Regime Change Boomerang: How Iran Can Leverage Trump’s War to End His Reign

Guest essay from Egor Kotkin. Support Egor’s writing on Patreon, and follow him on Substack, UpScrolled, Twitter & YouTube

Last July, in my debut essay for the Krystal Kyle and Friends Substack, written hot on the heels of the so-called “12-day war,” I described the logic of the Washington blob, how Iran and the West are making the real mistake of appeasement “as in 1938” in relation to the United States and Israel today, and how its rapid termination is pregnant with an inevitable recurrence, only on an order of magnitude larger scale, and in a very clearly foreseeable future:

…in the context of growing political problems at home and the falling popularity of the Republicans ahead of the midterms in November 2026, the “easy money” from winning a small victorious war for Trump is not just tempting, but the only opportunity to cover the failures on other political fronts – from the war on migrants to the trade war. Thus, all the available factors today are for a violent regime change in Iran, and… point towards a very narrow time corridor for action between the Israeli “right now” and September 2026
Analysis: Why Trump’s War On Iran Will Continue

The only hope for Iran, in my view, was to recognize the failure of the appeasement, the grave danger of the moment it has led them to, and establish a deterrence instead, in order if not to prevent, then at least to contain the next US attack. Quite soon became clear that this time the Iranian leadership saw the situation in the same way, and following this understanding, they also changed their strategy to the exact opposite, starting to prepare for the United States to pay as much as possible for the next attack, in order to respond to aggression with war. This, obviously, was not enough to discourage the United States from attacking. At this stage, the United States is not only not inclined, but in principle incapable of changing course. Thus, Iran’s new strategy came into play too late to stop the United States from launching another attack. However, along with the inability to change its own course, the US military and foreign policy blob also lost the ability to adapt to the change of another’s—and thus, the situation in which Iran had previously been burying itself deeper and deeper turned into the opposite, became a trap for the United States.

This piece is not just about the war with Iran in itself, though. It is about the many realities of this moment in history that remain unrecognized and thus allowed to play out further, until they are, eventually and inevitably, become painfully and tragically obvious in the hindsight, and which, with some foresight, were they to be recognized in time, could be entirely prevented. The war that just started in Iran, is both the result of such unrecognized realities and of them. It is a result of the colliding misconceptions about their own actions and goals of many forces. And if it is more or less clear as it comes to the US side: that the US cannot win this war because of their confusion of what they are even trying to do, hence what the victory even is, it remains dangerously misunderstood on the Iranian side.

And also, this is an example of developing politically useful socio historical models. Too often my fellow comrades act like the quality of a model (a theory) determined by its capacity to produce criticism. That is misguided: criticism-oriented thinking produces with criticism impotence, the bigger and pointier described the problem, the more inaccessible and unsolvable it feels. Useful models analyze a problem as a change, and look for the opportunities, that this change brings with it. Result of the effective model is not in understanding of what is the problem, what it does, but what to be done about it. I read a lot of good analysis and criticism in English, this war is no exception, but lately I notice increasingly often how even the best analysis, criticism or investigation are self-contained, entirely divorced from anything even looking in the direction of the change, and as a result produce disorganizing, disempowering effect. But we cannot afford to think for the sake of thinking anymore, the history now is on the move, and we must think for the sake of action to be able to catch up.

Trump MO: imperial inertia

Trump’s politics is a politics of testing and pushing the boundaries. Like any other human (at least in adolescence), Trump has this “this is bullshit!” impulse (as in “Why should I do this? This is bullshit!” or “Why couldn’t I do this? This is bullshit!”). And then, by acting on this impulse, people learn from the pushback where the actual boundaries lie.

