By Jonathan Schanzer
Sunday, April 05, 2026
America and Israel are at war with Iran, a fact that
should be neither shocking nor surprising. Both countries have been targeted by
the Islamic Republic since its inception in 1979. Both countries have engaged
in painful battles with the regime’s proxies. Both nations battled Iran for 12
days last year; Israel targeted nuclear assets and other key military targets,
paving the way for a crescendo of American strikes that hammered Iran’s nuclear
capabilities.
But the regime refused to back down. It continued to
pursue its nuclear program and its violent proxy project. Its ballistic missile
stockpile also grew at an alarming rate.
Seven months after American planes did their damage, U.S.
President Donald Trump parked a massive armada in the waters surrounding Iran.
For weeks, he exhorted the regime to negotiate and surrender its illicit
nuclear program. Concurrently, the Israelis threatened war if the regime
continued to stockpile missiles.
The clerics refused to stand down, thus triggering a
widening war. And so we begin anew the debate inside the United States since
the last helicopter escaped the American compound in Saigon in April 1975. What
is the role of the American military in achieving American aims, and should
American aims include using force to change regimes we believe violate the
international order and pose a long-term threat to us and to the West? Never
mind that the Iranian regime has all but asked for this war since 1979. The
conversation is not about Iran; it’s about the United States almost
exclusively—with Israel thrown in as well. The 21st-century meaning of “America
First,” the vague slogan that Donald Trump revived when he began his political
career in 2015, is now being hashed out and defined in real time.
***
The moment war erupted, critics hammered Trump—and Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Tucker Carlson called
the war “disgusting and evil.” He declared,
“Just because the prime minister of Israel wanted a regime change… It certainly
wasn’t a good idea for the United States.”
Former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene lamented,
“Trump, [Vice President JD] Vance, [Director of the Office of National
Intelligence] Tulsi [Gabbard], and all of us campaigned on no more foreign wars
and regime change.” She later stated, “We voted
for America First and ZERO wars.”
The anti-Trump left piled on. Senator Elizabeth Warren
released a statement
saying. “‘America first’ doesn’t mean dragging the United States into another
forever war built on lies while ignoring the needs of Americans here at home.”
Representative Ro Khanna posted on X decrying the
“illegal regime change war in Iran with American lives at risk.”
Critics on both sides seek to discredit Trump by invoking
the phrase “America First” and claiming that it means something other than the
war Trump launched in 2026. They suggest that he has betrayed his voters and
tricked the American people by wielding those words and then using massive
force against a faraway country many Americans know little about. To be fair,
Trump did repeatedly declare that he would steer America away from costly
foreign entanglements. But we don’t know the cost or impact of this war.
Moreover, declarations and actions are two different things. Over the past few
decades, presidents have fallen into the habit of speaking belligerently and
then acting cautiously. Trump has done almost exactly the opposite and seems
(as of this early writing) unfazed by the complaint that he has been untrue to
his own doctrine.
Wars have a way of destroying presidential legacies or
securing them. For Trump, his presidency’s success, both now and in history’s
retelling, hinges on battlefield performance and a paradigm shift. He must
first bring down the Iranian regime while limiting the spread of the conflict.
But he also cannot commit to costly and futile nation-building. Finally, he
must avoid Iran’s maddening complexities, especially its sectarian and
nationalist baggage. In short, he must pursue “America First” regime change. But
what does that mean, exactly?
***
Not all regime change is bad or disastrous. The U.S. has
overthrown more than three
dozen hostile regimes in modern history. Some have been remarkable
successes.
The defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 was the product of
total war culminating in Germany’s unconditional surrender.
The Marshall
Plan directed billions of dollars into rebuilding West Germany. Over time,
Germany emerged as a stable and democratic European ally. Similarly, the defeat
of Imperial Japan in 1945 ushered in a military occupation led
by General Douglas MacArthur. U.S. authorities dismantled Japan’s institutions
and oversaw
the adoption of a democratic constitution and parliament. Today, Japan is one
of Washington’s most important Asian allies.
In 1983, U.S. forces entered Grenada to evacuate U.S.
citizens, restore stability, and prevent the spread of violence after the
government collapsed. Approximately 7,000 U.S. troops, alongside Caribbean
forces, rapidly defeated
the Grenadian military and Cuban forces on the island. The United States then supported
constitutional elections in 1984 that restored civilian democratic rule, which
Grenada still boasts today.
