Tag: regime change

Trump Goes All In On Regime Change In Cuba

The Trump administration just slammed the door on an effort by Cuba’s communist government to secure an economic lifeline while appearing to embrace reform. A May 1 executive order expands and sharpens longstanding American sanctions on Cuba, and appears to deliberately target a recent gesture at partially opening the Cuban economy. “All property and interests in property that are in the United States,” the order says, are barred from operating “in the energy, defense and related materiel, metals and mining, financial services, or security sector of the Cuban economy, or any other sector of the Cuban economy,” under the penalty of economic sanctions.

On March 16, in a bid for survival, the communist government of Cuba had announced a series of intended though vaguely executed reforms that would allow foreign investment in the island from Cubans living overseas. The reforms were to include a supposed expansion of private property rights. Deputy Prime Minister Oscar Pérez-Oliva Fraga said that the country was “open to maintaining a fluid commercial relationship with U.S. companies.”

Asked by email if the May 1 order was a deliberate response to the March 16 Cuban announcement, a State Department spokesman referred The Federalist to comments made on April 27 by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants. In a long discussion with Fox News Chief Foreign Correspondent Trey Yingst, Rubio rejected the possibility of reform under the current Cuban government, describing Cuba as “a failed state.”

Cuba “can get better,” the secretary of state added, but “serious economic reforms are impossible with these people in charge. It can’t happen. And these people in charge aren’t just economically incompetent. They have rolled out the welcome mat to adversaries of the United States to operate within Cuban territory against our national interest with impunity. We are not going to have a foreign military or intelligence or security apparatus operating with impunity 90 miles off the shores of the United States. That’s not going to happen under President Trump.”

Keep reading

Rule by Secrecy – How Covert Regime Change Shaped Our World

The modern international order rests on a contradiction rarely examined in full daylight. Western states present themselves as guardians of international rules, democracy, and self-determination, yet the historical record of their behavior abroad tells a different story — one written not in treaties or speeches, but in classified cables, deniable operations, and shattered political systems. Covert Regime Change, first published in 2018, matters because it documents, with unusual rigor, how this contradiction became a governing method. Lindsey A. O’Rourke, Associate Professor at Boston College, does not ask whether covert intervention occasionally went wrong. She demonstrates that it became a routine instrument of statecraft, one whose predictable consequences were political collapse, mass violence, and long-term instability.

The book’s starting point is empirical, not rhetorical. O’Rourke assembles the most comprehensive dataset to date of U.S.-backed regime change attempts during the Cold War, identifying seventy cases between 1947 and 1989. Sixty-four were covert. Only six were overt. This imbalance is not incidental. It reveals a strategic preference for secrecy as a means of exercising power without democratic constraint. Covert regime change allowed policymakers to intervene repeatedly while insulating themselves from public accountability.

O’Rourke also dismantles the notion that covert regime change primarily served democratic ends. Statistically, covert interventions overwhelmingly produced authoritarian outcomes. Where democratic transitions occurred – and they are hard to find – , they were more often associated with overt interventions, where public scrutiny imposed limits. Secrecy correlated with repression, not reform. O’Rourke’s findings dispel the myth that the US fought for democracy during the Cold War: “The United States supported authoritarian forces in forty-­four out of sixty-­four covert regime changes, including at least six operations that sought to replace liberal demo­cratic governments with illiberal authoritarian regimes. Yet, Washington’s proclivity for installing authoritarian regimes was also not absolute. In one-­eighth of its covert missions and one-­half of its overt interventions, Washington encouraged a demo­cratic transformation in an authoritarian state.” In other words: Washington supported whatever regime or rebel group served its interests — and showed little concern for democracy.

What makes the book so unsettling is that it refuses to stop at the moment of intervention. O’Rourke tracks what followed. Using comparative statistical analysis, she shows that states targeted by covert regime change were significantly more likely to experience civil war and mass killings. Her statistical analysis shows that “states targeted for covert regime change were 6.7 times more likely to experience a Militarized Interstate Dispute with the United States in the ten years following intervention.” US regime change operations also steeply increased episodes of mass killing: “States targeted in successful operations were 2.8 times more likely to experience an episode of mass killing, whereas states targeted in failed covert missions ­were 3.7 times more likely.”

