{"id":313781,"date":"2026-03-02T12:01:42","date_gmt":"2026-03-02T12:01:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=313781"},"modified":"2026-03-01T14:21:23","modified_gmt":"2026-03-01T14:21:23","slug":"trump-starts-a-major-regime-change-war-with-iran-serving-neoconservatism-and-israel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2026\/03\/trump-starts-a-major-regime-change-war-with-iran-serving-neoconservatism-and-israel\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump Starts a Major Regime-Change War with Iran, Serving Neoconservatism and Israel"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This is the definitive war of choice. It is the exact type of war that Trump and his movement spent a decade vowing to end. And the potential for destruction is infinite.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

28 Feb 2026\u00a0<\/em>–\u00a0For decades,<\/strong> Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and American neoconservatives have dreamed of<\/a> only one foreign policy goal: having the United States fight a regime-change war against Iran. With the Oval Office occupied by Donald Trump \u2014 who campaigned for a full decade on a vow to end regime-change wars and vanquish neoconservatism \u2014 their goal has finally been realized.<\/p>\n

Early Saturday morning, the United States and Israel began a massive bombing campaign of Tehran and other Iranian cities. President Trump posted an eight-minute speech<\/a> to social media purporting to justify his new war, dubbed \u201cOperation Epic Fury.\u201d Trump\u2019 war cry was filled with the same slogans and clich\u00e9s about Iran that Americans have heard from the carousel of bipartisan neocons dominating U.S. foreign policy for decades: Iran is a state sponsor of \u201cterror\u201d; it is pursuing nuclear weapons; it took American hostages forty-seven years ago (in 1979); it repressed and kills its dissidents, etc.<\/p>\n

As if to underscore how fully he was embracing the very foreign policy dogma he vowed to reject, Trump invoked the Marvel-like \u201cAxis of Evil\u201d formulation that White House speechwriter David Frum wrote for George W. Bush at the start of the War on Terror. Iran\u2019s government, President Trump proclaimed, is one determined to \u201cpractice evil.\u201d This is how Bush \u2014 speaking of Iraq, Iran and North Korea \u2014 put it<\/a> in his 2002 State of the Union address: \u201cStates like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump left no doubt about the scope and ambition of his new war. This will not be a quick or targeted bombing run against a few nuclear sites, as Trump ordered last June as part of Israel\u2019s 12-day war with Iran. There is nothing remotely constrained or targeted about any of this. Instead, this new war is what Trump called a \u201cmassive and ongoing\u201d mission of destruction and regime-change, launched in the heart of the Middle East, against a country of 93 million people: almost four times the size of Iraq\u2019s population when the U.S. launched that regime change war back in 2003.<\/p>\n

That Trump claimed to have \u201ccompletely and totally obliterated\u201d Iran\u2019s nuclear program last June \u2014 just eight months ago \u2014 was not something he meaningfully acknowledged in his new war announcement, other than to vaguely assert that Iran somehow resumed their nuclear program. In fact, Trump seemed to delight in repeating the same triumphalist rhetoric that he used last year when he assured Americans that Iran\u2019s nuclear program could no longer pose a threat as a result of Trump\u2019s triumphant Operation Midnight Hammer.<\/p>\n

In lieu of outlining any clear mission statement for this new war, let alone a cogent exit strategy, Trump offered a laundry list of flamboyantly violent vows. The U.S. will \u201ctotally obliterate\u201d Iran\u2019s ballistic missile program (which Iran could not use to reach the American homeland but which Trump admitted<\/a> last June caused Israel \u201cto get hit very hard\u201d in retaliation). Trump also promised that the U.S. would \u201cannihilate\u201d Iran\u2019s navy. And he told Iranians: \u201cthe hour of your freedom is at hand\u2026.bombs will be dropping everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump also attempted to prepare the nation for caskets and body bags of American soldiers returning to the U.S. \u201cThe lives of courageous American heroes may be lost; we may have casualties,\u201d the President said. But, said the man who did everything to avoid military service including during the Vietnam War, mass death of American soldiers \u201coften happens in war.\u201d<\/p>\n

In sum, Trump just launched the exact war that most of his MAGA movement professed to oppose. That included one of Trump\u2019s most influential supporters, the late Charlie Kirk, who repeatedly maligned<\/a> the neocons\u2019 drive for war with Iran as \u201cpathologically insane,\u201d and warned that grave disaster of historic proportions would be the result:<\/p>\n

TO CONTINUE READING<\/a> Go to Original – greenwald.substack.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

28 Feb 2026\u00a0–\u00a0This is the definitive war of choice. It is the exact type of war that Trump and his movement spent a decade vowing to end. And the potential for destruction is infinite.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":313782,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[742,3904,3924,249,70,481],"class_list":["post-313781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-iran","tag-j-d-vance","tag-peace-hoax","tag-trump","tag-usa","tag-warfare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=313781"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313781\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":313787,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313781\/revisions\/313787"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/313782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=313781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=313781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=313781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}