In 1986, the United States toppled Philippine President
Ferdinand Marcos after fraudulent elections that rocked the country. As mass
protests and military defections grew, U.S. officials worked to facilitate a
peaceful transition. In February 1986, the U.S. evacuated Marcos to exile in
Hawaii. Subsequent American efforts focused on democratic institutions and
economic stabilization. Today the Philippines is among America’s oldest and
most important allies in Asia.
In 1989, the United States removed
Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega, a figure indicted
in U.S. courts on drug charges. Approximately 27,000 U.S. troops were dispatched
to the region. Noriega surrendered in January 1990 and then stood trial in the
United States. After a period of transition, Panama remained stable and
democratic.
More recently, America toppled the dictator of Venezuela,
a narco-state that undermined American security and national interests in South
America. The U.S. attempted to pressure
President Nicolás Maduro to leave power under threat of military action and an
oil blockade. Even with a massive fleet positioned off the coast of Venezuela,
Maduro refused to yield. American forces arrested him in Caracas, removed him
from the premises, and shipped him to America to stand trial. Trump then threatened
Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s successor, with a “big price, probably bigger than
Maduro” if she did not cooperate. She has since cooperated
with American demands: passing
pro-business oil laws, cutting off oil sales to American adversaries, and
releasing hundreds of political prisoners.
***
Admittedly, not all regime change efforts have ended
well. For example, in the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration overthrew
Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz, whose Communist leanings also alarmed
Washington. However, the new regime of Carlos Castillo Armas was unstable. He
was assassinated in 1957, triggering a series of military takeovers,
insurgencies, and weak civilian governments.
In the early 1970s, the Richard Nixon administration
sought to derail the Chilean government of Salvador Allende. Economic pressure,
diplomatic isolation, and covert support contributed to
the 1973 military coup that marked the rise of General Augusto Pinochet—who did
everything to derail efforts later in his rule to let free elections take
place.
A more recent suboptimal outcome was the 2011 Libya
intervention. The United
States and allies
combined sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and limited military force to
topple strongman Muammar Qaddafi during the Libyan civil war. NATO enforced a
no-fly zone, enabling an air campaign
that targeted Libyan military infrastructure while supporting rebel advances.
Washington froze billions of dollars in regime assets to finance the new
government. After Qaddafi fell, however, the Libyan government failed to
consolidate power. Rival Muslim states backed opposing forces, yielding a
deadlock that has endured since the re-eruption of the civil war in 2014.
***
Iraq and Afghanistan are America’s ultimate regime-change
failures. In the case of Afghanistan, the war was just; the Taliban sheltered
al-Qaeda leaders before the 9/11 attacks. President George W. Bush’s error was
trying to forge Afghanistan into a flourishing democracy, using American
taxpayer dollars, during an ongoing insurgency. The total
cost reached $2.3 trillion, with more than 2,300 U.S. service members dead, before a
cringe-inducing American withdrawal in 2021.
The 2003 war in Iraq was equally destructive but also
less just. The rationale
for intervention centered around allegations that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein
had “chemical and biological weapons” and was “seeking nuclear weapons.” That
turned out to be wrong. But Bush’s gravest error in Iraq was the same one he
made in Afghanistan. He sought to turn Iraq into a democracy during an
asymmetric terror campaign to derail America’s efforts. The war cost American
taxpayers more
than $2 trillion, with 4,300 U.S. service
members dead.
America didn’t lose because regime change was bad. Regime
change was hard, and it was made insuperably so due to the interference
of one key player in both Iraq and Afghanistan. That player was Iran. Iranian training
and material support for Iraqi militias enabled deadly attacks against
American troops. The Pentagon assesses
that Iran was behind 603 deaths (more than one-quarter) of American service
members in Iraq. And while numbers are not available for Afghanistan, William
Wood, former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, said,
“There is no question that elements of the insurgency have received weapons
from Iran.”
Questions linger as to why President George W. Bush chose
not to widen the War on Terror to include the Islamic Republic. He included it
in the “Axis of Evil,” after all. But given the long history of Iranian attacks
against the United States, it’s fair to ask: Why did presidents over the course
of 11 terms of office across 46 years refuse to act against the regime that was
the most implacably hostile to America?