Vietnam demonstrates how covert regime change could deepen rather than prevent war. Before large-scale U.S. troop deployments, Washington pursued covert efforts to shape South Vietnam’s leadership. O’Rourke reconstructs the U.S. role in facilitating the 1963 coup against President Ngo Dinh Diem. Rather than stabilizing the regime, the coup fragmented power and intensified dependence on U.S. military support. What began as covert political manipulation ended in a war that killed millions of Vietnamese and devastated the region.

In the Western Hemisphere, the United States utilized hegemonic operations to enforce a brutal regional conformity, often at the direct expense of democratic institutions. The CIA-backed overthrow of Jacobo Árbenz in 1954 destroyed Guatemala’s young democracy. Guatemala’s subsequent trajectory: decades of military rule, a civil war lasting more than thirty years, and the killing of roughly 200,000 people, the majority civilians. Indigenous communities were systematically targeted.

The case of the Dominican Republic illustrates the cold transition from secret meddling to open violence. The US first backed Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship. Following the 1961 assassination of Trujillo — an operation in which the CIA provided the weapons — the country attempted a fragile democratic opening. When the reformist Juan Bosch won the presidency in 1962, his refusal to launch a McCarthyite purge of domestic leftists led Washington to view him as a “weak link” in the regional defense against communism. After Bosch was ousted in a military coup, a popular uprising in 1965 sought to restore the democratic constitution. Fearing a “second Cuba,” the Johnson administration launched a massive overt invasion to crush the rebellion and install a more compliant regime. The empirical record here is clear: for American planners, the survival of a pro-Washington hierarchy was far more important than the survival of a Caribbean democracy.

Keep reading

Last US Convoy Exits Syria After Brutal 14-Year Regime Change Proxy War

Widespread reports on Thursday say the very last US military convoy has finally departed Syrian territory, with the years-long occupation of the primarily northeast oil and gas rich sector over in a ‘mission accomplished’ fashion.

It brings to a final close the 14-year long bloody proxy war which overthrew the Assad government and ultimately installed a pro-US/Saudi axis puppet, in the person of founding Syrian Al Qaeda Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, now known as President Ahmed al-Sharaa.

Hundreds of thousand of people lost their lives in the regime change war, with the country and its economy left in a sanction-starved and conflict-demolished state of ruins.

The US-backed Syrian Foreign Ministry declared Washington had decided to “complete its military mission” in the country. “The Syrian state is today fully capable of leading counter-terrorism efforts from within, in co-operation with the international community,” it said, happy to now be back in control of the domestic oil and gas supply.

The ministry “welcomes the completed handover of military sites where United States forces were previously present in Syria to the Syrian government,” adding that “the handover of these sites was carried out … in full coordination between the Syrian and American governments.”

While Pentagon propaganda had for years touted an ‘anti-ISIS’ mission, the real purpose of the troop presence was to cut off Damascus under Assad of its sovereign natural resources, and to arm and prop up a Kurdish-Arab coalition called the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). 

All the while, the CIA supported Sunni hardline jihadists who were indistinguishable from ISIS in their ideology in the fight against the Syrian Army, and the civilian population which often largely supported the secular Ba’ath government. The broader strategy has long been to destroy the Tehran-Baghdad-Hezbollah ‘Shia axis’ – even if that meant using ISIS as a tool of regime change.

Ironically, in the process of this US handover of oil and gas facilities back to post-Assad Damascus, the Kurds were thrown under the bus. Their dream for an autonomous enclave (Rojava) once again proved illusory, and in the long term the Kurds will find themselves at the mercy of Sunni fanatics on the one hand, and Turkish state under Erdogan on the other.

Keep reading

America Needs a Regime Change

The American people need the Iran war like a fish needs a bicycle. For our politicians and permanent bureaucrats, it’s a different story.

The political class, adrift after the Soviet Union fell, needed a new animating mythos. Neoconservatives taught them to experience preemptive war against tinpot tyrants as a civilizational crusade. The Middle East – where America’s “greatest ally” faced existential threats – offered the ideal stage for the clash between order and barbarism.

