The old US playbook: Regime change, broken rules and the price of impunity

May peace be upon you.

The unprovoked and coordinated US-Israel attack on Iran last Saturday came as a rude shock to many in Malaysia, especially those who had understood that ongoing negotiations between the US and Iran had made significant progress.

Those talks were supposed to have allayed US concerns about Iran’s nuclear capabilities, averted a violent confrontation and saved innocent lives and property.

With the benefit of hindsight, perhaps it was naive to expect the Trump administration not to spring an unwelcome surprise on the Iranians and peace lovers around the world. A similar round of negotiations had been disrupted last June, resulting in a 12-day war.

The upshot is that trust becomes a liability when diplomacy is mocked.

The illegal war waged against Iran serves as a grim reminder that there are members of the international community – particularly those with military might – who live by the nasty belief that might is right. Small countries such as Malaysia, with comparatively limited military power, are keenly watching such brazen unilateral action.

Leading the charge of this massive attack is none other than – rather ironically – the recipient of Fifa’s inaugural 2025 Peace Prize and chair of his own Board of Peace, Donald J Trump, who has repeatedly broken the rules to achieve the things he craved.

From the comfort of his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida, Trump candidly warned Americans that their sons and daughters sent to take part in the military assault might be brought home in body bags as a result of his imperialist impulses. He was preparing them for a worst-case scenario.

It is especially horrifying to recall that Trump once declared that his actions were guided and restricted only by his own “morality” – whatever that meant – and not by international law and humanitarian considerations.

This largely explains why Trump’s justification for the Iran attack shifted from time to time to suit his whims.

Cynics, however, argued that Trump was ‘blur’ about what he was doing.

At one point, Trump claimed he wanted to stop Iran from developing a nuclear bomb. Then he raised alarm about Iran’s ballistic missiles posing an existential threat to the US. Finally, he floated the idea of staging a regime change in the name of democracy in Iran.

One thing is certain: the attack has unleashed death and destruction, regardless of what the rationale for the war really was.

The military onslaught included the killing of 168 girls – most of them aged between seven and 12 — and staff at a girls’ primary school in Minab.

Those who have no compunction about murdering children should be reminded that their lives are as precious as those of the Palestinian children slaughtered by bombs, or those of children who have died of starvation in war-torn Sudan and Yemen.

It is also during this holy month of Ramadan – when the faithful are called to draw closer to the Almighty, practise self-reflection and show compassion towards the oppressed – that the invading forces chose to murder Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei and other top officials.

These killings were predictably welcomed – by the American ruling elite and some European leaders, especially those who favoured a regime change – as a brilliant tactical move.

The justification for them also gained traction after decades of vilifying Iran as a rogue state run by despotic mullahs – to the point of imposing crippling economic sanctions on the Islamic republic.

When rules are bent, what is wrong is made to look right and vice versa. Such moral inversion is possible if you have political and military clout, economic muscle and corporate media dominance to push certain agendas and manipulate narratives to serve powerful interests.

That is how some European leaders, aided by Western corporate media, pushed the narrative that Iran’s retaliation – which involved firing missiles and drones at US military bases — was excessive and a violation of the sovereignty of the Arab countries that host those bases.

The Iranians, on the other hand, regard those bases as an existential threat under the present circumstances.

It is worth noting that Iran’s right to self-defence against what the US and Israel called “pre-emptive strikes” must be differentiated from the kind touted by Israel in the context of its prolonged genocide in Gaza. Israel’s offensive posture has long been dressed up as ‘self-defence’.

We have been here before. Regime change is part of an old US playbook.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration launched a swift attack on oil-rich Venezuela, kidnapping sitting president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, and whisking them away to New York to dubious charges of drug trafficking and narco-terrorism.

A legitimate leader of a sovereign country was abducted because the Trump administration hoped that such action could prompt a regime change and give the US easier access to Venezuela’s oil – or at the very least, make the oil inaccessible to China and Russia.

In most cases, the US has left a trail of death and destruction after intervened in the domestic affairs of foreign countries. Such intervention has also given rise to dictatorship in these countries.

Political observers are concerned that assaults on a nation’s sovereignty, international rule of law, justice and human dignity have often been dressed up as an altruistic desire to promote human rights, democracy, socioeconomic progress and peace. Such pretexts are meant to manufacture consent in the US and among its allies.

The greedy grabbing of natural resources, such as oil, is also a vital motivating factor for military intervention.

In 1953, for instance, Mohammad Mosaddegh’s government in Iran was overthrown in a coup with the aid of British intelligence agency MI6 and the US CIA. He was replaced by the despotic Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was the preferred choice of Western powers.

The US and Britain objected to what Mosaddegh did — namely, nationalising Iran’s oil industry. The industry had previously been controlled by a British oil company.

Rules were also broken when the US intervened in Iraq, justified by the fiction of weapons of mass destruction. Hundreds of thousands of lives were snuffed out by military violence after President Saddam Hussein was removed from office.

Such intervention also wreaked havoc in Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen and Libya – the consequences of US and Western military adventurism. This created the kind of political instability and infighting that could also give predatory forces, such as Israel, the opportunity for military incursions in the region.

Lawlessness must be checked for the sake of global peace and humanity.

That was why the United Nations, formed on the ashes of World War Two, was mandated to forge and maintain peace and a rules-based world order.

Yet the international body that replaced the failed League of Nations seems to have increasingly failed to play this principal role effectively.

Institutional reform is needed so that the powerful are not emboldened to browbeat or bully weaker member states. Perhaps a good place to start is the UN Security Council.

We live in dangerous times. It is crucial that like-minded leaders of the Global Majority forge alliances in pursuit of mutual political, economic and cultural interests. The creation of the Brics bloc is one such initiative.

Mustafa K Anuar
Co-editor, Aliran newsletter
5 March 2026

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