***
The trail of blood began in 1979, with the hostage crisis
during which 52 Americans were held by the nascent Iranian regime for 444 days.
President Jimmy Carter appeared feckless, hoping to resolve the crisis with
diplomacy. The election of Ronald Reagan ended the ordeal, but Tehran was not
deterred. In 1983, the regime was behind a suicide bombing of the U.S. Embassy
in Beirut that killed
63 people, including 17 Americans. The culprit was Hezbollah, an Iran-backed
terror group. Later that year, Hezbollah carried out a truck bombing at a
Marine compound in Beirut, killing
241 service personnel. The following year, Hezbollah kidnapped
CIA station chief William Buckley in Beirut, later killing him. Hezbollah then
managed to hijack
two different airplanes, killing three Americans. Reagan followed the advice of
his defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, and repeatedly stood down.
President George H.W. Bush had an early brush with
Iran-backed Hezbollah when it killed
U.S. Marine Corps Colonel William Higgins after kidnapping him in Lebanon.
Result: nothing.
President Bill Clinton was no more challenging to Iran
than his predecessors had been. During the 1990s, amid an American push for
Middle East peace, Iran armed and funded proxies in the Palestinian arena,
where it shed more American blood. Car
bombings and suicide
bombings by Hamas and Islamic Jihad not only derailed America’s foreign
policy but also killed and wounded scores of Americans.
The regime grew bolder. In 1996, a truck bombing rocked Khobar
Towers in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 Americans. The Iran-backed Hezbollah
Al-Hijaz was blamed. Then, with the assistance of Hezbollah, al-Qaeda bombed
the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing
224 people, including 12 Americans, and wounding thousands. Clinton’s flaccid
response to terrorism in the 1990s is the greatest foreign policy stain on his
reputation.
By contrast, President George W. Bush’s War on Terror was
expansive. But it was arguably not expansive enough. The 9/11 Report
concluded that Tehran enabled the travel of 9/11 terrorists, noting “strong
evidence that Iran facilitated the transit of al Qaeda members into and out of
Afghanistan.” Bush declined to hold the regime accountable.
Similarly, Bush appeared paralyzed during the second
intifada (2000–2005), when Iran-backed terrorists embarked on a terrorism
rampage in Israel. Hamas suicide bombings continued to claim American
lives. In 2003, Iran-backed terrorists even killed three
U.S. diplomatic personnel in Gaza.
The Barack Obama presidency was marked by appeasement.
The 2013 Joint Plan of Action (JPOA) yielded hundreds of millions of dollars to
the regime in exchange for the mullahs’ agreeing to sit at the table. The 2015
Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) gave the regime billions in exchange
for fleeting restrictions on its illicit nuclear program. The agreement never
addressed terrorism.
President Donald Trump’s first term saw a spike in
Iranian aggression, particularly after he exited the JCPOA in 2018. In 2019
and 2020,
attacks by Iran-backed militias targeted American forces in Iraq. This prompted
Trump’s famous drone strike, which felled Iran’s top general, Qassem Soleimani.
Iran, however, was not deterred. In September 2020, American intelligence
exposed a plot to assassinate the U.S. ambassador to South Africa.
The presidency of Joe Biden began with a push for renewed
diplomacy with the regime. This did not halt Iranian aggression. Iran-backed
militia attacks killed or wounded American soldiers and contractors in Iraq and
Syria between 2021 and
2023.
Then, the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, plunged the Middle East into chaos.
Iran-backed Hamas killed
at least 48 Americans and kidnapped at least 12 Americans that day. As the war
widened, American service members were hit with multiple Iranian proxy attacks,
resulting
in dozens of injuries and three deaths.
In 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice announced
charges against an Iranian national and two American accomplices for plotting
to assassinate President Trump. A U.S. jury then convicted
agents of Iran for plotting to assassinate Iranian-American activist Masih
Alinejad. Former U.S. officials Mike Pompeo, Brian Hook, and others were also
targets of Iranian assassination plots. In March, as the bombs were falling on
Tehran, a man working for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was convicted
of entering the United States in 2024 with the intent of killing former
Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley.
In short, Iran’s war against America has been relentless.
There is no question as to whether the current war is just. It is. The debate
is not about Iran. It’s about America’s role in the world.