Here was the role of a lifetime: to call the shots on a world-historical mission that cast unilateral hard power as virtue. No wonder they cling to it, even after every failed​ regime-change war.

President Donald Trump’s vow that he would never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon was one of the few moments to draw bipartisan applause during his recent State of the Union address. So what if the geopolitical center of gravity now lies in the Indo-Pacific? On February 28, our leaders reached for another bloody encore in the desert, another stab at playing Wyatt Earp.

Like every functioning addict, America’s ruling class has enablers. Defense contractors monetize its messiah complex, the media industry mythologizes it, and a pro-Israel advocacy network leverages it by converting Israeli geopolitical ambitions into U.S. military imperatives.

When Israel decided to attack Iran, it should have been a time for choosing. Instead, the Trump administration treated U.S. participation as inevitable. The only choice we had was the timing. We could either join Israel’s opening blow or wait until Iran retaliated against U.S. forces before initiating hostilities. America’s terms of entry into the Iran war demonstrate “alliance entrapment,” regardless of whether Secretary of State Marco Rubio conceded it or not.

The first rule of a war of choice is to sell it as a necessity. In the absence of a direct attack on the homeland, the White House has cycled through several rationales. These include preventing an “imminent” nuclear threat (of which no public evidence has been produced), destroying Iran’s missile arsenal, liberating Iranians from tyranny, protecting Israel, and demanding the Islamic regime’s “unconditional surrender.” Ultimately, it settled on an official justification that is nearly verbatim from a memo by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies – a leading Iran-hawk think tank created to “enhance Israel’s image in North America.”

Since the war began, thirteen U.S. troops have been killed and 381 wounded, while the reported death toll across the Middle East is now in the thousands. If Trump opposed the 2003 Iraq War, why is he sacrificing blood and treasure in a strategically unwinnable regime-change operation? It appears that he objected to the outcome of that war and not the ideology that led to its failure. The “axis of evil” morality play always seduces those desperate to feel consequential.

The loudest case for Trump’s pursuit of glory in Iran was made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. After all, dismantling the Shia theocracy and its proxy network would shift the regional balance of power in Israel’s favor. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch and “some conservative commentators” also reportedly pushed the President toward war. Given who the White House is now lionizing, it would be safe to infer that the latter includes big-name neocons Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro.

Contrary to what the Murdoch media entities and neocon cheerleaders claim, American tactical victories have not translated into functional success. Iranian missiles and drones still regularly strike U.S. bases, energy facilities, and civilian areas in our allied Gulf states. The Islamic regime remains intact and it has effectively closed off the Strait of Hormuz. Many of our Asian partners are reeling from the consequent oil and gas supply disruption.

Corroding Pax Americana is a small price for the ruling class to feel like history’s heroes. As the hostilities grind into a war of attrition, Taiwan and our other allies fear that the ongoing diversion of U.S. military forces from the Indo-Pacific will create an opening for Chinese adventurism.

But at home, defense industry-funded think tanks are marketing the conflict as if it closes that opening. Analysts from the Hudson Institute, for example, claim that the Iran war is the first act of a grand strategy to weaken China. They exaggerate China’s ties with Iran and overlook the U.S. military’s inability to conduct protracted wars in multiple theaters. This enabling narrative flips what is a strategic self-own into a 4D chess move.

Keep reading

What Trump’s inner circle really thought of plan to go to war with Iran: CIA ‘dismissed regime-change plan as “farcical”. JD Vance said “it’s a bad idea”. But Donald went with his instinct’

Donald Trump’s inner circle’s almost all thought the Iran war was a bad idea when Israel gave a secret White House briefing that convinced him to launch Operation Epic Fury, it has been claimed.

Benjamin Netanyahu was invited to make his case for war in the Situation Room, The New York Times reports, a venue rarely used for in-person briefings with foreign leaders.

Seated across from the President on February 11, the Israeli prime minister delivered a detailed, hour-long presentation. His message was clear – Iran was vulnerable and the time was ripe for regime change. 

