Tag: regime change

Trump Starts a Major Regime-Change War with Iran, Serving Neoconservatism and Israel

For decades, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and American neoconservatives have dreamed of only one foreign policy goal: having the United States fight a regime-change war against Iran. With the Oval Office occupied by Donald Trump — who campaigned for a full decade on a vow to end regime-change wars and vanquish neoconservatism — their goal has finally been realized.

Early Saturday morning, the United States and Israel began a massive bombing campaign of Tehran and other Iranian cities. President Trump posted an eight-minute speech to social media purporting to justify his new war, dubbed “Operation Epic Fury.” Trump’ war cry was filled with the same slogans and clichés about Iran that Americans have heard from the carousel of bipartisan neocons dominating U.S. foreign policy for decades: Iran is a state sponsor of “terror”; it is pursuing nuclear weapons; it took American hostages forty-seven years ago (in 1979); it repressed and kills its dissidents, etc.

As if to underscore how fully he was embracing the very foreign policy dogma he vowed to reject, Trump invoked the Marvel-like “Axis of Evil” formulation that White House speechwriter David Frum wrote for George W. Bush at the start of the War on Terror. Iran’s government, President Trump proclaimed, is one determined to “practice evil.” This is how Bush — speaking of Iraq, Iran and North Korea — put it in his 2002 State of the Union address: “States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil.”

Trump left no doubt about the scope and ambition of his new war. This will not be a quick or targeted bombing run against a few nuclear sites, as Trump ordered last June as part of Israel’s 12-day war with Iran. There is nothing remotely constrained or targeted about any of this. Instead, this new war is what Trump called a “massive and ongoing” mission of destruction and regime-change, launched in the heart of the Middle East, against a country of 93 million people: almost four times the size of Iraq’s population when the U.S. launched that regime change war back in 2003.

That Trump claimed to have “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program last June — just eight months ago — was not something he meaningfully acknowledged in his new war announcement, other than to vaguely assert that Iran somehow resumed their nuclear program. In fact, Trump seemed to delight in repeating the same triumphalist rhetoric that he used last year when he assured Americans that Iran’s nuclear program could no longer pose a threat as a result of Trump’s triumphant Operation Midnight Hammer.

In lieu of outlining any clear mission statement for this new war, let alone a cogent exit strategy, Trump offered a laundry list of flamboyantly violent vows. The U.S. will “totally obliterate” Iran’s ballistic missile program (which Iran could not use to reach the American homeland but which Trump admitted last June caused Israel “to get hit very hard” in retaliation). Trump also promised that the U.S. would “annihilate” Iran’s navy. And he told Iranians: “the hour of your freedom is at hand….bombs will be dropping everywhere.”

Trump also attempted to prepare the nation for caskets and body bags of American soldiers returning to the U.S. “The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost; we may have casualties,” the President said. But, said the man who did everything to avoid military service including during the Vietnam War, mass death of American soldiers “often happens in war.”

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US and Israel Launch Illegal War on Iran, Call for Regime Change

he U.S. and Israel carried out a series of unprovoked and devastating strikes on Iran on Saturday, sparking retaliation from the country as U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on Iranians to overthrow their government.

Iranian media reported strikes across the country, including in the capital of Tehran and around the offices of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, The Associated Press reported. It’s unclear if Khamenei and other top leaders survived.

One of the strikes, reportedly launched by Israel, destroyed an elementary school for girls in the southern city of Minab, killing at least 85 people, Iranian semi-official outlet Tasnim News Agency reported — seemingly the first reported casualties of the conflict.

Iran retaliated with strikes targeting Israel and U.S. bases in numerous Gulf Coast countries, including in a strike on the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet headquarters in Bahrain. Many U.S. bases in the region were partially evacuated prior to the first U.S.-Israeli strikes.

In a video address posted as the first strikes were launched, Trump described the attack as “a massive and ongoing operation.”

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NED leader cut off in Congress after boasting of ‘deploying’ 200 Starlinks to Iran amid violence

The National Endowment for Democracy’s president, Damon Wilson, bragged to a House committee of his group’s aggressive efforts to spark unrest in Iran, including by smuggling Starlink terminals and fashioning anti-Iran narratives for the media.

Damon Wilson, the head of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), was interrupted by a member of Congress during a House oversight hearing on February 24 after revealing that his agency “began supporting the deployment [and] operation of about 200 Starlinks early on” amid the violence which swept through Iran last month.

Before he could finish the sentence, he was cut off by the ranking member of the House Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs, Rep. Lois Frankel, who told Wilson: “You know what, I’m going to interrupt you – we’d better not talk about it.”

Wilson’s comments had been prompted by a question from Frankel, who requested details of what appears to be a new and apparently secret initiative by the State Department to provide Starlink terminals to Iranians.

