Iran strikes: Widening conflict | Photo Credit: Amr Alfiky
It came down to regime change. Negotiations in Geneva and in the Middle East on a nuclear deal with Iran provided a convenient sideshow to carry out a well planned and targeted bombing campaign that claimed the lives of the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, some of his family members and supposedly the elite commanders of the regime.
For a person who built his foreign policy campaign in 2024 and earlier being against nation building and regime change and consistently ridiculing past Presidents for their policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, President Donald Trump did exactly that.
Nuclear quagmire
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From the beginning Washington’s rant about Iran’s continuing nuclear plans somehow lacked credibility and for a good reason. In June 2025 Trump had claimed that Teheran’s program had been “obliterated” with B 2s levelling the facilities in Nantanz and Fordow.
But American intelligence and analysts were far more circumspect of the results; and not too long ago there were reports of Teheran starting to further fortify the perimeters so as to withstand the bunker busters for a second time. But in the end it all boiled down to a compound and a building in Teheran where the regime’s top honchos were meeting.
If the US had said at the beginning that its objective was regime change and preparations to that effect were underway, not many in Iran or elsewhere would have shed tears. After all, here was a regime that had been around for about four decades, known for its brutal crackdowns and repressive laws in the name of religion.
In fact the Trump administration would have been hailed as a hero if it had stepped in when the brutal crackdowns were going on starting this January with an estimated 7,000 killed according to independent observers.
Change in objective
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After stating initially that the curbing of the Iranian nuclear programme was the stated objective, wiping out of Tehran’s top leadership seems to be an afterthought.
The taking out of the top leadership is indeed a major blow to the clerics but it sets in motion a process that need not be stabilizing for Iran, the region and the world at large, at least from the short-term point of view. From the current posturing the Iranian military has shown a capability to hit targets — however weak it may seem to military analysts — in the Middle East, disrupt air travel and threaten the vital sea lanes in an around the Gulf and the Straits of Hormuz.
The proxies of Iran like the Hamas, Hizbollah and Houthis may have been considerably weakened at the pounding received in the Gaza, Lebanon and elsewhere, but by no means a spent force.
Trump knows very well that getting rid of ruthless and unpopular regimes is easy; but putting in place a viable group or an individual who can command respect is difficult. In the case of Iran, Washington and Tel Aviv have thrown out the clerics without any visible alternatives and hence raising the troublesome spectre of political instability bordering on regional factionalism and violence.
In 1953 the Central Intelligence Agency and the British Intelligence MI-6 conspired to bring down the lawfully elected Mohammad Mosaddegh to get a pliable Shah of Iran who was ousted by Ayatollah Khomeni in 1979.
Seven American Presidents starting with Jimmy Carter in 1979 have been dealing with Iran and several of them had to deal with the issue of its nuclear program. Teheran’s refrain that its nuclear program is strictly for peaceful energy purposes and not for making nuclear weapons has long been dismissed. The question now is whether Washington and the international community can find a regime that can politically survive without a nuclear program and calls for the destruction of Israel.
The writer is a senior journalist who has reported from Washington DC on North America and UN
Published on March 2, 2026