With diplomacy stalled, Trump returns to floating regime change in Iran | CNN Politics

It’s a question President Donald Trump has privately been asking his national security team for months: Why aren’t the Iranian people toppling their leaders?

It was an outcome he seemed relatively certain of at the start of the war, convinced by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that street protests would flare up in Tehran after an intensive round of strikes.

Other American officials, having read intelligence assessments suggesting that wasn’t likely, weren’t so sure, and the issue was hotly debated before the first strikes began, according to people familiar with the matter. Still, Trump launched the conflict in late February with a call for a government takeover.

“This will be probably your only chance for generations,” he advised the Iranian people in a video the night the war began.

The idea quickly faded from view, replaced by the more urgent imperative of negotiating with the regime to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. By June, Trump insisted he “never cared about regime change” in Iran, claiming he was in negotiations with “very rational people” and that American attempts at ousting foreign governments “never work.”

Those comments aside, Trump continued wondering why his calls for government overthrow went unheeded, people familiar with the matter said.

Now, with traffic through the strait still below pre-war levels and diplomacy with Iran at a standstill, Trump has returned to the concept he began the war with six months ago.

“When are the Iranian people going to rise up and fight?” he asked on social media Tuesday.

The pendulum swinging back to regime change advocacy was the latest déjà vu moment in a war that seems to cycle through familiar patterns in month-long increments.

A month-long period of relative calm was punctured this week after the United States and Iran traded strikes over three consecutive days, returning to the same sequence of retaliation that stretched on for weeks earlier this summer.

Trump, who has repeatedly threatened to wipe out Iran’s civilian infrastructure, said Wednesday he was prepared to order an even larger round of destruction if needed.

“It was a very heavy attack last night and we’re prepared to do another one any time we want,” he said, while also saying he did not believe the renewed fighting would last long.

There are currently no substantive attempts at returning to diplomacy after Trump ordered his envoys to halt their discussions with Iran last month, according to officials. Instead, Trump says he is content with the status of the conflict and sounds in no hurry to reach a durable conclusion to the fighting.

“I like our position now,” he wrote on social media this week, “with almost total control of the Hormuz Strait, and their economy totally collapsing.”

Many in Trump’s orbit would prefer the conflict recede from the forefront of political conversation entirely for the next two months as voters begin to cast ballots that will decide the balance of power on Capitol Hill.

While the president has discounted the role the midterms are playing in his Iran decision-making, senior advisers and Republican allies on Capitol Hill have all issued warnings that renewed conflict would spell trouble on Election Day.

“I don’t know how much more they can take, but, you know, whatever it is, it doesn’t matter,” Trump said of Iran on Wednesday. “And I’m not affected by the election.”

The desire for a less visible conflict dovetailed with a shift in the administration’s strategy — to try choking off Tehran’s finances, including by threatening sanctions on its largest trading partners. The Treasury Department has yet to impose the biggest of those threatened penalties.

But part of the Trump team’s calculation in trying to cut off Iran’s financial lifelines — and worsen the country’s economic conditions — was to prompt anger among disillusioned Iranians toward their leaders. Officials privately acknowledge that average Iranians will bear the brunt of the new sanctions.

Already, the economic sting in Iran is real. Inflation has soared, and food prices are increasing by the week. The rial, Iran’s currency, has plunged in value. Iran’s top officials acknowledge they are suffering a host of economic problems.

“We are apologetic that these problems exist, as we find ourselves in a full-scale economic, military, and security war,” Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian said before the new Treasury Department measures were announced last week, according to state media.

Still, some US officials said there was little intelligence to indicate a renewed likelihood that Iranian protesters would take to the streets to oust their leaders, even as the economic situation in the country grows increasingly dire.

American intelligence assessments before the war began concluded a joint US-Israeli operation was unlikely to lead to regime change, and months into the conflict officials said the regime had not lost its grip on power.

And decades of crippling western sanctions have done little to weaken the regime, against the hopes of successive American administrations. Protests have instead been met with fierce crackdowns, including at the start of this year when the Iranian government unleashed one of the worst crackdowns in the Islamic Republic’s history.

Analysts said Iran’s leaders were well attuned to Trump’s objectives in trying to tighten the noose economically.

“The Iranian leadership sees this kind of economic campaign of economic pressure not in isolation, but as part of a broader campaign by the United States, which at some point is going to also have an element of domestic unrest and eventually lead either to regime change or to bring Iran to better terms with the United States,” said Hamidreza Azizi, senior Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group.

Trump was coy when asked this week whether the US, perhaps through the CIA, would arm Iranian dissidents looking to overthrow the regime

“I’d love to tell you that,” he said Wednesday in the Oval Office, “but it wouldn’t be appropriate to say.”

And even after questioning why Iranians weren’t rising up, he acknowledged he knew the answer to his own query.

“I understand their plight,” he said. “They’re being shot right now.”