US Bases in the Middle East. Source: World Beyond War
For decades Iran has been the gremlin in the American global imagination. US officials claim that Iran is the main source of instability in the Middle East, allowing them to dismiss any opposition to US or US allies’ policies as products of Iranian scheming. The US-Israeli attacks on Iran in June, however, marked a dramatic escalation in the long-running US shadow war on Iran. Although the White House proclaimed that “Operation Midnight Hammer” successfully averted a global nuclear crisis, the reality is that the crisis was as invented as the long-standing assertion that Iran is the master agent of disorder across the region. America, not Iran, is the rogue state in the view of much of the world. The regime change that we are most likely to see as a result of the Israeli-U.S. “war” on Iran is the end to the Western dominated post-WWII global order.
The June strikes were heartless and irresponsible. They killed hundreds, half of whom were civilians; prompted retaliations against a US base and Israel; and nearly ignited a regional war. While it is unclear how much damage they caused within Iran, they caused profound damage to US and global security. Most pointedly, they make future nuclear crises more likely. Iran can rebuild its reactors and research programs in a matter of months if it chooses to, but we cannot rebuild the trust needed for international cooperation in non-proliferation so easily.
The Iran War as Domestic Distraction
Domestically, bombing Iran was primarily an act of political theater aimed at the American audience. Bombing Iran, just like bombing Yemen in March, sacrificed distant lives for a brief patriotic flare to deflect attention from the national wealth transfer masquerading as administrative, budget, and tax reforms. Iranian lives will not be the only ones lost because of the Trump administration.
Demonstrators march by the courthouse in Urbana June 18 (a few days before the US bombing of Iran), protesting the US-backed Israeli bombing and potential US escalation. Photo by Janice Jayes
Trump’s undeclared act of war also undermined American constitutional and administrative checks on executive power. Trump ignored congressional demands for a vote on the war, then marginalized and belittled US intelligence professionals who contradicted his claim that Iran posed a potential nuclear threat. Having already defunded government-affiliated foreign policy institutions like the Wilson Center and the US Institute for Peace and shuttered the Voice of America and the US Agency for International Development, Trump faces few institutions still capable of challenging his erratic policies. Academic departments that could provide context are under siege as well. Most recently Trump completed his rampage through the US foreign policy infrastructure by firing 1300 State Department staff. In just five months Trump has hollowed out all non-military avenues for US government engagement with the world, and the remaining institutions for providing expertise have been repopulated with servile and unqualified sycophants. Trump’s attack didn’t make Americans safer, but it proved a successful distraction from the damage done to national security through executive branch overreach and manipulation.
Trump’s War on Non-Proliferation
This is the second time Trump has undermined international efforts to regulate the nuclear industry in Iran and weakened efforts to establish safe nuclear practices globally. In 2017 Trump unilaterally cancelled the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, in which the US agreed to lift economic sanctions on Iran dating from the 1979 revolution and Iran agreed to limit nuclear enrichment and allow monitoring from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Hit with sanctions again, the Iranians resumed enrichment as a bargaining chip for future negotiations. And then in June, even though Trump’s own director of national intelligence had testified just months before that that analysts did not believe Iran was pursuing a weapons program, the US and Israel launched bombing raids even as the US was in negotiations over a new nuclear deal with Iran. In cancelling the 2015 agreement, undercutting the IAEA, betraying negotiations, and bombing Iran, Trump crippled the best methods for preventing future nuclear proliferation anywhere through international verification.
In addition, Trump’s rogue attack on Iran, combined with continued US greenlighting of Israeli attacks in Palestine, Iran, Yemen, Lebanon, and Syria, is likely to provoke the new arms race already underway. The less countries trust the international system to set norms or resolve crises, the more they will pursue weapons, including “poison pill” WMD weapons, as protection in an uncertain world.
Dozens of states now possess the resources to pursue nuclear weapons. Although all proliferation increases the risk of accidental or deliberate use, there is no evidence that new nuclear states will be less restrained than existing nuclear powers. The greater danger, however, comes from the risk of proliferation at the level of extremist or criminal groups, and only a strong international network of cooperation and inspection can reduce that risk. Unfortunately, Trump’s macho military strike did more long-term damage to nuclear security cooperation than it did to the Iranian nuclear program.
