Eli Lake, Columnist

Regime Change in Iran? That’s Not Trump’s Policy

The goal of tightened sanctions on oil is to deprive the Iranian leadership of revenue.

April 23, 2019 at 10:00 AM UTC

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

Not trying to change this regime.
Photographer: AFP/Getty Images

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It’s a common refrain of critics of President Donald Trump’s foreign policy: What his administration is seeking in Iran is regime change. Even if Trump never utters the phrase, they say, it’s what he really wants.

So it’s not surprising that after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced a tightening of U.S. sanctions on Iranian oil imports on Monday, ending the waivers the U.S. had granted some countries to purchase Iranian oil, the critics pounced. Supporters of the 2015 nuclear bargain with Iran warned that it was 2003 all over again.