How Iran Hawks Are Viewing the Cease-Fire

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Many of the critiques of the Trump administration’s decision to go to war in Iran have come from familiar groups that believe he should have first sought approval from Congress and the international community. But after Tuesday’s fragile cease-fire, a new strand of criticism has emerged from the camp of Iran hawks: that the United States should have stayed the course and enacted regime change.

On the latest episode of FP Live, I spoke with John Bolton, a former national security advisor in U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term. Bolton has long been an advocate for regime change in Iran. Subscribers can view the full discussion in the video box atop this page. What follows here is a lightly edited and condensed transcript.

Many of the critiques of the Trump administration’s decision to go to war in Iran have come from familiar groups that believe he should have first sought approval from Congress and the international community. But after Tuesday’s fragile cease-fire, a new strand of criticism has emerged from the camp of Iran hawks: that the United States should have stayed the course and enacted regime change.

On the latest episode of FP Live, I spoke with John Bolton, a former national security advisor in U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term. Bolton has long been an advocate for regime change in Iran. Subscribers can view the full discussion in the video box atop this page. What follows here is a lightly edited and condensed transcript.

Ravi Agrawal: You think it was wrong of Trump to de-escalate this week. Explain that.

John Bolton: I think it was wrong if his objective is regime change. I honestly don’t know what his objective really is. It seems to keep shifting. But given the closure of the Strait of Hormuz by the regime, and by intimidating shipping and insurance, they’ve established something that is really, in my mind, a threat in many respects equivalent to the nuclear threat they were developing, the terrorist threat they’ve nurtured over decades—really, a direct threat at the world economy.

To walk away with that scenario still unresolved sets a dangerous precedent. I think our military was working on clearing the strait. I’m not suggesting it’s an easy job. But it’s obviously something that needs to be resolved. It has been unacceptable to the United States since Franklin Roosevelt and the king of Saudi Arabia met during World War II to have any country, whether it’s an outsider like the Soviet Union or a Gulf country like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, to have domination over the total oil production of the Gulf region. That has to remain our objective, and it’s obviously jeopardized now by what the regime in Tehran is doing.

RA: And part of what you’ve been saying is that the regime can rebuild, which makes it dangerous.

JB: I think that’s right. I think Trump made a number of mistakes before beginning hostilities. He didn’t make a very compelling case to the American people that regime change is the only way to protect ourselves and our allies in the region, especially, from Iran’s menace. If you don’t prepare your own people for why you’re about to use military force, it’s just a mistake in Politics 101. A corollary to that is he didn’t prepare Congress. An international corollary is he didn’t brief any of the allies. It’s not just that he didn’t brief NATO. He didn’t brief the Gulf allies. He didn’t brief our allies in the Pacific, like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and others who get a lot of their oil from the Gulf. He didn’t brief anybody, and we’re paying some of the price for that now.

Most importantly, he didn’t prepare the opponents of the regime inside Iran. He didn’t work with them. He didn’t assist them. This all could have started after the 12-day war, the campaign against Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile program last year. If you had a functioning National Security Council (NSC) process, that could have been an exercise for the NSC to say, “What have we learned from that episode of ‘mowing the lawn,’ as the Israelis call it? And are we ready for something more than that?” As far as I can tell, none of that happened.

RA: I have to say, I find that term, “mowing the lawn,” very distasteful.

But let’s interrogate the idea of regime change. I know you’ve been a proponent of this for many years now. Part of the issue here is that from everything we know about the Islamic Republic, the regime has many contingencies for key positions, and that’s why the regime is still intact right now. The military controls some 40 percent of the economy, so incentives to defect from the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] or the Basij are extremely low. This is now a military-clerical regime. How many of the hundreds of thousands of people in the IRGC, Basij, and the ground forces combined would America have to kill to “finish the job,” as you’ve been putting it?

JB: Much of what you said demonstrates why regime change is the only alternative if we ever want to see more benign behavior from some government in Iran. I do think we’ve damaged the government very severely. That’s one of the consequences of the use of military force that I don’t think Trump has thought through how to exploit. We’ve killed hundreds of leaders at the very top of the regime. We have provoked a premature succession crisis by killing the former supreme leader. He’s only the second supreme leader. They’ve had one succession. So by definition, a succession is a time of potential crisis where all kinds of factors come into play.

RA: But Ambassador, if I may, what I’m trying to challenge is the idea that enforced regime change wouldn’t backfire—and that it’s almost impossible to even envision without immense violence. Why advocate for it?