Iran as the Ghost in the Machine
Trump’s ability to panic the American public with the specter of an irrational, nuclear Iran rests on decades of American culture combining racism, Islamophobia, and a conviction that there must be a scapegoat for the failure of US policies in the region. Iran is certainly involved in multiple theaters in the area, and has strategic partnerships with groups employing terror tactics, but the same can be said of the US. From the perspective of many in the region, it is the US, not Iran, that is the destabilizing agent. It is the US that has a track record of interventions geared at regime change (Iran 1953, Afghanistan 1980s and 2001, Iraq 2003, Syria 2012, Libya 2011 . . . ); that uses drone strikes and military units outside of declared war zones; that funds and arms militias, including those that use terrorist tactics; that kidnaps (renditions) and tortures individuals at secret prisons and Guantanamo in disregard of international law; and that partners with a network of undemocratic regimes with atrocious human rights records.
US hawks prefer to draw the public’s attention away from this record of destabilizing US behavior and revive the outrage of the 1979⎼80 hostage crisis, when US diplomats and other civilians were held for more than a year by one of the many groups contending for power in the aftermath of the 1979 Revolution. In Iran they remember a different national wound. They recall US cooperation with the UK to depose a popular prime minister in 1953, after he moved to nationalize the oil industry (read the CIA documents on Operation Ajax yourself online through the George Washington University National Security Archive). The US then backed the Shah as he established the repressive regime that ultimately provoked the uprising in 1979.
Hawks also point to Iran’s long relationship with Hezbollah in Lebanon as evidence of Iranian scheming. However, Hezbollah was not created by Iran; it was formed in response to the 1982 Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil War and the subsequent massacres of Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by Israeli-allied Christian militias (take a look at the Israeli government investigation of the massacres, the Kahan Commission Report). Iran as well as many other countries, including Israel, Syria, France, and the US, cultivated relationships with local factions to influence the multi-sided war. Sadly, US and French troops and American diplomats and private citizens became targets of kidnapping, assassination, and truck bombs during the 1980s; but it is a vast oversimplification to imply, as American hawks do, that these acts of terrorism were carried out by proxies at the behest of the Iranian state.
Iran has its own ghosts from the 1980s to mourn, which Americans often discount. In 1980 Americans encouraged Saddam Hussein‘s attack on Iran, providing weapons and financing even when the US knew he had used chemical weapons on the battlefield and on his own population. The Iraqi assault on Iran did not topple the Islamic Republic’s government. Instead, it led to an eight-year war and contributed to three-quarters of a million deaths, most of them Iranians. Americans recall the deaths of hundreds of Americans in 1980s Lebanon as tragic; Iranians recall the loss of an entire generation as tragedy as well.
American officials today are pursuing a red herring in blaming Hezbollah violence on Iran. Even eliminating Iran’s current government through regime change wouldn’t solve Israel’s security problem in the north. Hezbollah remains active not because of the limited Iranian aid, but because of the impact of continued Israeli invasions and bombings of Lebanese territory, the deteriorating situation of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and the absolute failure of the international community to address the situation. What drives Hezbollah’s strategy is Israel’s behavior, not Iran’s directives.
The Iranian presence in Syria and Iraq since the early 2000s is another goad to American saber-rattlers; but again, Americans seem to overlook their own role in destabilizing the region after 2003. For Iran, sandwiched between countries that had been invaded and occupied by the US, inundated with refugees, and then faced with the rise of an extremist movement (ISIS) that threatened the lives of all who disagreed with its interpretation of Islam, including all Shia Muslims—the majority of Iranians—it was logical to pursue involvement in Iraq. Iran had a clear interest in thwarting the emergence of a US-lapdog government in Iraq that could give the US the option of using Iraq as a launchpad for regime change next door. Yet the US, ignoring its own illegal invasion and occupation of a sovereign nation, portrays Iran as the outlaw. Americans remember the thousands of soldiers who were maimed and killed in the Iraq war, some certainly due to the actions of Iranian-affiliated militias; but the US invasion and occupation led to hundreds of thousands of deaths (see the Brown University Costs of War Project for a sobering accounting), seldom acknowledged by Americans.
