‘Not politically correct’
Trump has apparently warmed to the notion of regime change that he once promised to oppose. Earlier this year, his Administration intervened in Venezuela to arrest its sitting leader. And last year, Trump foreshadowed the current military campaign when he warned that the “not politically correct” term might be necessary for Iran, even as Administration officials such as Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio insisted “we don’t want a regime change” and “we’re not into the regime change business here.”
Trump later balked at his own suggestion, saying later that June that regime change “takes chaos, and ideally, we don’t want to see so much chaos.”
In the lead-up to the current war amid rising tensions between the U.S. and Iran, however, on Feb. 13, Trump said that a change in Iran’s power structure “would be the best thing that could happen.” Still, in the early days after the war broke out on Feb. 28, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that the operation is “not a so-called regime change war.”
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