Both the White House and Israel wanted swift regime change in Iran. Instead they’ve triggered a spiraling conflict with no plausible endgame.
The US-Israeli war against Iran, launched without any coherently stated goals or popular support, is already turning into a horrific quagmire. It also doesn’t look like Donald Trump and Israel will get the swift Iranian regime change they hoped for.
In this episode of the Jacobin Radio podcast Confronting Capitalism, Vivek Chibber is joined by Jason Brownlee, a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin, to discuss the history of regime change wars, the geopolitical interests in the Middle East, and Trump’s further descent into the neoconservative blob.
Confronting Capitalism with Vivek Chibber is produced by Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy and published by Jacobin. You can listen to the full episode here. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
I thought we’d start off by trying to get some understanding of what’s behind the American attack. Normally, when the US attacks a regime, it at least puts up some show of a coherent explanation — laying out what the American interests are, what the justification of it is, trying to explain to the public that there’s some direct interest that’s at stake here — a direct threat at least — where the United States deemed it necessary to attack either preventively or in response to some sort of aggression. What really stands out here is that if there is some kind of clear objective, the US is not letting us know what it is.
It’s not even a Gulf of Tonkin kind of threat inflation. There were active diplomatic talks going on that the representative from Oman said were going very well. And then there was a surprise attack by Israel and the US more…
Auteur: Jason Brownlee