Wilson appeared to take credit for both the recent unrest and Iran and subsequent media framing of the chaos. “What we’re seeing today, the Endowment has been making investments over years that have ensured that there have been secure communications, including Starlinks… that allowed information to go both in and out of the country,” he stated.

According to the New York Times, the Elon Musk-produced internet systems had been smuggled into the country by a “ragtag network of activists, developers and engineers [who] pierced Iran’s digital barricades.” It is clear now that the NED was at least partly responsible for funding and coordinating that network.

With Starlink emerging as a key weapon in the information war waged against Iran, it’s unclear how anti-government actors have managed to smuggle the devices into the country. But a recent incident in which a senior Dutch diplomat was caught trying to sneak multiple Starlink units and satellite phones through security at Iran’s Imam Khomeini Airport gives a hint.

The National Endowment for Democracy was founded in 1982 under the auspices of then-CIA Director William Casey to topple socialist and independent governments through the direct sponsorship of NGO’s, media organizations and political parties. “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” NED co-founder Allen Weinstein said of the Endowment’s work in 1991. 

Despite its mission of promoting transparency and “fundamental freedoms” abroad, the NED is now a dark money group which conceals the names of its local partners under a “duty of care” policy announced in 2025. During his congressional testimony this February, Wilson insisted the policy was necessary for the security of grantees on the ground.

The NED’s work to smuggle Starlink terminals into Iran is therefore a covert operation aimed at promoting unrest. And according to Wilson, it is now a key part of the Endowment’s most aggressive initiative.

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US Withdrawing All Forces From Syria, Over A Year After Regime Change By Proxy War

Last week we and others reported that American forces finally after many years withdrew from the remote Al-Tanf Garrison, a base in southern Syria near the borders of Iraq and Jordan. US troops had long operated out of Tanf to pressure the Assad government as part of the long-running US-backed regime change project. The US primarily trained the Syrian Free Army (FSA) in that remote desert area – which was an umbrella group of various factions, among them jihadists, armed and funded by Washington.

But the majority of US forces had long occupied the northeast of the country, where the oil and gas fields are concentrated, specifically Hasakah and Deir Ezzor provinces. But over several weeks, the Pentagon has been handing over its constellation of small bases to the Syrian government of Ahmed al-Sharaa (al-Qaeda and ISIS name: Abu Mohammad al-Jolani). At times throughout the Syrian proxy war, the US had anywhere from 800 to 2000 troops on the ground, but likely also more contractors and intelligence operatives.

Under Trump, Washington has been weighing a complete withdrawal since the year’s start, having fully backed the Jolani regime in the wake of the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad. This has been awkward to put it mildly, given Jolani had long been on the US terror list, after being dropped once he took control of Damascus.

On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reports, “The U.S. is in the process of withdrawing all of its roughly 1,000 troops from Syria, according to three American officials, ending a decadelong military operation in the country.”

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Iran Protesters Include Mossad and MEK

Donald Trump has promoted the idea – amplified by much of the international media – that protesters inside Iran are calling for U.S. military intervention and the overthrow of their government.

At the same time, Trump is threatening Iran with major military action, demanding not only changes in how protesters are treated, but that Iran abandon what he claims is a pursuit of nuclear weapons and relinquish its long-range missile capabilities and other defensive systems.

It’s true that many Iranians are protesting in response to severe economic hardship, which has reached unprecedented levels. But a major driver of Iran’s inflation and currency collapse has been the sanctions imposed by the Trump administration, which have sharply constrained Iran’s economy and access to global markets.

What is largely absent from Trump’s rhetoric – and from much of the dominant media narrative – is that these protests are not purely organic. External actors are also involved, including Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad, and the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), an exiled Iranian group that has committed acts of terror for decades.

Mossad involvement has been openly acknowledged

On social media, Mossad posted a message directed at Iranians stating: “Go out together into the streets. The time has come. We are with you – not only from a distance and verbally. We are with you in the field.”

Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu reinforced this openly, stating: “When we attacked in Iran during ‘Rising Lion,’ we were on its soil and knew how to lay the groundwork for a strike. I can assure you that we have some of our people operating there right now.”

Former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo compounded this message of encouragement by tweeting: “Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them.”

And last year, Mossad Director David Barnea confirmed Israel’s ongoing activities in Iran, declaring: “We will continue to be there, as we have been.”

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How Human Rights Watch Shattered Yugoslavia

On August 25th 2025, this journalist documented how the 1975 Helsinki Accords transformed “human rights” into a highly destructive weapon in the West’s imperial arsenal. At the forefront of this shift were organisations such as Amnesty International, and Helsinki Watch – the forerunner of Human Rights Watch. Supposedly independent reports published by these organisations became devastatingly effective tools for justifying sanctions, destabilisation campaigns, coups, and outright military intervention against purported overseas “rights” abusers. A palpable example of HRW’s utility in this regard is provided by Yugoslavia’s disintegration.

