--- title: In Bombing Iran, Trump Ignores 80 Years of U.S. Regime Change Mistakes description: The U.S. has a long history of toppling governments and then messing up everything after that. Trump may have launched the next version of that canonical: https://time.com/7296013/trump-strike-iran-war-regime-change/ author: Philip Elliott article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2025-06-19T16:22:06.000Z article:modified_time: 2025-06-23T15:12:54.000Z article:section: Politics og:title: In Bombing Iran, Trump Looked Past 80 Years of U.S. Regime Change Mistakes og:description: The U.S. has a long history of toppling governments and then messing up everything after that. Trump may have launched the next version of that og:url: https://time.com/7296013/trump-strike-iran-war-regime-change/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9e349e601a5c10aa/6998c7a5c8dcb430d2b503bc/GettyImages-2220445402.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1024 og:image:height: 576 og:image:alt: World Leaders Converge In Canada For G7 Summit og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: In Bombing Iran, Trump Looked Past 80 Years of U.S. Regime Change Mistakes twitter:description: The U.S. has a long history of toppling governments and then messing up everything after that. Trump may have launched the next version of that twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9e349e601a5c10aa/6998c7a5c8dcb430d2b503bc/GettyImages-2220445402.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # In Bombing Iran, Trump Looked Past 80 Years of U.S. Regime Change Mistakes > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: September 2026. ## TIME D.C. Brief: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition D.C. Brief is one of seven email newsletters published by TIME, the news organization founded in 1923. Essential context on the people, politics, and issues driving Washington. D.C. Brief goes beyond the Washington headlines to explain the politics, personalities and power dynamics shaping what happens next. 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It is written by a TIME senior correspondent who covers the capital full time. #### Who writes TIME's D.C. Brief? Philip Elliott, a senior correspondent at TIME, writes D.C. Brief. #### Is D.C. Brief free? Yes. D.C. Brief is free at time.com/newsletters. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-dcbrief-2026q3/newsletters?i=19e4b30f-53ed-4bf1-8091-27ccc06a1ee0&cr=time-nl-dcbrief-2026q3-v1) ## Video: U.S. Joins Israel in Strikes on Iranian Nuclear Sites, Trump Announces, Risking Wider War [Watch (HLS stream): U.S. Joins Israel in Strikes on Iranian Nuclear Sites, Trump Announces, Risking Wider War](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/mSrygUbr.m3u8) (3:43)  _Published 2025-06-22. President Donald Trump announced Saturday evening that the United States military carried out airstrikes on three Iranian nuclear sites, joining Israel’s bombing campaign in an effort to cripple Tehran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon._  by [Philip Elliott](https://time.com/author/philip-elliott/)  ## Philip Elliott Senior Correspondent Updated: Jun 23, 2025 3:12 PM UTCPublished: Jun 19, 2025 4:22 PM UTC President Donald Trump announced Saturday evening that the United States military carried out airstrikes on three Iranian nuclear sites, joining Israel’s bombing campaign in an effort to cripple Tehran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon.  by [Philip Elliott](https://time.com/author/philip-elliott/)  ## Philip Elliott Senior Correspondent Updated: Jun 23, 2025 3:12 PM UTCPublished: Jun 19, 2025 4:22 PM UTC _This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up_ [_here_](https://cloud.newsletters.time.com/signup?nln=dc-brief&source=dc%5Fonsite) _to get stories like this sent to your inbox._ Donald Trump [expected](https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/obama-meets-trump-nemesis-231200) his first face-to-face meeting with Barack Obama would be all of “10 or 15 minutes.” After all, the pair had spent years circling each other, trading barbs from afar and using the other’s political movement as a blend of punching bag and strawman. The mutual [enmity](https://time.com/5881982/obama-brawl-with-trump-breaks-with-history/) was hardly a secret; Obama’s [trolling](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/watch-inside-the-night-president-obama-took-on-donald-trump/) of Trump at a White House correspondents’ dinner set in motion the New Yorker’s serious contemplation of Redemption By White House Win. The 2016 [summit](https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37932231) between the President-elect and the incumbent ended up going 90 minutes, during which North Korea was, to Trump’s mind, [the big takeaway](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/15/trump-obama-told-me-that-he-was-close-to-starting-a-big-war-with-north-korea.html). (Obama’s team recalled the [conversation](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/16/us/politics/trump-obama-north-korea.html) differently.) The message was pretty clear: that rogue nation was one of the biggest problems Trump was inheriting as he rose to power after the 2016 election. The election clearly did not go as Obama had hoped so he had this one set piece to convey to his successor just how fraught the situation on the Korean Peninsula was, and how any misstep could be