On February 26, 2026, the United States and Iran concluded their third round of nuclear negotiations in Geneva. Iran’s foreign minister described them as the “most intense so far.” Oman’s mediating foreign minister announced “significant progress.” Technical talks were scheduled to continue in Vienna the following week. A senior US official called the discussions “positive.” Iran had agreed in principle to forgo stockpiling enriched uranium under a negotiated framework. Two days later, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury — a massive coordinated strike that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, approximately 40 senior military commanders, and an unknown number of civilians, including 148 people at a girls’ elementary school in Minab. The nuclear programme, we should recall, had already been significantly degraded during the twelve-day war in June 2025. Two intelligence sources told CNN that the claim Iran was close to a missile capable of hitting the United States was not backed by intelligence. So here we are again. An American administration has decided, without public trial, without congressional declaration of war, without any transparent presentation of evidence to the people footing the bill, that the correct response to a country actively negotiating with you is to assassinate its head of state. I hold no affection for the Iranian theocracy and would welcome a freer and more peaceful Iran. The regime’s massacre of thousands of its own protesting citizens in January 2026 was a moral abomination. Its support for proxy militias across the Middle East has been well-documented. But the question we should be asking is not whether the Iranian regime is bad — it is whether assassination and bombing during active diplomacy makes us safer, freer, or more just. The Scorecard Nobody Wants to Read Let us walk through what actually happens when powerful states decide to remove foreign leaders by force. The most bitterly ironic place to start is Iran itself. In 1953, the CIA (under its codename Operation Ajax) and MI6 (under Operation Boot) overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh after he nationalised Iran’s oil industry. The Shah was installed as an absolute monarch. The CIA’s own internal history of the operation — written by coup planner Donald Wilber in 1954 and declassified when it was leaked to the New York Times in 2000 — acknowledged that the agency had transformed a turbulent constitutional monarchy into an absolutist kingship and induced a succession of unintended consequences. The most consequential of those unintended consequences was the 1979 Islamic Revolution that created the very theocratic regime the US just bombed. The coup eliminated the moderate, secular element of Iranian politics and enabled radical Islamists to emerge as the key opposition. The CIA coined the term “blowback” in its 1954 internal lessons-learned report on this very operation, warning that “possibilities of blowback against the United States should always be in the back of the minds of all CIA officers involved in this type of operation” (CIA internal report on Operation Ajax, 1954; first reported by The Intercept, citing declassified CIA documents). In 2013, the CIA publicly acknowledged for the first time that the coup was carried out “under CIA direction” as US foreign policy, and described the intervention as undemocratic (PBS, October 2023, reporting on CIA’s “Langley Files” podcast). Iraq in 2003 needs little elaboration. Saddam removed, the state dissolved, trillions spent, thousands of American lives lost, and from the vacuum emerged ISIS — arguably a greater threat to regional stability than Saddam ever was. The discriminatory policies of the post-invasion governments pushed marginalised communities toward exactly the radicalism the intervention was meant to prevent. Afghanistan, 2001–2021. Two decades, $2.3 trillion, thousands of American and allied lives, and the Taliban walked back into Kabul anyway. Guatemala, 1954. The CIA overthrew a democratically elected president and installed the first of a line of right-wing dictators. Decades of turmoil followed, including the murder of the first American ambassador killed on duty. Chile, 1973. The US backed Pinochet’s coup against the democratically elected Allende. Years of brutal military dictatorship followed. Kosovo, 1999 — often cited as the “success story” of air power. Instead of breaking Milosevic, NATO bombing led Serbian forces to accelerate ethnic cleansing, expelling nearly one million Kosovar Albanians within weeks. The Independent International Commission on Kosovo (Oxford University Press, 2000) concluded that NATO’s bombing campaign accelerated the very atrocities it was meant to prevent. Libya in 2011. Gaddafi killed with US-led air support. The country has been a failed state ever since — competing warlord factions, a major corridor for human trafficking into Europe, and a staging ground for regional terrorism. Perhaps the most telling lesson is North Korea’s. After watching Gaddafi — who had voluntarily surrendered his nuclear programme — get killed by Western-backed forces, Pyongyang concluded that only nuclear weapons can prevent regime change. North Korea’s foreign ministry described Libya’s disarmament deal as “an invasion tactic to disarm the country” (Columbia Journal of International Affairs). Kim Jong-un himself stated he had learned “a lesson from the Middle Eastern countries” in developing