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President Trump has offered some thoughts but no clear plan on how he wants the war in Iran to end. He says he does not want the U.S. bogged down in a long-running conflict, yet he does want to choose the country's next leader. NPR's Greg Myre has this report.
GREG MYRE, BYLINE: President Trump said in interviews Thursday that he needs to be directly involved in selecting Iran's next leader. This sounds like the very definition of regime change. However, regime change is a phrase and a policy that U.S. presidents have rejected since the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan became hugely frustrating efforts to reshape those nations.
KORI SCHAKE: There are remarkably few cases of successful regime change historically and especially in the last hundred years.
MYRE: Kori Schake is with the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington. There are many failures but, she says, just a few clear examples in the past century of U.S. wars that led to significant positive outcomes. She pointed to Germany and Japan after the U.S. defeated them in World War II and Panama following a brief U.S. incursion to oust its leader in 1989. And there's another key historical point, says Stephen Walt of Harvard.
STEPHEN WALT: I don't think there's ever been a successful regime change solely accomplished with airpower. It always requires some kind of ground force involvement. So I think we're a long way from calling it regime change or expecting it to happen.
MYRE: Trump seems to believe he can buck these trends. He told both Reuters and Axios that he needs to approve the next Iranian leader. Otherwise, he said, the U.S. would probably have to go back to Iran in five years and fight another war. He ruled out one leading candidate, Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in an airstrike last Saturday. With the U.S. and Israel still waging a ferocious bombing campaign, it's hard to see why Iran's surviving leaders would take advice from Trump. Again, Kori Schake.
SCHAKE: We are doing the destruction. We are not doing the construction of something to come next. But it's really not good enough for our government to say, and now, people of Iran, it's up to you.
MYRE: The U.S. and Israeli attacks have killed 50 or more top Iranian leaders, so much of the old regime is gone. For now, Iran has a three-person interim leadership team. Trump has been clear he doesn't want the U.S. establishing a large presence and getting deeply involved in the country once the military campaign is over. But his administration has offered few details. Again, Stephen Walt.
WALT: They're throwing out a whole series of possible goals. And that way, if they get one or two of them, it gives them an excuse to shut it down if they decide they need to and then claim victory at the end.
MYRE: Trump has ordered at least eight other military operations in the past year. The others were also based on overwhelming U.S. airpower, not ground troops, and that allowed the president to start and stop the operations at will. But without a stable political arrangement, Iran and the region could still face future turmoil, says Stephen Walt.
WALT: We've been hearing for many, many years that one more big military operation in the Middle East and then everything will be fine. There's, I think, every reason to be skeptical of the idea that we finally have knocked Iran back so far that the whole region will pacify itself.
MYRE: Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, wants a complete overhaul of Iran's leadership and may pursue additional goals. Gulf Arab states don't want an unstable Iran spreading regional chaos, and world oil markets are already jittery about disruptions to the flow of oil in the Gulf.
Greg Myre, NPR News, Washington. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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