fatal to millions. The outgoing President’s concern was that Trump, or some of his top advisers, might want to try to swap regimes. But history is lined with examples why these trades have never gone as planned. And Obama wanted to [convey](https://time.com/5617952/trump-lying-obama-kim-jong-un/) the risks of both a nuclear-armed free agent and a country decapitated without a clear next step. Obama [hated](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/16/us/politics/trump-obama-north-korea.html) the threat of a nuclear North Korea but also understood how things might escalate in some pretty terrible ways if unchecked emotions and amateur gut sense took over. Maybe—despite his own instincts—Trump understood that regime change was not compatible with this worldview. Instead, he courted the North Koreans and broke a half century of protocol in visiting with the reclusive regime’s chief. In fact, as a candidate, and even well before that, Trump resisted any suggestion of intervention. That positioning helped Trump remake the Republican Party by elevating its isolationist wing. It’s why the current moment is such a challenge for Trump: [Israel’s strikes on Iran](https://time.com/7295726/netanyahu-trump-israel-iran-nuclear-strikes/) lured dreams of a time after an Ayatollah runs the Islamic Republic. But dreams can easily turn into nightmares, and this particular lullaby is more than a little discordant. “Regime change” has become shorthand in national-security circles the same way “nation building” and “mission accomplished” have devolved from well-considered policy goals into collapsed folly. U.S. intervention into foreign nations’ governance in pursuit of friendlier—if not less-lethal—regimes has proven a loser. In recent years, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya have all provided proof of the model’s overly optimistic lens on the map. Going back in the post-World War II era, history has shown the United States very capable at both toppling governments and then promptly getting the sequel disastrously wrong. For every regime change at the hands of Americans that went well—think Adolf Hitler’s exit from Germany and Benito Mussolini from Italy—there are multitudes that went off the rails: six overt [attempts](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09636412.2020.1693620) during the Cold War and another 64 in covert operations. And just about no one on the political stage this century has been more clear-eyed on that reality than Trump. Dating to his days as a celebrity host of a reality show, Trump hated foreign adventurism, although he did tell Howard Stern he [supported](https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/08/politics/donald-trump-iraq-war-opposition) the Iraq war a month before Congress voted on it. After launching his presidential bid in 2015, he campaigned endlessly against so-called [“forever wars”](https://time.com/7295729/trump-middle-east-war-iran-risk/) and creeping American meddling. He [blasted](https://time.com/7295729/trump-middle-east-war-iran-risk/) decisions to engage beyond U.S. borders as simply stupid. He called regime change a dangerous precedent that violated sovereignty and wasted cache. For Trump, the ability to topple rivals was enough of a threat without taking it out of the safe. “Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake, all right?” Trump [said](https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/02/trump-code-pink-bush-iraq-9-11-213630/) in a February 2016 debate. Months later, after he won election but before he took office, Trump seemed to redouble his skepticism of the military’s reach into other governments. “We will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn’t be involved with,” the President-elect [said](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/07/donald-trump-we-will-stop-racing-to-topple-foreign-regimes) in December of 2016. There’s a reason why regime change has been a non-starter. Democrats hated it when George W. Bush tried it, particularly with Iraq. Republicans hated the blowback they faced for Bush’s errors. Independents loathed the fallout. Swing-state voters hated that their kids were sent onto battlefields they didn’t understand. Fiscal conservatives hated the costs. Fiscal liberals hated the opportunity costs. In Iraq alone, 4,000 Americans and 100,000 Iraqis lost their lives. Trump has gotten all that for most of his political career. He may not have a grasp on the nuances of the foreign policy but he certainly gets the zeitgeist. And, as has been the case for two decades, the patience for a thrust beyond U.S. borders is limited. Want proof? Look at the post-WW2 landscape. South Korea, Greece, and Syria all fell to U.S. meddling before 1950 even got here. Burma, Egypt, Iraq, Guatemala, Indonesia, Syria (again), Cambodia, and Cuba all followed. Far-flung efforts in the Dominican Republic, Laos, Brazil, Chile, Ethiopia, Bolivia, Afghanistan, and even Poland followed. Grenada, Panama, and Haiti left U.S. administrations in the political muck. Vietnam was the biggest catastrophe to most Americans’ memories. Put in the crudest terms, the United States is really good at ignoring what Washington has coined the Pottery Barn Rule: you break it, you own it. Yes, we can break a whole lot, and have. But the United States does not exactly have total control over what it knocks off the shelf. Which brings us back to Iran, which sits dangerously close to the ledge’s