For the past 20 years, there’s basically been one guy in Republican politics who was known as the Iran war guy.
For years, even decades, John Bolton has argued for regime change in Iran, and for America to take a proactive military role to make that happen. Bolton served as the US ambassador to the United Nations under George W. Bush and, later, as national security adviser to Donald Trump during his first term.
The partnership with Trump was fleeting, however. He did not leave the administration on good terms and has been a critic of Trump since. He’s even been indicted by Trump’s Department of Justice for the mishandling of classified documents. Despite that backstory, it is still a bit confusing to hear one of America’s foremost Iran critics break with the Trump administration on this war. How did Trump lose the Republican Party’s biggest Iran war hawk? And why?
Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Bolton, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
You’ve become known as one of the most prominent American advocates for military action in Iran over a set of decades. But in recent weeks, you’ve emerged as one of the sharpest critics of the Trump administration’s actions and how it’s conducting this war. I wanted you to walk me through your critiques.
What I support is a policy of regime change in Iran. And I’ve held that view for many years because I don’t think there’s any chance the current regime will change its behavior on two critical fronts.
It’s not going to give up its pursuit of nuclear weapons, which threaten Israel, the United States, really the whole world. And it’s not going to give up on its pursuit of terrorism, its support of terrorist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Shia militia in Iraq and conducting terrorist operations around the world.
We’ve got decades of evidence that their behavior is not going to change. So when you’re confronted with that kind of threat, danger, and behavior isn’t going to change, the alternative is change the regime. I think the regime is in its weakest position since any time after it took power in 1979. The economy is a mess. The young people are, they can see they can have a different kind of life. Two thirds of the population is under 30. The women are enormously dissatisfied since the death of Mahsa Amini. Ethnic groups are dissatisfied.
Conditions are ripe for regime change as a policy to succeed. And the question is, what role can the United States play? And here, I think Trump has badly misplayed his hand from the beginning, unfortunately.
Tell me how.
Well, Trump initially did nothing to prepare the American public for the steps necessary to affect regime change. Normally, when a president is going to take a dramatic action like Trump has, you explain that to the American people.
You make the case why it’s in our national interest to seek regime change, to avoid the threat of nuclear weapons, to avoid the continuing threat of terrorism. You don’t have to say anything about what your specific plan is. You don’t have to talk about timing, but you have to be respectful of our citizens and make the case to them that this is in their interest. I think he could have done it. I think there’s a very compelling case he didn’t do it.
Yeah, that didn’t happen.
A corollary to that is you need to prepare Congress, certainly on the Republican side, to get their support, but on the Democratic side too. I think there are a number of important steps that Congress is going to have to take, instead of leaving them in the dark. It doesn’t mean they would agree with you necessarily, but at least you’ve stated your case to them and it’s part of making it to the American people.
The other aspect that Trump failed on was consulting with allies. Normally, you try and build an international coalition before the war starts, not after. And he obviously didn’t do that. I mean, we’ve got very close ties with Israel. I think our military planning and preparation has been seamless as far as I can tell.
But there are plenty of others, not just the NATO allies, but the Gulf states in the region who are obviously affected by this, our allies in the Pacific, Japan, South Korea, and others who get most of their oil from the Gulf.
As far as we can tell, he did no preparation of the opposition actually inside Iran. No coordination, no effort to see what they would do, no effort to support them, to provide resources, money, arms if that’s what they wanted, telecommunications, just no coordination at all.
There’s a sense that they want to make this around four to six weeks, not necessarily the timeline that a full regime change could take. Is it your position that if they aren’t willing to kind of see that all the way through, they shouldn’t have started this in the first place?
Right. Four to six weeks might have been a good estimate of the Pentagon’s initial campaign. But the military action alone was never going to cause regime change, or at least it would have been a lucky event had it done so. This has to come from inside Iran. It’s the people, the opposition, the ethnic groups, the young people, the women that have to have to figure out how to actually accomplish it.
“I think if you are going to go after the goal of regime change, you have to know what you’re getting into and be resolved to work your way through it in order to achieve it.”
And it’s clear they were badly intimidated in January when the regime killed 30 or 40,000 protesters, literally machine gunned them in the streets of Iran simply for protesting against the regime. That needed to be taken into account.
I’ve heard you say in other places that Trump is not a strategic thinker. From your perspective of someone who was in the White House, who was trying to strategize with the president, what was the impact of that lack of strategic thinking?
Well, it makes it very hard to carry through to achieve a given objective. One thing that Trump has done in the second term is all but eliminate the National Security Council decision-making process, which I’ll be the first to say is not perfect. But it’s a way of getting all the different agency and department views together to try and get the facts assembled that would permit a president to make a responsible, well-informed decision.
I’m hearing from you that we should see the lack of planning that has manifested in this war as a result of the change or the collapse in process from the first Trump administration to the second.
Yeah, I mean, making Marco Rubio both secretary of state and national security adviser is another piece of evidence there — with all due respect to Marco, these are two completely separate jobs.
I don’t blame that on anybody in the government other than Trump. He thought he was being constrained by the NSC, that somehow we were trying to — I speak for all these other Cabinet members — that we were trying to force him in one direction or another.
Obviously, each member of the the NSC has his or her own views, but it’s the clash of views that can benefit a president so he can see what the stronger case is, what aligns more with his preferences, what the better plan is, all of these sorts of things I think are generally enhanced by discussion. If you don’t have much discussion or it’s not well-informed discussion, you’re not getting the benefits.
The administration would say that Iran is weakened militarily fundamentally, that their leadership has been eliminated in a unique way, that they have sped up a succession crisis. Is that achieving the objective of regime change?
No, not at all. There’s a report that the regime has selected a new secretary of the Supreme National Security Council held by Ali Larijani, who was killed a few days ago. And this guy is reported to be an old-time Revolutionary Guard hardliner.
So if he’s the new National Security Council secretary, that’s an indication that he’s probably even more hardline than Larijani. To the extent the regime can rebuild, and that’s simply a matter of getting oil flows out through the Strait of Hormuz. I have no doubt they’ll be back to an assertive nuclear weapons and ballistic missile program, and lining up their terrorist surrogates again.
I think if you are going to go after the goal of regime change, you have to know what you’re getting into and be resolved to work your way through it in order to achieve it. And if you don’t think you can achieve it, then don’t start it. Try something else. And it’s clear Trump hasn’t done many of those things. And that’s why he’s in the conundrum that he is in now.
Today, Explained publishes video episodes every Saturday tackling key issues in politics and culture. Subscribe to Vox’s YouTube channel to get them. New episodes of Today, Explained drop every day of the week on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite listening app.
If you enjoy our reporting and want to hear more from Vox journalists, sign up for our Patreon at patreon.com/vox. Each month, our members get access to exclusive videos, livestreams, and chats with our newsroom.
