Trump should pay heed to his country’s miserable history of regime change

Depending on which day or hour or even minute you might have read Donald Trump’s views on regime change for Iran, he’s either for it, or against it.

What seems likely is that he is either ignorant of the history of the United States’ attempts to force regime change on a cascade of countries since World War II – including Iran 72 years ago – or he doesn’t care.

It’s a miserable history.

Most attempts, from South America to Africa, South-East Asia and the Middle East, have ended in failure, civil war, misery for civilians, new enemies for the US or long-term “unintended consequences” that have cost the US massive amounts of treasure and goodwill.

Thus, it was disconcerting when Trump, in a whirl of texting euphoria after his warplanes had dumped their payloads on Iran’s nuclear facilities, began fooling around with the idea of overturning that country’s admittedly odious and repressive regime.

“It’s not politically correct to use the term, “Regime Change”, but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!” Trump raved on his Truth Social media platform.

There was a lot of social media texting going around at the time.

Australia’s former prime minister Scott Morrison merrily retweeted a triumphant Trump post congratulating America’s airborne warriors and boasting “there is not another military in the world that could have done this”.

Morrison, a man for whom judgment has often been a stranger, headed Trump’s excited post with words of his own.

“Peace through strength,” he tweeted.

It’s hardly a new credo. The Romans used the Latin phrase “Si vis pacem, para bellum”, meaning “If you want peace, prepare for war”.

The concept underpinned the Cold War, with the US and the Soviet Union each harbouring enough nuclear bombs to guarantee mutually assured destruction if either pulled the trigger.

Today, however, Trumpian peace through strength seems uncomfortably close to the paradoxical phrase that “war is peace” in 1984, George Orwell’s deathless novel that seemed dystopian when first published in 1949 but which reads as spookily prescient in the 21st century.

Along with “war is peace”, two more contradictory precepts round out the chilling 1984 quote: “Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

They could have been crafted especially for Trump’s MAGA.

Trump, of course, is basking in new-found popularity following his decision to attack Iran. And in truth, it is difficult to find a serious voice opposed to knocking out Iran’s ability to build nuclear bombs.

Still, those with memories might recall that president George W. Bush’s approval ratings were somewhere north of 60 per cent as he sent his war machine – along with that of Tony Blair’s UK and John Howard’s Australia – against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003.

But as the wars and regime changes in Iraq and Afghanistan lost their gloss, so did Bush’s standing. By 2008, his approval was 22 per cent.

Bush, Blair and Howard could have done with a history lesson on the Middle East before they blundered into Iraq.

In 1920, T.E. Lawrence, also known as Lawrence of Arabia, wrote to The Sunday Times decrying the British occupation of Iraq (then Mesopotamia) and charging that it was much more complicated than Britain’s people had been told.

“The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour,” he wrote. “They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. Things have been far worse than we have been told ... We are today not far from a disaster.”

Lawrence could have been describing the chaos that followed the invasion of Iraq, which turned out not to have the weapons of mass destruction that had been used as the excuse for the military adventure.

What might happen now in Iran is unpredictable, but will certainly involve some measure of chaos, even if the ceasefire between Israel and Iran holds.

But regime change?

Trump may or may not know that you can draw a line from a CIA-engineered regime change in Iran in 1953 all the way to the revolution of 1979 that installed the Islamic ayatollahs that have caused so much dyspepsia to a series of US presidents and Israeli leaders ever since.

The CIA, with help from Britain’s MI6, manipulated the 1953 coup d’etat that overthrew an elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, essentially to protect British oil interests.

The coup strengthened the hand of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, leading him to become an autocratic ruler.

In 1964, the shah imprisoned and then expelled from Iran the Islamic leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini for speaking against his pro-Western program.

Khomeini went to Turkey, Iraq and eventually France, spending years mobilising opposition to the shah.

Meanwhile, America’s hopes of controlling the shah as a puppet evaporated. The shah morphed into megalomania, almost blowing up the West’s economies by forcing a massive increase in the price of oil in 1973.

The shah, growing immensely wealthy, appeared to believe he was invincible, and began to sound very similar to today’s Trump.

When sycophantic courtiers suggested a campaign to award him the Nobel Peace Prize, the shah responded with mighty arrogance: “If they beg us, we might accept,” he reportedly said.

When the British prime minister Harold Wilson and French president Valery Giscard d’Estaing were reduced to phoning him, begging for loans, he grandly gave each of them the equivalent of $1 billion, declaring he didn’t want to see Europe collapse.

Despite – or because of – the shah’s use of an army of secret police and torturers, his reign came to an ignominious end.

His regime was overthrown in 1979, when Khomeini returned from exile to lead Iran’s Islamic Revolution. The CIA plot those decades previous was all for nothing.

And so the Middle East turns, Trump might yet learn.

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.