The Israeli delegation painted a picture of swift and decisive victory. Iran’s missile capabilities, they argued, could be dismantled within weeks.

The Strait of Hormuz would remain open, and retaliation against American targets would be minimal.

Behind the scenes, Israel’s intelligence service, Mossad, could help spark an internal uprising to finish the job.

At one point, Netanyahu played a video montage highlighting potential future leaders of Iran should the regime collapse – including Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the country’s last shah.

Trump’s reaction was positive, and he appeared to be on board.

Keep reading

Yes, Iran Is Playing Chess – But Only After Rewriting the Rules of the Game

The origins of chess are contested, but few dispute that while the game began in India, it was the Sassanian Persian Empire that refined it into a recognizable strategic system. It was Persia that codified its language, symbolism and intellectual framework: the shah (king), the rokh (rook), and shatranj, the modern chess game.

This is not a trivial historical detail. It is, in many ways, a metaphor that has returned with force.

Since the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran on February 28, 2026, political discourse – across Western, Israeli and alternative media – has repeatedly invoked the analogy of chess to describe Iran’s conduct.

The comparison is seductive. But it is also incomplete.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu articulated this framing as early as May 2012. Speaking of Iran’s negotiating posture, he said that “it looks as though they see the talks as another opportunity to delay and deceive and buy time… Iran is very good in playing this kind of chess game, and you know sometimes you have to sacrifice a pawn to save the king.”

That statement was not merely rhetorical; it revealed a long-standing Israeli interpretation of Iran as a strategic actor operating within a calculated, long-term framework.

More than a decade later, that framing has resurfaced with renewed urgency. Analysts, policymakers and commentators now routinely describe Iran’s actions as deliberate, layered and patient – defined not by immediate gains, but by positional advantage accumulated over time.

Some observers contrast this with what they perceive as a fundamentally different approach in Washington: one driven by immediacy, spectacle and the politics of rapid outcomes.

But such a contrast, while tempting, risks oversimplification.

Iran’s approach is rooted in historical continuity. It understands the current war not as an isolated confrontation, but as the latest phase in a decade-long process of pressure, containment and confrontation.

In this sense, the battlefield is not defined by days or weeks, but by political cycles measured in years – if not generations.

The objective of its adversaries, however, has remained consistent: Shāh Māt – checkmate – the dismantling of the Iranian state as a coherent political entity.

Yet this is precisely where the central miscalculation emerges.

When the Iranian Revolution overthrew the US-backed Shah in 1979, the collapse of the system was swift and decisive. But it was not the result of external pressure. It was the inevitable outcome of a structurally brittle system.

That system was vertical – organized as a rigid hierarchy with power concentrated at the apex and legitimacy flowing downward. When the apex collapsed, the entire structure disintegrated.

If the people are the piyādeh – the pawns – then in that moment, they did not merely encircle the king; they overturned the entire board.

This experience helped shape a strategic doctrine that would later define US and Israeli military thinking: the belief that removing leadership – what is often termed “decapitation” – can trigger systemic collapse.

Keep reading

US ‘worked directly’ with terrorists in Syria on Israel’s behalf – Trump’s ex-counterterrorism chief

The US “worked directly with Al-Qaeda” and Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) to topple former President Bashar Assad and destroy Syria, US President Donald Trump’s former counterterrorism chief, Joe Kent, has said.

Kent, who resigned as head of the US National Counterterrorism Center in protest of the US-Israeli war against Iran, made the remarks in an interview with MintPress News on Friday.

The former senior official reiterated his take on the Iran conflict as the latest in a series of wars waged by the US on behalf of Israel, preceded by the Second Iraq War and the Syrian Civil War, in which Washington actively backed terrorist groups, he said.

“We came in and we said: We’re going to work with the Israelis, but we’re also going to have to work heavily with the Sunni population on the ground in Syria to create an uprising,” he added.

“And that’s where ISIS came from. We worked directly with Al-Qaeda; Hillary Clinton’s emails confirm this. The operations that we were doing to support the so-called Free Syrian Army, and there were some moderates there, but the most effective guys initially were Al-Qaeda and then eventually ISIS.”

