During the Cold War and the Vietnam War, a popular theory among the government strategists was the “domino effect.” It held that If one country fell to the communists, then many others would follow.
President Truman was the first to engage in that theory to justify military aid to Greece and Turkey. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson used it to justify the Vietnam War. If Vietnam fell, the theory said, so would Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and others. Even Japan would be threatened.
I have written often that we should not fight unless we have a vital national security interest at stake. We do in Iran.
We need to think in these terms now because the fall of the ayatollahs’ Iranian regime would have major effects throughout the Middle East and probably all of these effects would be positive.
We don’t know what President Trump is thinking and he could do far better by explaining what he is doing. He has positioned a large force off Iran. The USS Abraham Lincoln came into the Gulf of Oman in the past week. What should the American people think if he started a new war there?
Trump has told the Iranians that they need to make a deal on their nuclear and missile programs and previously threatened to intervene militarily if the ayatollahs’ murders of protesters got past the point that we could tolerate. He has said that we were “locked and loaded and ready to go.” The number of protesters murdered by the regime is somewhere around 16,000.
But the Iranians won’t make a deal and — judged by their past conduct — even if they did they wouldn’t live up to their obligations in it.
In the meantime, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is reportedly lobbying Trump to cause regime change in Iran while both Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and Turkey are lobbying against it.
Our pseudo-ally, Saudi Arabia, has said it wouldn’t allow us to use its air space to attack Iran. The Saudis are terrified that if we attacked Iran again, their eastern province — which is about one-third Shiite — would rebel and possibly destroy some of the Saudis’ oil facilities.
So what is Trump going to do? At this point, we don’t know. But we can foresee the after-effects of a regime change in Iran.
For starters, the Houthis of Yemen would be out of money without Iranian support and arms. They would be highly vulnerable to regime change and it probably wouldn’t take much to do it.
Next, the Iranian proxy terrorists of Hizballah would be entirely vulnerable without Iranian support. The Israelis would have a fight on their hands but Hizballah could, and should, be annihilated. They have American blood on their hands going back (at least) to the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut.
Regimes that are semi-dependent on Iran — Syria is a prime example — would suffer regime change. The newest Syrian dictator — Ahmed al-Sharaa — is a former al-Qaida commander without whom the world would be a better place. He could fall if the Kurds launched a new round of attacks.
Qatar is safer from regime change. Their government, headed by Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, depends on its own oil exports for survival and those are safe for the moment. Qatar’s support for Hamas, which has been obvious for at least a decade, wouldn’t stop. The Israelis, having recovered the body of the last Hamas hostage, should go back into Gaza and eliminate Hamas.
The biggest question is China which takes in almost 1.4 million barrels of oil per day from Iran. The denial of Iranian oil could sink the Chinese economy and its ability to project power. That means China could, and probably would, fight to maintain the flow of Iranian oil. How it would fight is another question.
China probably doesn’t have the capability to defend Iran unless it launched nuclear weapons. Its massive military is aimed, at this point, to conquer Taiwan. So what will China do?
In 2023, CIA Director William Burns said that China’s plan was to attack Taiwan by 2027, and that Chinese President Xi Jinping set that year for an attack. Chinese “experts” in the West have said that while China could attack Taiwan by 2027, the year’s deadline was flexible because China may or may not be capable of an overwhelming attack by 2027.
President Trump could be faced with an attack on Taiwan if he decided to cause a regime change in Iran this year. China knows that Trump has stripped our military of much of its presence in the South China Sea which could defend Taiwan.
Can we both cause regime change in Iran and defend Taiwan at the same time? It’s highly unlikely that we could.
Trump — faced with the likelihood of a multi-front war — might yet back down. An effort to cause regime change with Iran would be far less likely if Trump believed that China would attack Taiwan before its 2027 deadline.
Trump likes to make deals. If he believed that Iran would live up to its obligations under any deal — which is extraordinarily unlikely — he might want to make a deal somewhat like the 2015 Obama deal on nuclear weapons. That would be a huge mistake. Unless the Iranians accepted unrestricted inspections of its nuclear facilities and its missile capabilities, Trump would be making a deal that obviously won’t be followed. And Iran won’t make any such deal.
The president has put his credibility on the line by promising to aid the Iranian opposition and, by doing so, he has put the credibility of the nation at stake. He should undertake regime change in Iran but he — and we — need to understand what it will take to do so.
It won’t be as easy as the Maduro snatch. It will take months — maybe years — to destroy the ayatollahs, their Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and their missile capabilities. American lives will be lost in that effort. Is it worth that sacrifice?
I have written often that we should not fight unless we have a vital national security interest at stake. We do in Iran, especially so in that the Iranians will — a few years from now, or sooner — achieve nuclear weapons. At that point, it will be too late to do anything but deter that threat. And our deterrence is failing across the globe.
READ MORE from Jed Babbin:
From Outrage to Agreement: Trump’s Greenland Gambit
Trump and Greenland: A NATO Test
A Dying Regime With a Loaded Gun
