After days of denial, US President Donald Trump circled back to the traditional American pass time: Regime Change. Acknowledging that the term isn’t fashionable anymore, he decided to rebrand it. He’s calling it MIGA: “MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN”.
The US has been toppling governments for almost as long as it has been around. But it became a national pass time during the Cold War. The Americans kept orchestrating coups against democratically elected Communist and Socialist governments all over Latin America. Most of those countries still bear the scars from those regime changes. In the last century, the US was mostly successful in its regime change operations against Communism, barring notable exceptions like Cuba and Vietnam. But Washington seems to have lost its touch since the turn of the century, especially in the Middle East.
In 2001, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the US launched its invasion of Afghanistan. While none of the September 11 attackers were Afghans, the planning was done in the country. So, the US went after the attackers, Al-Qaeda, and the people who were sheltering them, the Taliban. Taliban rule was dismantled within two months of the US invasion of Afghanistan. Washington spent the next two decades propping up its friends, Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani. But the Taliban regrouped, and convinced Trump to negotiate a US withdrawal during his first term. The withdrawal was overseen by former US President Joe Biden. As the Americans began pulling out of Afghanistan, the Taliban swept into Kabul. They took mere days to topple the Afghan government that the Americans had propped up for decades. It was one of the biggest failures of US foreign policy. They spent billions of dollars, and squandered thousands of lives, just to see the Taliban return to power as soon as they left.
Other American regime change operations haven’t gone according to plan either. Two years after the Afghan invasion began, the US decided to topple the government of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The justification back then was that Hussein was stockpiling “weapons of mass destruction”, or WMDs, that the US had to neutralise. No WMDs were ever found, but Saddam Hussein was executed, nonetheless. What came in his place? ISIS. The Islamic State terror group carved out a huge chunk of territory for itself in Iraq and Syria in 2013. By overthrowing Saddam Hussein, the US caused a power vacuum that allowed for the rise of ISIS. The Americans had pulled out of Iraq in 2011, but they had to redeploy in 2014. To deal with the mess that they had helped create. ISIS was eventually routed from Iraq in 2019. But the knock-on effects are still being felt across the globe. The Islamic State now has multiple offshoots in multiple parts of the world. They are still conducting terror campaigns, most notably in West Africa. And a former ISIS and Al-Qaeda affiliate is now the President of Syria. So much for the so-called “War on Terror”.
The most recent American regime change debacle took place in Libya. 2011 was the year of the Arab spring. It began in Tunisia, when a street vendor set himself on fire, because he was being harassed by a municipal official. His act sparked anger which spread all over the Arab world. Libya wasn’t spared either. Libya had been ruled by Muammar Gaddafi since 1969. He had been in charge for decades. Once the Arab Spring began, protests broke out against Gaddafi as well. They started in the city of Benghazi, in February 2011. The protests spread throughout eastern Libya, and the US saw its chance to enact regime change. It started directly supporting rebels who wanted to oust Gaddafi. NATO provided aerial support for the anti-Gaddafi forces. Clearing their path with airstrikes. Gaddafi was eventually captured, and brutally killed by the rebel forces, and reports suggested direct US involvement. For Washington, it was another regime successfully changed. Libya has since seen two civil wars, the country split in half, ruled by two governments, and a warlord in control of its oil.
And now, it seems Trump wants to extend this track record to include Iran. A few days ago, Trump stated that the US knew where Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was, but it wouldn’t take him out “for now”. Trump had also said he wasn’t going to bomb Iran for at least two weeks. Khamenei isn’t relying on American benevolence. He has reportedly designated three successors, in case the US or Israel manage to kill him. Trump probably won’t allow that succession plan to go through either, considering he says he wants to “MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN”. That likely means he wants it to go back to being the Iran before the 1979 Revolution. Back when the clerics weren't in charge, and Iran was a staunch ally because of the US-backed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Even if some Iranians aren’t completely behind the Ayatollah, will they really want the return of an absolute monarchy? Or is this another failed regime change just waiting to happen?