Keep reading

Battle for Hungary: How the Russiagate blueprint has been unleashed against Orban

The shadow campaign to swing the Hungarian election against Viktor Orban has escalated with the wiretapping of Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto. The case offers a rare look into how bureaucrats, journalists, and spies run a regime-change operation in real time.

Three weeks out from the April 12 elections, the political opposition to Orban scored what seemed to be a win over the weekend, when Politico and the Washington Post ran articles alleging that Szijjarto had phoned Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov with “live reports on what had been discussed” at multiple EU meetings. The reports cited anonymous “European security officials.”

Neither Orban nor Szijjarto make any secret of their desire to maintain cordial relations with Moscow, particularly on matters of energy security and the peace process in Ukraine. However, when bundled with more outlandish claims – that Russian “election fixers” are already embedded in Budapest, for example – the reports paint a picture of a government compromised by the Kremlin.

Orban’s leading opponent, Peter Magyar, has repeated these claims in his speeches. After the Szijjarto story broke, he accused the foreign minister of “betraying Hungarian and European interests,” and threatened him with “life imprisonment” for treason, should his Tisza party win the election.

All it took was one leaked audio file for the scheme to unravel.

The Szijjarto wiretapping plot

In an audio file released by Hungarian conservative outlet Mandiner on Monday, opposition journalist Szabolcs Panyi can be heard telling a source how he passed Szijjarto’s phone number to “a state organ of an EU country.” Once they had this number, he explained, agents of this country were able to extract “information about who that number spoke to, and they see who is calling that number or who that number is calling.”

Keep reading

Exiled Iranian crown prince says at CPAC he intends to ‘make Iran great again’

Reza Pahlavi, the exiled crown prince of Iran, called on the American people to take a moment and reflect on what a free Iran would look like.

“No more nuclear threats. No more terrorism. No more hostage taking. No more closing of the Strait of Hormuz. No more blackmailing fo the global community. Imagine an Iran that instead of exporting terrorism, is promoting freedom,” he said at the conference.

“Stability to its neighbors. National security and economic opportunity for the United States and the free world,” he added.

“Can you imagine Iranians going from ‘Death to America’ to ‘God Bless America’?” he also said. “I can because I’ve seen the true soul of my people.”

The crowd began chanting, “USA.”

He said he can imagine an Iran that “exports engineers, instead of extremists” and “startups instead of suicide bombers.”

He said the Middle East will change when Iran is free.

“President Trump is making America great again. I intend to make Iran great again,” he said.

Keep reading

Trump: “Cuba’s Next By the Way But Pretend I Didn’t Say That Please… Cuba’s Next.”

President Trump on Friday renewed his threats to invade Cuba while speaking at the Future Investment Initiative Priority Summit in Miami Beach, Florida.

While speaking about the US’s invasion of Venezuela, where Nicolas Maduro was captured, Trump told the crowd, “Cuba’s next by the way,” before joking that the media should disregard his comments. Then, he doubled down, stating, “Cuba’s next.”

This comes as the Department of Justice is preparing to charge Communist Cuban leaders in cases related to drugs or violence.

Trump has also cut off the flow of oil by threatening tariffs on any country that provides oil to Cuba through an Executive Order last month.

WATCH:

Trump: MAGA wants strength, and they want victory. They want success. And that’s what we have, and we have been very, very successful. You know, when I went into Venezuela, I said, “meh,” because I campaigned on the fact, peace through strength, that you wouldn’t have to use it. But I built this great military. I said, You’ll never have to use it, but sometimes you have to use it.

And Cuba’s next, by the way. But pretend I didn’t say that please. Pretend I didn’t say that. Please, please, please, media, please disregard that statement. Thank you very much.

Cuba’s next. So, despite the radical left Democrat shutdown, we will continue to defend the sovereign borders of the United States of America, and we’ll defend our allies, your ally. You didn’t know they were that tough, did you? You didn’t know they were pretty tough, Iran. Not tough anymore. Now, we’ll continue to deport dangerous criminal aliens from our country.

Keep reading