In December 2017, HRW published a self-laudatory essay boasting how its publication of “real-time field reporting of war crimes” during the Bosnian civil war’s early stages in 1992, and the organisation’s independent lobbying for a legal mechanism “to punish military and political leaders responsible for atrocities” committed in the conflict, contributed to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia’s establishment. Documents held by Columbia University “reveal the fundamental role of HRW” in the ICTY’s May 1993 founding.

These files moreover detail HRW’s “cooperation in various criminal investigations” against former Yugoslav officials by the ICTY, “through mutual exchange of information.” The organisation is keen to promote its intimate, historic ties with the Tribunal, and how the ICTY’s work spurred the International Criminal Court’s creation. Yet, absent from these hagiographic accounts is any reference to HRW’s pivotal contribution to manufacturing public and political consent for Yugoslavia’s breakup, which produced the very atrocities the organisation helped document and prosecute.

In November 1990, HRW founding member Jeri Laber authored a tendentiously-titled op-ed for The New York Times, “Why Keep Yugoslavia One Country?”. Inspired by a recent trip to Kosovo, Laber described how her team’s experience on-the-ground in the Serbian province had led HRW to harbour “serious doubts about whether the US government should continue to bolster the national unity of Yugoslavia.” Instead, she proposed actively facilitating the country’s destruction, and laid out a precise roadmap by which Washington could achieve this goal.

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Engineering Iran’s Unrest

John Maynard Keynes famously wrote in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919): 

“There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of Society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”

The United States mastered this art of destruction by weaponizing the dollar and using economic sanctions and financial policies to cause the currencies of targeted countries to collapse. On Jan. 19, we published “The US–Israel Hybrid War Against Iran,” describing how the United States and Israel are waging hybrid wars on Venezuela and Iran through a coordinated strategy of economic sanctions, financial coercion, cyber operations, political subversion, and information warfare. 

This hybrid war has been designed to break the currencies of Iran and Venezuela in order to provoke internal unrest and ultimately regime change.

On Jan. 20, just one day after our article, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent publicly confirmed, without qualification, apology, or ambiguity, that our description is indeed the official U.S. policy.

“It is high time that the world’s nations face up to America’s rogue economic behavior… This lawlessness is illegal, reckless, harmful, destabilizing, and ultimately ineffective in achieving America’s own goals, much less global objectives.”

In an interview at Davos, Secretary Bessent explained in detail how U.S. Treasury sanctions were deliberately designed to drive Iran’s currency to collapse, cripple its banking system, and drive Iran’s population into the streets. This is the “maximum pressure” campaign to deny Iran access to international finance, trade, and payment systems.

Bessent explained:

“President Trump ordered Treasury and our OFAC division, Office of Foreign Asset Control, to put maximum pressure on Iran. And it’s worked, because in December, their economy collapsed. We saw a major bank go under; the central bank has started to print money. There is dollar shortage. They are not able to get imports, and this is why the people took to the street.”

This is the explicit causal chain whereby U.S. sanctions caused the currency to collapse and the banking system to fail.

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Iran Is Not Libya: Why Destabilization Risks Global Chaos

The drumbeat of escalation against Iran has grown louder in Western capitals, from fresh sanctions rhetoric to renewed strike speculation. Beyond the headlines, a dangerous shift is occurring in the strategic thinking of policymakers. The old Neoconservative framework of “regime change”, which assumed one could swap a government while keeping the nation intact, is being shadowed by a far more perilous drift toward policies that risk state collapse.

Whether driven by the momentum of broad sanctions or a lack of viable alternatives, the current trajectory suggests that Western powers are risking a repetition of the “Libya Model” in Iran. A sober analysis of data, geography, and demographics indicates that this path would not lead to democracy, but to a geopolitical catastrophe that creates a security vacuum from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf.

The Libya Mirage vs. The Iranian Reality

The allure of this strategy rests on a kind of amnesia about the outcome of the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya. Sold as a humanitarian necessity, the removal of central authority did not produce a liberal democracy. Instead, it shattered the state’s monopoly on violence. Over a decade later, Libya remains a fractured territory where rival militias compete for control and human trafficking networks operate with relative impunity.

Attempting to replicate this outcome in Iran involves a profound misreading of scale. Iran is not Libya. It is a nation of nearly 90 million people, roughly thirteen times the population of Libya in 2011. Geographically, it sits atop the Strait of Hormuz, a critical artery through which a major share of globally traded oil passes each day.

In contrast to the isolated Gaddafi regime, a destabilized Iran would not implode neatly. It would likely erupt across borders. The collapse of central authority in Tehran could plausibly trigger large refugee flows toward Europe and create conditions conducive to extremism and narcotics trafficking. From a purely Realist perspective, the cost of coexisting with a difficult Iranian state is significantly lower than the cost of managing a major zone of ungoverned instability in the heart of Eurasia.

