“I think we’ve had regime change” in Iran, President Donald Trump declared Sunday.
In his prime-time address Wednesday night, he repeated it: “Regime change has occurred.”
Critics dismissed Trump’s claim out of hand.
They’re wrong — because they’re measuring regime change by the wrong standard.
“Regime change” doesn’t necessarily mean an invasion, a decapitation strike, a new flag over the capital.
That was Iraq and Afghanistan, where American power underwrote both the military campaign and the political reconstruction that followed.
Iran is a different problem, and Trump is running a different playbook.
Start with a basic fact: Iran is a revolutionary state.
Its survival depends on three pillars — an ideology, a patronage network and a coercive apparatus drawing legitimacy from a founding idea.
To bring such a system down, all three must fail simultaneously.
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