Of the nearly 1200 overseas military sites operating in the world, the US has nearly 900 while Iran has one—yet the US accuses Iran of military adventurism. Source: World Beyond War Report, 2025
And what about the much-maligned “Iranian-affiliated militias” who regularly attacked US troops in Syria over the past decade? Again, context helps. The Iranian alliance with the Assad government has never been a secret. It dates to the 1980s, when Iran was faced with invasion from US-backed Iraq to the west and US-funded militias (the Taliban) in Afghanistan to the east. Not surprisingly, Iran cultivated a relationship with Syria as a strategic counterweight. After the Syrian revolt broke out in 2011 and ISIS emerged, Iran-backed units in Syria sometimes clashed with US troops, although both were battling ISIS. But in this case it is the Americans that should be accused of covertly funding militias, including jihadists and separatists (Operation Timber Sycamore and the Free Syrian Army). The American and American-backed forces in Syria were the foreign intruders intent on toppling the government, while Iran was a formal government ally.
Finally, one cannot read about Yemen without seeing the ubiquitous phrase “Iran-backed Houthi rebels.” The Houthi movement existed for years as a regional resistance movement before beginning to receive limited Iranian aid in 2015. And Iran hasn’t been the most lethal outside actor in Yemen. The Saudis not only waged bombing campaigns in Yemen (with US assistance), but they brought in foreign mercenaries. The sometimes-partner of the Saudis, the UAE, hired their own mercenaries (some of them American veterans), ran private detention centers, and attempted to carve off the island of Socotra and the strategic port of Aden for its own maritime ambitions. The US has been waging war on Yemen for twenty years, employing drone strikes, special forces units, starvation-inducing blockades, and air strikes. This spring, US airstrikes on Yemen struck a migrant detention facility, among other sites, causing the deaths of hundreds. Clearly the Iranians have not been the only foreign actor in Yemen, but Iranian involvement allows Americans, once again, to ignore the real reason for Houthi attacks on regional shipping: the Israeli war on Gaza.
Waiting for Regime Change
The Islamic Republic of Iran is no paragon of human rights, but neither are most US allies in the region. Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq all received failing scores for human rights in 2023. But only the sorry state of Iranian human rights (and they also receive a failing grade) is trotted out to justify discussions of regime change. There are certainly many within Iran that would like to see political change—but through their own efforts, not military intervention from abroad.
Regime change in Iran, however, is not the regime change which the Trump bombing campaign is most likely to provoke. The last eighteen months have witnessed a level of frustration and anger with the pathetically ineffective Western-centric international system not seen since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. The UN peacekeeping troops are fired at by Israel in Lebanon without consequences; UN leaders condemning the violence on civilians in Gaza are ignored; the UN assistance programs in Gaza are shut down; and even when the International Criminal Court brings charges against Benjamin Netanyahu, he travels freely to Europe and the White House. Meanwhile, day after day, images of Palestinians suffering under murderous occupation appear on phones across the world and the US continues in its delusion that bombardment from afar is statecraft. The anger at the West is palpable.
The global anger may be similar to that of 2003, but there are important differences. While Trump’s strikes were similar to unilateral strikes the US has carried out for decades—in Libya, Sudan, and Iraq—and consistent with the “over the horizon” tactics of ongoing US drone strikes in Yemen, Somalia, and other places Americans cannot be bothered with finding on a map or naming in a declaration of war, the US is unlikely to do more. The US in 2025 is broke and scarred from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and too worried about potential conflict in Europe and East Asia to risk getting tied down in Iran.
More importantly, the world is different. Not only does the US have comparatively less military and economic influence than it did in 2003, but other countries have options in the more multipolar world that they didn’t have before. There are more options for buying weapons, for negotiating trade deals, or for establishing military alliances. And Trump’s erratic foreign policy is only likely to hasten the process of decentralization.
The real question the US needs to ask is not how do we keep other states from acquiring nuclear weapons, but how will we live in a world we no longer dominate? Bombing countries from halfway around the world might be carried out with the most modern of equipment, but it is an outdated tactic that will only hasten the collapse of the old international system. This is the regime change that Trump’s strike on Iran has hastened.
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