The only difference is, that, unlike other humans, Trump is coming from the place of immense privilege from birth, so the resolution of “this is bullshit!” for him usually comes at the cost of many other people enduring even more bullshit in their lives because of that, because modern civilization at its root is fundamentally classist, i.e. built with a presumption, that there are always must be “two sorts of people.” This is why, to the extent that “this is bullshit!” is capable of producing any results, people already in positions of power and privilege, usually get more privilege, while people at the bottom of societal hierarchy usually get punished for daring to even ask.

Under such conditions, if people in power cross an actual boundary, that produces enough pushback from the people who were violated for the powerful to recognize their violation, they are only required to stop breaking things further to be let go and hailed like they fixed it, which is another one of their privileges, while the disempowered people are expected to facilitate such privilege, by absorbing all the pain produced by the mistake of the powerful and bearing all the costs of what it takes to repair what the powerful broke.

But it would be a mistake to assume that those rules apply only to people within societies, because the same two-tier system of exploiters and exploited that existed, among other places, in medieval Europe, was expanded to the rest of the world during the era of colonization, thus making class division a fundamental property of the first (and until now only) world order that emerged as a byproduct of their zeal for endless conquest covering, ultimately, the entire planet. In other words, not only people, but entire countries in modern world have been designated to either exploiter or exploited classes. And the United States, as an empire at the very of the international class system, acquired the same privilege of never being held accountable for their mistakes, i.e. never being bothered with repairing things that they broke as long as they stopped actively breaking them.

In practice of international relations it means, among other things, that the United States were able to invent and practice, for the first time in the world history, such phenomena as “forever wars,” because even if they lost a war, they were powerful enough to shield themselves from any pain that wars produce outside of the direct military engagement, and thus allow themselves to ignore all the consequences of their failure as soon as they withdrew.

This is why the era of ascension of the United States to global dominance is characterized by the growth of the permanently broken places, permanently split countries: South Korea vs Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Israel vs Palestine, Kuwait vs Iraq, Pakistan vs India, Taiwan vs the People’s Republic of China, Kosovo vs Serbia etc. etc. with the latest addition of Ukraine vs Russian Federation. Granted, many of those splits were designed by the British Empire, following the old Roman strategy “divide and conquer.” But in times of Roman Empire it would end as soon as the Romans withdrew, whereas in most places, of which British lost their direct power over, they were replaced with the neocolonial “supervision” of the United States, enforced through the international trade and financial institutions, backed by the permanent global background presence of the US military via 800+ bases all over the globe. Such design made possible for the US to divorce the predatory exploitative practices of the US from its consequences on the entirely new level.

And with Trump, the US empire, that already lost any means of exercising self-control after the collapse of the socialist block and the Soviet Union itself, and became the semi-sentient Blob instead, lost even the institutional memory of why any power that wishes to last must pair their greed with some gaslighting too; to care not only for their immediate profit from their actions, but about the perception of it as well, to cover up the colonial pillaging and plundering with the narratives of their benevolence, put aside enough effort to buy themselves some level of plausible deniability. Or why it shouldn’t mix politics and warfare by, say, utilizing diplomacy as mere military tactics.

This final shift of the imperial descension into madness, losing not only the sense of accountability for their actions, but even the memory of it (one can say “Israelification” of foreign politics), that happened with Trump in the office in 2017, was missed by the rest of the world and became the reason why the sensible and responsible Iranian turned an appeasement and backfired on them, ensuring only that the more responsibility on cleaning the US-Israeli mess they assume onto themselves, the bigger US-Israeli mess they will get themselves into by that next.

But the rapid change of approach after the “12-day war” from appeasement to deterrence, changed everything. The Iranians realized that denying that the acts of war mean war only brought them on the brink of military defeat without even having a war too late to prevent the attempt of regime change in Iran to follow “taking out the Iranian nuclear program” next, but timely enough to prepare for war.

With Trump and his regime being clueless enough to expect to be able to collect the on of the biggest trophies of war, the enemy’s leadership heads, without paying the price of war, it constituted a perfect trap, the destructive potential of which entirely corresponds to the level of danger of the situation that Iranians allowed themselves in.

