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By Charles Darnay
Rudy Giuliani told The Washington Post last week that President Trump will confront Iran and seek “regime change.”
As one of the president’s closest advisers and helping to guide his legal team, Giuliani has become a semi-official spokesman for the administration on a host of issues.
“The president down the road is thinking regime change in Iran,” Guiliani told the Post. “There is no doubt that at some point, we have to make that change. What side of history do you want to be on?”
The paper noted the former New York City mayor’s growing influence and his discussion of “a topic totally outside his Russia-investigation purview: Iran.”
The idea of regime change and the ousting of Tehran’s regime controlled by Islamic mullahs raises the specter of a major military confrontation, one that might broaden to include Russia, an ally of Iran.
In early May, soon after joining Trump’s inner circle of advisers, Giuliani told reporters the president is “as committed to regime change as we are.”
Giuliani added that ousting the current Tehran leadership is “the only way to peace in the Middle East” and “more important than an Israeli-Palestinian deal.” Giuliani made the remarks to a press gaggle after a speech to the Iran Freedom Convention for Democracy and Human Rights in Washington.
Days after Giuliani’s speech, President Trump cancelled the U.S. agreement with Tehran that banned their development of nuclear weapons.
“This was a horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made,” the president said in an address from the White House. “It didn’t bring calm, it didn’t bring peace, and it never will.”
Later in May, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told the Heritage Foundation the U.S. will confront Iran’s growing regional influence with plans to “crush” the regime with economic sanctions and other military preparations.
“It’s implicitly a regime change policy,” Suzanne Maloney, a foreign policy expert at the Brookings Institution told CNN. “There’s no other possible way to interpret that speech.”
White House National Security Adviser John Bolton has said the U.S. decision to abandon its deal with Iran was based on its bad behavior, noting “Tehran has poured billions of dollars into military adventures abroad, spreading an arc of death and destruction across the Middle East from Yemen to Syria.”