edge. Before surprising the world with a [strike on Iran's nuclear facilities](https://time.com/7296469/u-s-strikes-iran-nuclear-trump-war/) on Saturday, Trump had been publicly cagey about what he would do next. “I may do it, I may not do it, nobody knows what I’m going to do,” Trump said Wednesday about the prospect of launching an air strike on an Iranian nuclear facility. **Read more:** [_A New Middle East Is Unfolding Before Our Eyes_](https://time.com/7295798/new-middle-east-time-cover/) Yet undermining that cautiousness was Trump’s apparent acceptance of Israel’s view that Iran is racing toward building a nuclear weapon. That assessment is at odds with the U.S. intelligence community’s [view](https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/17/politics/video/trump-gabbard-iran-nuclear-weapons-collins-digvid), which remains consistent that that’s not the case. “I don’t care what she said,” Trump said on Tuesday, referring to recent testimony of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard that Iran isn’t actively trying to build a bomb. Trump may have been brutal about Bush getting the intel wrong on Iraq, but it seems he may not have learned the risks of rushing into the mix with incomplete or manipulated facts. Trump is, at his core, a gut-driven figure who has proven adept at finding voices that confirm his instinct—and banishing those who challenge it. Trump might despise the existing regime in Tehran, but he also does not want to be left with another shattered nation in that region with little more than epoxy as a plan. Yet even members of his own base fear he may be about to do just that, dragging the country into the very kind of boondoggle he won office by denouncing and abandoning the isolationism that he inserted into the GOP’s new DNA. _Make sense of what matters in Washington._ [_Sign up for the D.C. Brief newsletter_](https://cloud.newsletters.time.com/signup?nln=dc-brief&source=dc%5Fonsite)_._ ## Transcript [00:02] Thank you very much. [00:05] A short time ago, the U.S. military carried out massive precision strikes on [00:11] the three key nuclear facilities in the Iranian regime Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan. [00:21] Everybody heard those names for years as they built this horribly destructive enterprise. [00:29] Our objective was the destruction of Iran's nuclear enrichment capacity, [00:34] and a stop to the nuclear threat posed by the world's number one state sponsor of terror. [00:41] Tonight, I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success. [00:48] Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated. [00:54] Iran, the bully of the Middle East, [00:57] must now make peace. [00:59] If they do not, future attacks will be far greater and a lot easier. [01:03] For 40 years, Iran has been saying death to America, death to Israel. [01:09] They have been killing our people, [01:10] blowing off their arms, [01:12] blowing off their legs with roadside bombs. [01:15] That was their specialty. [01:17] We lost over a thousand people and hundreds of thousands throughout [01:21] the Middle East and around the world have [01:23] died as a direct result of their hate in particular. [01:27] So many were killed by their general, Qasem Soleimani. [01:32] I decided a long time ago that I would not let this happen. [01:36] It will not continue. [01:38] I want to thank and congratulate Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. [01:43] We worked as a team like perhaps no team has ever worked before. [01:48] And we've gone a long way to erasing this horrible threat to Israel. [01:52] I want to thank the Israeli military for the wonderful job they've done. [01:57] And most importantly, I want to congratulate [01:59] the great American patriots who flew those magnificent machines tonight [02:04] and all of the United States military on an operation [02:08] the likes of which the world has not seen in many, many decades. [02:11] Hopefully we will no longer need their services in this capacity. [02:16] I hope that's so. [02:17] I also want to congratulate the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, [02:22] General Dan Raisin Cain. [02:24] Spectacular, general. [02:25] And all of the brilliant military minds involved in this attack. [02:29] With all of that being said, this cannot continue. [02:32] There will be either peace or there will be tragedy for Iran, [02:37] far greater than we have witnessed over the last eight days. [02:41] Remember, there are many targets left. [02:44] Tonight's was the most difficult of them all by far, [02:48] and perhaps the most lethal. [02:51] But if peace does not come quickly, [02:53] we will go after those other targets with precision, speed and skill. [02:59] Most of them can be taken out in a matter of minutes. [03:03] There is no military in the world that could have done [03:05] what we did tonight. Not even close. [03:08] There has never been a military that could do what took place just a little while ago. [03:13] Tomorrow, General Caine, Secretary of Defense [03:17] Pete Hegseth will have a press conference at 8 a.m. at the Pentagon. [03:22] And I want to just thank everybody. [03:24] And in particular, God, [03:27] I want to just say we love you, [03:29] God, and we love our great military. [03:31] Protect them. God bless the Middle East. [03:35] God bless Israel, and God bless America. [03:38] Thank you very much. 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