And the worst thing the Iranians can do right now, is to back down from fully realizing the potential of that trap. Both for their own sake, but also because the global, historical context of this war makes it existential not only for Iran (in every possible sense, from survival the Iranian regime or state to keeping a semblance of civilized order for everybody on that land), but for entire world—because this is the last stepping stone of the imperial madness descent into hell left before Russia and/or China.

Simply put, because the entire era we live in is the price that we pay for unfinished lessons of World War 2, that has returned to haunt us with the US and Israel as the Fourth Reich and NATO as the Axis-2, it puts Iran, attacked by the US and Israel on February 28, 2026, in the unenviable place of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Iranians did their best, even tried the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with JCPOA, but only to face the same cost of misreading the historical moment that tragically. But now there’s really, really no room for mistakes left.

At this point, there’s only one path to peace for Iran, and for the world’s hope that the war with Iran will be about the extent of the scale on which the World War 3 ultimately plays out: through. Iran must not just fight back, thinking of exerting some pain on the US, it must fight to defeat the US—or, rather, the Blob, that it became in Trump’s regime (the Blob is not all Trump regime, but the Trump regime is all Blob).

And if Iran does it, and continues from this moment onwards with the goal of regime change in Washington, it might very well succeed at that for a number of objective reasons to explain below. If Iranians go into this war for defeating and destroying Trump, they can. If not, it won’t keep them from being rolled over and destroyed afterwards, and then more, as a part of the even bigger war.

The February moment of the US czardom

One of the realities that are necessary to be recognized while there’s still time to prevent them playing out in full, that this is the beginning of the World War 3. It may not look like that yet, because it never does: the beginning of World War 1 didn’t look like World War 1 either, nor the beginning of World War 2, even with the hindsight of World War 1 available at the moment. And that’s the point of recognizing World War 3 before it takes on its full form.

Follows from that, another important reality to recognize: that the Trump’s United States already made the Germany’s famous mistake of both times, and started the war on two fronts, international and domestic.

There’s a certain toll on the US political system to be exacted in order to maintain the global empire: it internal rigidity must match the scale of the warfare it involved in. Like the Iraq and Afghan wars were matched by the Patriot Act, for example. And it remained balanced since and until recently. When Biden famously said that US could manage two wars at the same time, he was right, and two wars were what he left the US with: war (generously speaking) in Palestine and war in Ukraine. Trump’s second term started with the increase in the intensity of the domestic warfare, growing it to be more obviously open. The looming midterms deadline (November 2026) is do or die for Trump regime: it could only cross it intact as an open dictatorship, by taking over the elections, reducing them to the voting part of the process and taking out the “decision” part from the results. Doing so, would take out the political weight from the counter of the number of “our guys in uniform” lost, and thus would allow Trump to take on Iran in the old-fashioned way, as a full ground invasion, if needed.

But at the moment, the political system of the US is not there yet. Counting on Iran still playing along with his charade “just this, and that’s it, no war,” after committing the biggest (short of the first nuclear strike only) opening act of war possible, Trump trapped himself in the game, where Iran could drive up the political cost far beyond the political credit Trump’s regime can afford at the moment, before the elections are secured enough. Trump is like a child who tries to beat up another kid when adults are walking by, and tries to convince the kid he threatens to murder not to cry too loudly until the adults are gone at the same time, counting on the kid being too scared to refuse to assist him to get away with his own murder.

In this war, Iran has two arms they get Trump with: military and economic. Militarily, Iran seems capable enough to withstand the US assault longer than the US has the ammo to attack Iran with and protect itself and its regional assets in the process, having them have to retreat.