North Korea’s nuclear programme (Wilson Center). Former US Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats was even more blunt: “The lessons that we learned out of Libya giving up its nukes is, unfortunately: if you had nukes, never give them up. If you don’t have them, get them” (Aspen Security Forum, July 2017). Every regime change teaches the next regime the same lesson: negotiate less, conceal more, acquire deterrence faster. Where Are the Successes? Scholars have searched hard for cases where forcible regime change produced a stable, free society. The examples they land on are post-World War II Germany and Japan. But consider what “success” required: a global war that killed tens of millions, devastated entire continents, consumed years of the world’s productive capacity, and left scars that took decades to heal — followed by prolonged military occupation and massive reconstruction spending. If that is the best-case template, it is less a model to emulate than a warning about the true cost of the enterprise. And it is not remotely comparable to launching airstrikes and hoping a liberal democracy spontaneously emerges. Academic research by Alexander Downes — Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University, co-Director of the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies, and author of Catastrophic Success: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Goes Wrong (Cornell University Press, 2021) — examined every documented case of foreign-imposed regime change over the past two centuries and found that it increases the likelihood of civil war and violent leader removal in target states, fails to reduce the probability of conflict between intervening states and their targets, and does not increase democratisation unless accompanied by deep institutional change in countries already favourable to democracy. His peer-reviewed findings with Jonathan Monten, published in International Security (Spring 2013) under the title “Forced to Be Free? Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Rarely Leads to Democratization,” reinforced that forcible regime change succeeded in producing democracy only where preconditions — high wealth, low ethnic heterogeneity, and strong prior institutions — were already present. The Evidence We Never Saw The west has elaborate domestic legal systems built on the presumption of innocence, the right to a fair hearing, and the requirement that the state present evidence before depriving anyone of life or liberty. Yet when it comes to foreign policy, we apparently require none of these things. Was Iran still funding terrorist groups? Probably, to some extent — though its major proxies (Hezbollah, Hamas) had been significantly degraded by Israeli military action throughout 2024 and 2025. Was it pursuing nuclear weapons? It claimed otherwise, and it was actively negotiating limitations. Were its leaders engaged in criminal activity that warranted assassination? Perhaps — but who evaluated that evidence? Where was the public case? What court, what tribunal, what impartial body reviewed the intelligence and authorised the killing of a head of state during diplomatic negotiations? The answer is: none. What did take place was a closed-door briefing to eight members of Congress which amount to notification after the fact, delivered to people who cannot publicly challenge the intelligence, cannot call witnesses, and cannot vote on the action. It is the illusion of accountability. I am entirely comfortable with the principle that genuinely criminal actors — those directing terrorism, those ordering massacres — can be legitimate targets. But the principle only holds when there is transparency, when evidence is presented, when the public whose money and safety are at stake or their representatives can evaluate the case. Otherwise you are simply trusting that the same institutions that assured you Iraq had weapons of mass destruction are telling the truth this time. What Has Actually Happened Within hours of the strikes, Iran’s constitutional succession mechanisms activated exactly as designed. A temporary leadership council formed. An interim supreme leader was appointed. The IRGC issued statements not of surrender but of escalation. Iran launched retaliatory strikes against Israel, US bases, and Gulf Arab states that host American forces. Three US service members were killed. The Strait of Hormuz was closed. China halted rare earth exports to the United States. The regime did not collapse. It consolidated. Analysts at Chatham House — the Royal Institute of International Affairs, founded in 1920 and consistently ranked among the world’s most influential foreign policy think tanks — warned that Iran has more cohesive state institutions than Iraq did in 2003, and that the space between regime collapse and democratic consolidation is historically the most dangerous phase. The Question That Matters The question that matters is simple and pragmatic: does this work? Does forcible regime change produce the stability, security, and freedom its architects promise? The evidence from every documented case over two centuries says no. The evidence from Iran’s own history says no. The evidence from the 48 hours since the strikes — regime consolidation, retaliatory missiles, dead American service members, closed shipping lanes, severed supply chains — says no. The burden of proof lies with those who claim this time is different. History suggests otherwise. |
