Donald Trump told Axios that he expects to be involved in selecting Iran’s next Supreme Leader. The foreign policy establishment immediately began hyperventilating about sovereignty and norms and “the optics.” The rest of us noticed that Trump is probably right.
Technically, the Assembly of Experts picks the Supreme Leader — 88 clerics sitting in a room deciding who gets to control one of the most destabilizing regimes on the planet. Technically. But when your country has just absorbed a thousand military casualties and your air defense network looks like a screen door, “technically” does a lot of heavy lifting.
Trump called Khamenei’s son Mojtaba a “lightweight” and “unacceptable.” When a reporter asked who could replace Khamenei, Trump replied: “Most of the people we had in mind are dead.” That is either the darkest joke in presidential history or the most honest foreign policy statement of the decade. Possibly both.
This is how power actually works in the aftermath of a military campaign. You don’t have to occupy a country to influence its political direction. You have to make clear that certain outcomes are acceptable and certain outcomes are not. The U.S. has been doing this, to varying degrees of success and honesty, for seventy years. Trump is just saying out loud what every administration since Eisenhower has done behind closed doors.
The pearl-clutching about “interference in Iran’s internal affairs” is particularly rich given that Iran has spent decades funding, arming, and directing proxy forces across the Middle East to interfere in everyone else’s affairs. Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis — these aren’t organic expressions of local grievance. They’re Iranian foreign policy conducted through other people’s children.
We’re supposed to politely stay out of their succession planning while they wire money to every militia that points guns at Americans? Hard pass.
The “international community” — and yes, the scare quotes are load-bearing — will condemn this. The UN will issue a statement. Some European foreign minister will give a press conference about “respecting the sovereignty of the Iranian people,” by which they mean the sovereignty of the clerical regime that has been brutalizing the Iranian people for forty-five years.
Khamenei is 85 and not in good health even before you factor in what the last few months have done to Iranian military infrastructure. Someone is going to replace him. The question is whether that someone is selected by 88 clerics trying to preserve the regime’s radical trajectory, or by a process that involves some acknowledgment of what the last campaign actually changed.
Trump wants a voice in that room. Given what we just spent to earn it, that seems reasonable.
The mullahs can object all they want. The Assembly of Experts has 88 votes. We have the Air Force.