But inability to defeat Iran won’t stop the forces that are desperate to prolong the Western hegemony for another century. The two-tier exploitative world order with the Western countries on top as exploiters and the rest under them as exploited, was built by the conquest, but maintained by the industry. Colonial empires used the force to get the reaches, they hollowed out and destroyed everybody else’s productive capacity and built-up their own, by 1914 becoming the most productive places on Earth. This allowed them to survive the collapse of their colonial empires during the first stage of decolonization in 1917-1975, and continue the engine of world exploitation running in the neocolonial body. The colonial design of the world order continued because its political superstructure matched the way economic relations were organized under colonialism and could be maintained with less force and direct control. But since 1975 capital, that became transnational, was able to capture almost every state on Earth through neoliberal coup, incapacitate Western governments and deindustrialize Western economies, thus changing the distribution of productive power in the world entirely, and the US military power has become the only thing that protects the outsized rent extracted by the West from the global distribution of productive forces, and, at this point, the only remaining thing that binds the West and makes the West to still be a thing at all.

Which is why the entirety of the Western regimes already slavishly threw themselves behind the US war with Iran, and if the current political limits on the use of the US military lead to their defeat in Iran, then Western regimes dependent on neocolonial rents will be in direct conflict with the little public control over the use of the American military that remains. And as they realize the necessity of the military dictatorship to continue the project of the world hegemony of the US, they would have to accept giving up their power and wealth in order to preserve democracy… or get behind the Trump’s regime turning the US into a military dictatorship.

Just as Iran was catastrophically out of sync with the times using appeasement with Trump, and trying to deescalate when it needed to build up deterrence, it will be too late to rely on deterrence right now, when the entire 6 centuries of the Western dominance, as Marco Rubio so astutely recognized, are on the line. They already sentenced humanity to suffer a slow and painful death of civilization from climate change. And they would nuke both Russia and China to before they would accept simply living in the world that they are not on top of anymore. There’s no question, that if the last of the democratic input that the public has in the US will make the US lose against Iran without going all in, then democracy has to go.

By starting the war with Iran before securing enough political power domestically to endure a draft and a ground invasion in order to defeat Iran, Trump gave Iran the power to decide how devastating they want the impact of this war on the US political system and Trump’s own political standing to be. The effects of a military defeat in the foreign war are usually not immediate enough to collapse a regime. Met with the sudden economic hardship at home, however, creates a perfect political storm: since the Roman times, governments were able to make the country starve, but never the cities. Allowing people in the city to starve is the surest way to lose control of the city, and if that city happens to be where the government itself resides—to lose power as well. Even rumors about hunger in the city, when they are given credibility by the overall poor economic situation, and especially if it connected to a poorly going war, can be enough to cause the unrest. And if the growing public unrest coincides with the military defeat, when the regime’s confidence that they at least control their military is usually at its lowest, it could easily end up in revolution.

Like rumors of impending bread shortages, not even the shortages themselves, in the capital of the Russian Empire, Petrograd, in February 1917, in the third year of the First World War, led to mass unrest at a time when the loyal to the Tsar troops, he could order to suppress them, were at the front, too far from the capital, forced the Tsar to abdicate the throne and ended to the thousand-year history of monarchy in Russia.

In other words, Trump himself created a situation where Iran now holds the keys to triggering a revolutionary situation in the United States, if they use both of their arms, and not only inflict a decisive defeat on the US military in the Middle East, but also provoke an economic collapse at a time of growing economic insecurity and the lowest public confidence in the Trump’s ability to manage the economy.

If Iran allows Trump to exit the war, whether actively, by agreeing to negotiate peace, or even passively, by simply not chasing the US as they retreat in defeat, while he’s still in power, and before the Midterms start in September, it will free his hands to turn the war inward, point the guns at the voting booths and crash the dissent entirely with the same inevitability, coming from the sum of interest that constitutes the Blob, that made the regime change attempt on Iran inevitable:

A forceful regime change in Iran is in the interests of practically all the forces that together form US foreign policy… At the same time, there is not a single force or institution that has influence on US foreign policy whose interests would be contrary to a regime change in Iran
Why Trump’s War On Iran Will Continue