Sanctions and the Fragility Trap

Some advocates of “maximum pressure” argue that economic strangulation creates leverage for democratization. The economic data suggests a different outcome. While sanctions have undeniably devastated the Iranian economy, driving high and persistent inflation and eroding the national currency, they have failed to produce political liberalization.

In practice, these policies create what economists call a “fragility trap”. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned that geoeconomic fragmentation and the weaponization of trade are fracturing the global economy. In Iran, this dynamic systematically hollows out the middle class. By destroying the economic foundation of independent civil society, Western policy eliminates the very social stratum historically required for stable democratic transitions.

As citizens are pushed into a struggle for biological survival, facing documented obstacles to accessing some critical medicines and shrinking purchasing power, their capacity for organized political activism diminishes. They rarely become builders of stable institutions; survival takes over. Thus, the current policy does not weaken the grip of the state; it weakens the resilience of the society.

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EU official plotted to ‘organise resistance’ against Hungary’s Orban, files show

As the EU has sought to prolong the Ukraine proxy war, expropriate frozen Russian assets, and enlarge the bloc at any cost, Viktor Orban’s Hungary opposed it at every turn. Now, with his support teetering, leaked documents reveal a major EU official plotted a long-term covert campaign to oust him.

A senior European Union official has been secretly seeking to remove Hungarian President Viktor Orban since at least 2019, according to leaked documents reviewed by The Grayzone. The files show in January 2019, the EU’s International Coordinator for the Directorate-General for Migration and Home Affairs, Marton Benedek, authored a “project proposal” aimed at “developing a permanent coordination forum to organise resistance against the Orban regime.” In addition to his role at the European border control agency, Benedek currently heads Brussels’ “cooperation” with Libya.

Read Benedek’s anti-Orban project proposal here.

The impetus for Benedek’s plot was “an unprecedented set of anti-regime demonstrations in Hungary and among expat Hungarians” over controversial proposed legislation allowing businesses to compel employees to work overtime, and delay payment of their wages for an extended period. Thousands took to the streets before and after its implementation.

According to Benedek, outrage over what he referred to as “the slave law” had “compelled a small group of some 30 political, trade union and civic leaders to coordinate their activities, agree on a set of minimum objectives and funding principles, and jointly plan future action.” This had given birth to “an ad hoc coordination forum… which could develop, over time, into an incipient political coordinating body that could credibly challenge” Orban’s rule.

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From Noriega to Maduro: The Long US History of Kidnapping Foreign Leaders

While it has undoubtedly shocked the world, the Trump administration’s abduction of President Nicolás Maduro fits into a long history of United States kidnapping of foreign leaders.

On January 3, U.S. Special Forces entered Venezuela by air, captured Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores, killing around 80 people in the process. They were flown to the United States, where Maduro was put on trial on spurious drug trafficking and possession of firearms charges.

Despite President Trump himself declaring that “kidnapping” was an appropriate term for what happened, corporate media around the world have refrained from using the obvious word for what transpired, preferring to use “capturing” or “seizing.” These terms reframe the incident and cast doubt on its illegality, helping to manufacture public consent for a grave breach of international law. Indeed, managers at the BBC sent out a memo to its staff, instructing them in no uncertain terms to “avoid using ‘kidnapped’” when reporting on the news.

Targeting Venezuela

Maduro is not the first Venezuelan official Washington has helped kidnap. In 2002, the Bush administration planned and executed a coup d’état that briefly ousted Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, from power.

The U.S. government had been organizing and financing the ringleaders of the coup for months, flying the key players back and forth to Washington, D.C. for meetings with top officials. On the day of the coup, American Ambassador Charles Shapiro was at the mansion of local media magnate, Gustavo Cisneros, the headquarters of the coup.

Two U.S. warships entered Venezuelan waters, moving towards the remote island of La Orchila, where Chavez was helicoptered to. Chavez himself stated that senior American personnel were present with him during his abduction. Unsurprisingly, the Bush administration immediately endorsed the proceedings, describing them as a return to democracy.

Chavez was only saved the same fate as Maduro after millions of Venezuelans flocked into the streets, demanding a return of their president. Their actions spurred loyal military units who retook the presidential palace, and the project fell apart. After the coup, the United States quadrupled its funding to the coup leaders (including Maria Corina Machado) through vehicles such as USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy.

A further kidnapping of a Venezuelan official occurred in June 2020, when the United States downed the plane of Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab. Saab was in Cabo Verde at the time, traveling back from a diplomatic mission to Iran, where he has been helping break American sanctions. He was only released in 2023, after Venezuela negotiated a prisoner swap which included a number of CIA agents captured in Venezuela in the act of carrying out terror attacks against the country’s infrastructure.

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