantling of the main structures of the Islamic Republic or, at the very least, the abandonment of its key policies.” I think this is possible in the medium term (and would be even without war)” – the administration’s signature policies are unacceptable in Iran and “nothing has been done.” In other words, Trump is misusing the phrase to portray success in this historically unacceptable war
The Trump administration has offered many conflicting explanations for its goals in Iran—10 reasons in the first six days of the battle alonemy colleagues Marie-Rose Sheinerman and Isabel Ruehl have pointed out. But the president’s recent actions have underscored his rejected of the anti-interventionist ideals he campaigned for. In addition to escalating the conflict in Iran, he has tried to destabilize other foreign governments over the past few months: After the January capture of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro (and subsequent installation of a Trump-approved interim leader), the White House instituted its first oil embargo against Cuba since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Despite loosening the restrictions a bit in recent days, there are no signs that Trump has backed up his statement. the goal to remove the Cuban leadership and establish a more pro-American government.
Maybe Trump will actually make a regime change in Iran. Like my colleague Nancy Youssef he wrote earlier todaythere are still many paths this war could take—and no military strategist could advise deciding the outcome of the war in just a few weeks. But at the same time, there are many reasons to be skeptical about Trump’s assessment of how things are going.
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Today’s news
- The Supreme Court ruled 8–1 that Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy for children violates free speech right, a decision that could affect similar laws in more than 20 states.
- US Army has begun dropping B-52 bombers over Iran for the first time in the war. The move signals that Iran’s air defenses may be weakened after weeks of attacks, but Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Iran could still retaliate with missiles.
- Israel’s defense minister said that his army plans to occupy most of southern Lebanon to the Litani River after its land invasion ends, and that displaced residents will be prevented from returning for that period.
Evening Read
What Maxxing Reveals About Life Online
By Ian Bogost
Maybe you’ve heard looks maxxingan online trend in which young people strive to be attractive, often to their own detriment. Thanks to Clavicularyoung, influential in the manosphere, this term—and others modeled after it—has grown. You can be lookmaxxer for smooth maxxing (skin care or exercise) or for hard maxxing (plastic surgery or self-mutilation). Looksmaxxers often find themselves jester-maxxingthat is, using humor to get women’s attention.
Maxxing can be specialized, too, and even relatively, maximally speaking. A guy can be a personality booster instead of a joke-maxxing one. A few versions of incel-maxxing may include health-maxxing – what people called it good health about 10 minutes ago. Do you want your gut to be more normal? That’s fiber-maxxing. Do you want to build abundance? You are protein-maxxing. Some women called tradfem want to have more children through reproduction-maxxing-a process that our culture understood as getting pregnant again. Maxxing goes the other way too, increasing harm instead of benefits: Maybe you have a drug habit, in which case you can be pills-maxxing. Anorexia, for some, now hunger-maxxing.
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Think. Some research suggests that many diagnostic errors in medicine are due to failures in thinking. Alexandra Sifferlin willingness to learn if the quality of inquiry it is a skill that any doctor can achieve.
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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this journal.
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