US President Donald Trump said this week that Iran’s new leadership is “less radical and much more reasonable.” Trump and the Pentagon have repeatedly claimed that regime change has happened.
“If you look already because the one regime was decimated, destroyed. They’re all dead. The next regime is mostly dead. And the third regime, we’re dealing with different people than anybody’s dealt with before. It’s a whole different group of people,” Trump said earlier this week. “So, I would consider that regime change.”
But what most political scientists and analysts would consider regime change involves an outside power transforming how a country is governed, not merely replacing the people at the top of that system.
By definition, regime change is systemic change – something that has yet to be seen in the Islamic Republic, which remains under the same authoritarian theocracy that has been in place since the Iranian Revolution in 1979.
If anything, the war has given more power to the hardline military factions inside the complex system of Iranian governance, as well as bolstered anti-American sentiments.
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