The Promotion of Liberty Is Part of Trump’s Iran War

By Noah Rothman

Friday, March 20, 2026

 

At least for the time being, the Israeli air campaign over Iran, in particular, seems to have effectively terrorized the Iranian people’s terrorizers.

 

Israeli intelligence has so thoroughly penetrated the Iranian security services that the Israel Defense Forces can effectively corral IRGC and Basij forces in the kill boxes of their choosing. They are making calls to individual Iranian security officers, informing them that they are on the “blacklist” and warning them to defect before they are eliminated. Before he met his fate at Israeli hands, the former head of the Basij paramilitary, Gholamerza Soleimani, had fled to the woods where he commanded his deputies from a tent. The Israelis got him, too, with the aid of Iranian tipsters on the ground.

 

The Institute for the Study of War has a wry take on the Israeli air war over Iran, in which the IDF has targeted the symbols of the Iranian regime’s power and elements of its internal repression apparatus. “Allowing overpasses to dictate one’s tactical deployments rather than determining deployments based on tactical realities is certainly suboptimal,” its latest dispatch read, citing videos of Iranian security agents hiding from the Israeli panopticon in the skies beneath elevated highways. “These reports indicate a notable level of operational shock across the regime’s coercive apparatus, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Basij, and Law Enforcement Command (LEC), and suggest that elements of Iran’s internal security system are functioning suboptimally at this time.”

 

Suboptimal though Iran’s internal security services’ operations may be, their efforts to intimidate the Iranian population into subservience — even killing potential dissidents — continue. “In one incident, two teenage brothers were shot and killed after honking their car horn in celebration of the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the war’s opening salvo,” the Washington Post reported Friday. “Authorities are also still detaining people linked to the January protests, former political prisoners, or members of minorities.”

 

The executions continue inside Iran. Saleh Mohammadi, one of the supposed dissidents the Islamic Republic put to death this week, was a star wrestler who was accused of participating in mass anti-regime protests in December and January. He was just 19 years old when he was hanged to death before a public audience.

 

The Trump administration’s response to this particular atrocity has invoked language that wouldn’t sound remarkable coming from any other president. But for this president, the rhetoric does represent a departure of sorts:

 

 

Even opponents of this war on the right, like Senator Rand Paul, cited it as evidence (as if more were needed) of the Iranian regime’s illegitimacy and the desirability of regime change:

 

 

From the outset of the war, the president advocated liberty promotion as one of its objectives. “All I want is freedom for the people,” the president told the Washington Post at the outset of hostilities. That message is not at odds with the statement Trump made in announcing the start of Operation Epic Fury. “Now is the time to seize control of your destiny, and to unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is close within your reach,” he told the long-suffering Iranian people. “This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass.”

 

The Trump administration has been cagey about endorsing Israel’s primary strategic objective in this war, creating “the conditions” for regime change. Most administration principles prefer to emphasize a narrower and more achievable objective: eliminating Iran’s capacity to project power across its borders. But if the Trump administration seeks to neutralize the Iranian threat permanently, something only regime change could achieve, Epic Fury will need an indigenous ground force to do what air power alone cannot. That’s where the Iranian people come into play.

 

So, in pursuit of a realist objective — “regime change without nation building,” in Foundation for Defense of Democracies executive director Jonathan Schanzer’s formulation — all and sundry are compelled to embrace the rhetoric typically associated with human rights activism and democracy promotion as an antidote to the abuses of a totalitarian state. Even critics of the extent to which past administrations have elevated those concerns to near-doctrinal importance recognize their instrumental utility.

 

Human rights, liberalism, and the promotion of American values are not luxury beliefs or the stuff of woolly headed dreamers who know nothing of the intricacies of geopolitics and statecraft. They have practical value, too. It’s good to see the Trump administration acknowledge as much, however belatedly.