Now that President Donald Trump has invaded Iran, he has no choice to see it through to an absolute conclusion and permanently remove the ayatollahs — and one of his former top foreign policy advisers just wrote he is “already failing” to do this.
“If the president wasn’t fully resolved to remove the ayatollahs, he should never have initiated so ambitious a military effort,” Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton wrote for The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. “Strikes on military targets alone won’t topple the regime. Instead, they must debilitate the institutions of state power, notably the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the basij militia. That would prove the regime’s inability to defend itself, signifying it can’t long survive and exacerbating divisions within a system already rocked by an accelerated succession crisis and the elimination of many top leaders. Iran’s opposition must help intensify regime collapse by working with disaffected officials, civil and military.”
Instead of working toward these goals, Bolton said Trump is “already failing” because “many Iranians feel betrayed, fearing mortal reprisals if the regime survives. Regime-change failure would also pose grave risks in three critical areas: oil, international terrorism and nuclear weapons.”
Despite this unacceptable status quo, Bolton fears the White House while declaring victory prematurely, which will almost certainly leave the region off worse than when America found it.
“It would be untenable for the White House to declare victory while it remains unsafe to export Gulf oil,” Bolton wrote. “The ayatollahs now have palpable evidence of what closing the strait means for the global economy. If they remain in power, they will never forget it.”
Bolton is not alone among prominent Republicans questioning Trump’s invasion of Iran. Steve Schmidt, a GOP strategist who advised President George W. Bush, was similarly scathing earlier this month when discussing the war.
“We are but 19 days into the quagmire in Iran,” Schmidt explained. “The Marines are on the way. There is no plan to end the war — only strategies that will escalate it. The world's flow of oil remains shut down through the Strait of Hormuz. And all of this is because Donald Trump is incapable of listening. All he does is talk. Donald knows he can never be told no. And so now oil is careening ever higher.”
Even Joe Rogan, a popular right-wing podcaster who was one of Trump’s most influential supporters during the 2024 presidential election, says that Trump’s base feels “betrayed” because he started wars in Venezuela and Iran after promising to be an antiwar president.
“Well, it just seems so insane, based on what he ran on. I mean, this is why a lot of people feel betrayed, right?” Rogan explained on an episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience.” “He ran on, ‘No more wars,’ ‘End these stupid, senseless wars,’ and then we have one that we can’t even really clearly define why we did it.”