Stopping the war at some level of mutually inflicted damage would be enough for deterrence in the more normal times, but in the current political situation, it will only fuel the urgency for Trump regime to use both military and paramilitary like ICE to suppress the internal dissent and force the elections their way. And after Trump does it, he remain as incentivized to destroy Iran, but freer to use military on even bigger scale, free to return to Iran with the boots on the ground this time, and with less political cost attached. As of now, there’s nothing to gain from the peace with the US, because peace is only possible between the sides that recognize its value for themselves, whereas the US empire, on the contrary, peace-averted, scared of peace above anything else, and requires a constant growing instability around the world, in order to be able to leverage the only tool left at their disposal to prolong their global relevance.

The US and Israel are the Fourth Reich already on the warpath, fueled by ethnonationalism, for world domination, and settling for anything other than regime change in Washington would be a historical mistake, akin to the Soviet Union making peace with Hitler after the Red Army reached the borders of the USSR in 1944.

The only way out is through, and in order to make it, and turn the military failure abroad in the political collapse at home, Iran must go full in on the economic front, while continue hammering the US and their vassals all over the Middle East and anywhere else they could get them. Whatever it takes: shutting down and mining the Strait of Hormuz and destroying the oil production and refining infrastructure of the Arabian Peninsula and any nearby country that will continue to supply oil to Israel, NATO countries and the US military as soon as possible in order not only trigger global economic meltdown, but to make it as deep as possible, should only be a starting point.

And this makes it a real opportunity to save us human lives and historical time.

• Because it’s not a war between countries, it is not about defeating the US on the battlefield, moreover the US as a country. It is a war between eras, war for the future against the demons of the past, a struggle of the better world order to be born out of the old world order that refuses to die. Winning this war will win tomorrow for the entire world—it will release the world’s majority from struggling against the West, and the West from struggling to keep the world down—while the enemy fights to deny the possibility of a different, better future for everybody, including themselves.
• Because at this point, to be able to stop the global descent into madness only by molesting some money, no matter the scale, is a blessing, compared to what humanity is dealing with, and what comes after, if we fail to stop the unraveling of the Western dominance at this stage. It is an option to buy our way out, instead of bleeding for it.
• It is a path, but it is also a test, whether we can take it. By breaking out from under the capitalist spell, refusing to submit the very possibility of a different way to live to the interests of the class that are making this life unbearable, and setting out on a new path, humanity will also prove that there was another path for us in the first place.
• Because we live at the change of eras, are of colonialism, Western world order and the West itself is long overdue to be left in the past. The question is not whether it happens, but will humanity be able to utilise the opportunity to take some action to get slightly ahead of the course of history, instead of letting ti drag itself in kicking and screaming later, and save itself countless lives and the historical time, of which humanity does not have eternity to spend, we are already live on the borrowed time: Climate Change Puts Humanity on The Clock for Radical Change.

The US-Israel attack is basically a self coup in the making: they did not start it from abundance of confidence and the options available to them. By the rapid, aggressive ever growing in scale action they are trying to capture attention away from how thin the leg that they stand on. And Iran, if proceeds without holding back, could turn Trump’s regime change war into a war to change Trump’s regime.

Holding the ground militarily and going all in on economic warfare at the same time will leave no room for Trump to pivot and wiggle his way out in this situation, with every move they make only bringing them closer to the cliff.

Neither he won’t be able to pivot inwards, and attack the US cities with his military and paramilitary forces, in order to cancel the elections and impose a military dictatorship, while he’s tied in the big war that he’s not winning. Iran right now in a position to save the US from becoming a military dictatorship by trapping and weakening Trump enough for his regime to collapse or be overthrown, which in turn will save Iran from the possibility of a longer, bigger war with the US. Trump is a menace both in, for the US political system, and out, for peace and stable climate in the world, and escalation at each reinforces the other. By punching Trump’s regime with both arms at the same time, this cycle could be broken. Stuck between Iran and the US populace, in the rapidly deteriorating economic situation due to shut down oil production and trade in the entire Middle East, Trump will be tied by the domestic crisis from escalating the war against Iran by moving to invasion, while the continuing war he’s unable to get out of will prevent Republicans from taking over the political system and making their power unchallengeable before they will be booted out of power in the Midterms.

