With Ayatollah Ali Khamenei having been killed as part of the ongoing war in Iran, there’s great uncertainty surrounding who will lead the Middle Eastern country going forward. Evidently, Donald Trump doesn’t just have some ideas on the subject, the president also expects to be directly involved in answering the underlying question. MS NOW reported Thursday as part of the network’s live blog coverage:
Trump told Axios in an interview today that he must be involved in picking the next supreme leader of Iran.
Several news outlets have reported that the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, is favored to succeed his father. Trump said that would be ‘unacceptable’ to him and dismissed the regime’s process of picking a new supreme leader, which is carried out by senior clerics who make up Iran’s Assembly of Experts.
The Republican explicitly told Axios, “I have to be involved in the appointment,” a position he continued to emphasize in others interviews Thursday. Indeed, Trump told ABC News’ Jonathan Karl: “We don’t want them to put anybody in there unless it is approved by us.”
There’s no shortage of problems with this, starting with the inconvenient fact that the president knows very little about Iran and its potential future leaders, and the idea that he would be capable of making a responsible choice is plainly ridiculous.
Complicating matters, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has continued to insist that the ongoing military offensive is not a regime change war. But the Pentagon chief and his boss can’t both be right: Either this isn’t a regime change war, or this is a war in which the United States has killed a foreign leader with plans to choose his successor. The administration probably ought to choose one talking point or the other.
But stepping back, there’s a broader element to this that’s often overlooked: Trump seems to like the idea of selecting foreign heads of state — and his list isn’t limited to Iran.
For example, he appears to have positioned himself as the person who’ll choose Venezuela’s new leader after his administration bombed the South American country and took Nicolás Maduro into custody.
Two weeks ago, at a White House news conference, Trump offered support for Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, adding that he “essentially” put him in the office.
A week before that, a reporter asked him if he has “a veto” on Nouri al-Maliki possibly returning to the prime minister’s office in Iraq.
“We’re looking at a prime minister, we’ve got some ideas,” Trump responded, as if the decision would be made by the White House.
We’re not just talking about Trump’s habit of endorsing foreign candidates and hoping they’ll win elections in their respective countries. Rather, this is a situation in which the president believes he’s entitled not only to choose officials to serve in his own executive branch, but also to choose leaders in foreign lands.
I continue to think about the Americans who supported the GOP ticket in 2024 because they believed Republicans would pursue a foreign policy based on restraint and non-interventionism, and just how spectacularly wrong they were.