JB: What we’ve done is move up regime change in ways they weren’t prepared for. The Times of London reported earlier this week that the successor supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, appears to be in Qom, in a coma, being treated for severe wounds, which means there is no supreme leader, in effect, if that’s true. What’s happening now is that fissures and splits are developing in what’s left of the top of the regime and things are beginning to come apart. This is where—

RA: The evidence suggests otherwise.

RA: They’ve emerged from this conflict with control of the Strait of Hormuz. They’ve shown remarkable coordination, for example, in saying they will attack universities if theirs are attacked. The tit-for-tat nature of the way in which they’ve approached this war so far suggests that command and control is way more intact than the other side would have us believe. The regime largely seems intact, and even if something happens to Mojtaba Khamenei, all they have to do is install another supreme leader. I mean it kind of proves the point that even if, as you’re suggesting, Khamenei is in a coma, they’re still operating.

JB: What you’re saying proves the exact opposite. They made a point of saying they had delegated authority in the Revolutionary Guard to commanders in the 31 provinces, following pre-planned scenarios of what would happen if they were attacked and if the central nodes of command and control were eliminated. I think that’s what they’re following now. The evidence is that the damage is so substantial that they’re running on muscle memory. And I don’t think it’s tit-for-tat, as you just said. I was told by someone formerly high up in the Israeli military that if you looked at the total tonnage of weaponry dropped by Israel and the United States on Iran compared to the total tonnage of weaponry Iran has dropped on everybody else, that ratio is 300 to 1.

JB: Let me finish a thought here occasionally. The idea is that as the instruments of Iranian state power are systematically destroyed—and I do think we’ve got a ways to go before accomplishing that—these fissures and splits inside the regime continue to grow. It’s not just the opponents of the regime, who are very widespread across the country and who I think constitute an overwhelming majority of the population. It’s people in the regime itself who begin to look around and say, “This ship is going down, and maybe I don’t want to go down with it.”

Now, if Trump had prepared more in advance by working with the opposition, by providing them with resources, money, telecommunications, weapons, whatever, we could be in a much better position than we are. It’s not too late, but I don’t have any confidence, given the erratic course of things at this stage in the White House, that we’re going to see a sustained effort. I don’t know what comes next at this moment.

RA: To go back to your point about the difference in tonnage, how much Israel and the United States have struck Iran versus the other way around, one comparison here could be made with Afghanistan. Obviously, the Taliban was hit far more than the other way around, but as they often used to say, “You might have the watches, we have the time.” It very much seems like this Iranian regime has set out to say, “All we need to win is to survive.” They’re also just acutely aware that to dramatically hurt global commerce, all they need is for one drone to go through, or even just stopping ships from going through for a lack of confidence. Why is it that you and so many others have felt for such a long time that all these costs—the immense global ripple effects that have come from this war and that would come from any war to try to enact regime change in Iran—why do you think it’s worth it?

JB: Because I don’t think having religious fanatics controlling nuclear weapons is something that we should accept. And I believe in a strong—

RA: Pakistan has nuclear weapons. Israel has nuclear weapons. Is that OK?

JB: I find the proliferation of nuclear weapons generally gravely concerning. I’m more concerned about nuclear weapons in some hands than others. I am not concerned about nuclear weapons in the hands of Great Britain, but I am exceedingly concerned about nuclear weapons in the hands of a medieval, feudal group of religious fanatics backed by a militarized autocratic system. Iran’s behavior has shown repeatedly over time that that threat will grow as it approaches a significant nuclear capability.

RA: I have a question about enforcing regime change from one of our subscribers. Here goes: “The type of action that you seek would take tremendous American political resolve. We are a democracy. America has no such resolve. How do you execute your strategy without the backing of the American electorate?”

JB: You need to prepare the people. You have to make the case, as I said before, why regime change in Iran is in our interest and the interest of our friends and allies around the world. I think Trump obviously has not made that case, and it could be a crippling mistake.

RA: If you had to make the case in 30 seconds, what would it be?

JB: The nature of this regime from its very inception—when one of its initial actions was taking our diplomats hostage; its attacks on America and American positions, blowing up our embassy in Lebanon in the summer of 1983 and attacking the Marine barracks in Lebanon in the fall of 1983; and on and on and on—shows that it really is a threat on an ideological basis. When they say “death to America” and “death to Israel,” you should take it seriously. I think the Gulf Arabs share the same geostrategic view of the threat of Iran. Given 47 years of trying to change their behavior unsuccessfully, the conclusion, the inescapable conclusion, is that peace and security in the Middle East will never happen, and broader chances for peace and security won’t happen, as long as this regime remains in power.