Just to be clear: I’m not suggesting that Iranian Revolutionary Guards land on the Potomac. They do not have the power to depose the US president, the US president gave them the power to make it happen himself, when he approved the poorly thought war with Iran, he exposed his weak spots and made himself, his power, his regime more politically vulnerable than ever, at the moment when it is already on back foot in all their ventures. Liberation could never come from the outside, only the change of masters. Freedom cannot be given, only taken. Which is why at the end of the day changing the regime in the US is up to the Americans themselves. But on the inside people usually could only cease the opportunity, as it arises, much less to create it or steer the conditions their way. Iranians, on the other hand, have the rare opportunity to do exactly that and push the situation inside the US towards developing the revolutionary conditions. Trump is Nicholas II, and his regime is in a pre-February situation now.

For that Trump must not be allowed to exit the war in any way or fashion, he must be kept engaged in order to prevent him from consolidating his power in his political backyard until the fall of his regime, be it after the Midterms, or sooner, or even later.

Using Trump’s attempt to hit Iran with a big stick, to break Trump’s regime neck with the same stick, is probably the only course of actions in the current circumstances that offers a comprehensible path to the better of possible outcomes—the world after the US hegemony, the post-Western world, and away from the worst of them, like a military dictatorship in the US, ground invasion in Iran, expanding the war to entire Eurasia etc.

If Iran treats this war not as a war against the United States (and Israel), but the war against the Trump regime (and Israel), will make them natural allies to the domestic US opposition, with whom they have the same enemy. The threat this regime poses to Iran and the rest of the world indeed is the same threat it poses to its own people. Realizing that Americans, fighting Trump’s aggression in their cities, in their neighbourhoods, fight the same war against the same enemy, that Iranians now on their land, will make the revolution unstoppable. Which is also ironic because that’s what the US tried to do all this time.

1. Freedom is necessity realized. I wouldn’t want Iran to fight someone else’s battles, but as soon as the battle began, they must realize that there’s no good future, or any future for them left by those who started it. And that avoiding the fight will not bring peace, the peace only exists on the other side, and must be fought for. Winning this war is not a matter of ending it. To win this war, Iranians must take the fight on the another level entirely, and fight to change the very conditions that created it. Doubt that comes from refusing to take a deadly simple and unambiguous truth for what it is, doesn’t stop the death march but enslaves with fear before it comes. Uncertainty and doubt are paralyzing. Whereas clarity is liberating, clear sight of the threat takes the scare out of it. The clearer it is what needs to be done, the freer the hands to do it and the thought in search of how, which in turn makes success more possible.
2. It won’t work if Iran left to do it alone. By targeting Iran, Trump’s regime exposed their weaknesses to Iran, empowered Iran to hurt them like nobody else could. Nobody else has a path to regime change in Washington that is different from a path to the nuclear self-annihilation. That’s power, and only Iran is in position to realize it. But no matter how capable Iran of working on creating the conditions for a revolutionary situation in the United States, only the Americans can take advantage of it. Iran must do everything it can on the economic front and the battlefront, to create in the US revolutionary conditions, and the public must do its best to cease it. And if Iranians will go all the way for Americans to have their chance to fight, Americans must act on it and take the fight as far as it’s needed—changing the Trump regime must not be the highest aspiration, but only a starting point.

Framing the regime change war against Iran as a regime change war against Trump regime and the US empire is meant—instead of redefining divisions and making people to move their positions—to erase divisions and make us see that we all, exactly where each of us is, are on the same side already, and there’s no need to take or choose sides—only to recognize the side that we are already together on.

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