WASHINGTON — President Trump said Tuesday he does not seek regime change in Iran, as doing so could lead to “chaos.”
“No. If there was, there was, but no, I don’t want it. I’d like to see everything calm down as quickly as possible,” the president told reporters aboard Air Force One en route to the NATO summit in the Netherlands.
“Regime change takes chaos and ideally we don’t want to see so much chaos. So we’ll see how it goes.”
Trump urged both Iran and Israel to adopt a ceasefire and end hostilities on Monday after ordering a US military strike on Tehran’s nuclear sites on Saturday.
“Iran will never rebuild their nuclear facilities,” he wrote in an all-caps post on Truth Social.
He had fired off a Truth Social post when Israel first began bombing Iran about possibly taking out their leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, and floated “regime change” in a post on Sunday.
“It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
But in private, the president had been telling those around him that he wanted to prevent regime change in Iran in case it ended as “another Libya,” The Post previously reported.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, had not ruled out eliminating Khamenei when Israel began bombing Iran, leaving the door open to possible regime change.
“We are doing what we need to do,” Netanyahu told ABC News on June 16 about targeting Khamenei. “It’s not going to escalate the conflict; it’s going to end the conflict.”