RA: I was really struck by some reporting in the New York Times this week, which took us in the room in February when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made the case for attacking Iran and presented a four-step plan that included regime change. And according to the New York Times—and clearly they’ve had senior officials tell them this or leak to them—the CIA director heard that and called the regime change element of it “farcical.” Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, said it was “bullshit.” If you were there in that room, what would you have said?

JB: I wouldn’t necessarily have heard what was said in the meeting in February and then said, “Let’s start the war on Feb 28.” I was very pleased to see Trump make the decision last year to go after the nuclear weapons program. By the way, people told us for years, “You can’t attack the nuclear weapons program or there’ll be war in the Middle East, and the Iranian people will rally to the regime.” Well, we did a pretty good job. We didn’t obliterate the nuclear weapons program, and we only conducted a one-day war—a 14-bomb war, in effect. But we did considerable damage to the nuclear program, and there were no protests in Iran. If anything, the people took away the impression that the regime couldn’t defend one of its most important assets, and a regime that can’t defend the crown jewels ultimately can’t defend itself.

That was a moment to begin to think more broadly, but I don’t buy the argument that somehow Bibi conned Trump into this. He made the same arguments in the first term, similar to those I did, to no effect. Why did they produce the result they did in the second term? I don’t know. And if all the people who were leaking what happened during that meeting in the Situation Room were so concerned, why didn’t they speak out more strongly and tell Trump their opinions? I know one reason for that; I always spoke out and told him what my opinions were, and here we are. But what’s the point of being a senior advisor if you don’t give the advice you believe in?

The U.S. president has a history of following other world leaders—or his gut—instead of his own intelligence officers and experts.

Shipping companies are reacting with caution as Hormuz cease-fire terms remain uncertain.

Brett McGurk advised four presidents on a contested region—but to what end?

RA: Are you suggesting that, were any of his senior advisors to give him advice that would go against what he wants to hear, they would get fired?

JB: I don’t know what the situation is today. It could be substantially different, but if everybody’s covering their posterior for what happened in that meeting after the fact, then you have to ask: What are they in government for? Is it for those high-level government salaries, or are they there to try to affect policy?

RA: There’s one more element of this. Trump seemed very publicly surprised that Iran would attack the Strait of Hormuz, that it would attack its Gulf allies. It was almost like he hadn’t seen the intelligence community’s work on this—all the wargaming shows that this is exactly what Iran would have done, and you need to prepare for that. When you heard all of this, why did you think Trump was surprised?

JB: I don’t know. I don’t see how he could be surprised. We talked about this in the first term, and I obviously haven’t been in any of these recent meetings, but I would be stunned if the Pentagon didn’t lay out, among the many contingencies that they would prepare for, both an effort to close the strait and attacks on the Gulf Arabs.

RA: So you’re saying Trump knew these things, and yet now he’s sounding as if he didn’t know any of it.

JB: It’s a possibility he wasn’t paying attention or discounted them, but I think it was put in front of him, and the responsibility is ultimately his—that’s where the buck stops.

RA: Last question for you. I called you an Iran hawk at the start of this conversation, and you’ve laid out your reasons for why you think we should all be thinking about regime change in Iran. After this operation, which I’m getting the sense you’re saying was botched, Trump didn’t sell it to the people, and according to you, he pulled out too soon. Does this damage, longer term, the views of people like you who have been calling for regime change? In other words, is it now going to be much harder in the future to ever achieve those ends?

JB: I don’t see why it should be. The proof will be that if this regime survives in a finite amount of time, it will rebuild its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs and its network of terrorist proxies. It will try again to close the Strait of Hormuz.

People will ask: What do we do to resolve these threats? If you ask the leaders of the Gulf Arab countries today, they would say, as representatives of Qatar and others have said, that this fundamentally changed their view of Iran. They tried to placate them for years, and they had their civilian targets attacked, not just missing targets at U.S. bases. So the geostrategic reality of the region now links the Gulf Arabs even more closely with Israel, because they see this regime as an existential threat to them. But this failure here is not going to resolve the issue.

This post is part of FP’s ongoing coverage. Read more here.

Ravi Agrawal is the editor in chief of Foreign Policy. X: @RaviReports

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The U.S. president has a history of following other world leaders—or his gut—instead of his own intelligence officers and experts.

Shipping companies are reacting with caution as Hormuz cease-fire terms remain uncertain.

Brett McGurk advised four presidents on a contested region—but to what end?