***
None of Trump’s war critics question American military
competence right now. What they question is the cost of the war, Trump’s
endgame, and what they perceive as similarities between this action and the
wars of the Bush era. In essence, Trump is being pressed to explain how the
“America First” president who vowed to avoid foreign entanglements intends to
steer America through this war.
Trump has already rejected the Pottery Barn Rule, a
heretofore-unknown principle adduced by Secretary of State Colin Powell that
supposedly required the United States to repair Iraq once we had “broken” it.
Trump’s rejection is commendable. Just because America stands up to another
country’s aggression does not mean that its taxpayers must finance the removal
of rubble, let alone the rebuild. This was a novel precept, and it is one that
Americans broadly eschew. Americans today seem to understand that the world is
a dangerous place and that dangerous actors may require overwhelming
responses—but they want to prevent the spilling of American blood or treasure
for the benefit of others.
The Venezuela model for regime change is therefore, on
the surface, an appealing model for the future. Minimal risk, all-but-certain
mission success, and the promise of oil profits all sound ideal. However,
surgical opera-tions with little destruction or bloodshed were never in the
cards when it came to engaging Iran. Hundreds of top leaders and thousands of
targets have been wiped out, with oil facilities in flames. The United States
may yet find an Iranian Delcy Rodríguez should the regime begin to buckle. Then
again, it’s hard to overestimate the ideological nature of the Islamic
Republic. The task of finding pragmatists inside the regime may prove
Sisyphean.
Here is where it is useful to remember that the people of
Iran are arguably the country’s greatest resource. They are educated. A less
radical, more pragmatic regime existed in Tehran in the memories of everyone
older than 55, and the experience of living under theocratic tyranny has been
the only experience young Iranians know.
Is Iran ripe for regime change? In 2009, Iranians
overwhelmingly voted for liberalization, only to have the mullahs fix the
result—leading to an uprising that had to be crushed, though not nearly as
brutally as the killing spree in January 2026 that showed the regime’s truly
murderous colors in the mass slaughter of tens of thousands. Indeed, Iranians
have in recent memory sought to carve a different path and, just two months
ago, were in open revolt. This is not a quiescent population whose will has been
shattered.
Unfortunately, little is known about the opposition on
the ground right now. But Iranian unity will be crucial to any effort to reach
a stable end state in this war. We’ll soon see if the Persian-speaking majority
can join forces with the complex patchwork of Iranian minorities.
Self-defined experts on these matters look at the
prospect of Iranian common cause with deep skepticism. But we Americans are
hardly the best judges of the ways to achieve common ground. Our divisive
politics have in recent decades rendered American foreign policy schizophrenic,
with key principles shifting violently every four or eight years. The debates
over military intervention, regime change, and even America’s place in the
world have yielded chaos and confusion, both at home and abroad.
While Americans have been exceptionally vociferous in
expressing their varying political views in recent years, the Iran war has
finally brought a major fault line to the surface. This heated battle on both
the left and the right is between neo-isolationists and interventionists. For
those who believe no good can come of war and that America fails when it
fights, no argument exists that will penetrate their hard shell of determinist
defeatism. But foreign policy theorists in the neo-isolationist camp—those who
do not want to appear to be isolationist but rather realist—warn that whatever
America does is merely a distraction from the real issue of the 21st century.
That issue is our “great power competition” with China. Any cent we spend for
any purpose other than countering China is a penny wasted. Of course, since
China is allied with Iran and sees Iran as an extension of its sphere of
interest, an American defeat of Iran would serve the purpose of putting China
on notice that we will not look kindly on another totalitarian regime’s effort
to spread its shadow across the globe. Nor will we sit idly by.
The task before Donald Trump is finding a middle ground
that appeals to the isolationists and interventionists, on the left and the
right, all of whom fervently believe that they are putting “America First.” To
secure his place in American history, and to end this war on his terms, he must
find a way to validate both camps while engineering a decisive victory in Iran
that heralds a new Middle East, sets back rivals like China and Russia, and
does not empty out the U.S. Treasury.
None of this is simple or intuitive. But history is
replete with American regime-change experiments that did not bankrupt America
and did not thrust it into a forever war. Should Trump find a way of repeating
that history, and not the failures of the early 21st century, while vanquishing
the greatest threat to American interests in the Middle East, “America First”
won’t just be a political slogan. It will be a blueprint for other important
battles amid the litany of geopolitical challenges that lie ahead.
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