The (Obvious) Reasons Israel and America Should Eliminate Iran's Regime
The case for "decapitating the government of Iran" isn’t complicated. It’s long overdue.
Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Some people are so unserious that they should never be allowed a microphone.
Tucker Carlson is one of those people.
Masquerading as an “all-American” wannabe geopolitical expert, he has been making his anti-Israel rounds, appearing anywhere that will hand him a camera so he can continue pretending he understands how the world actually works.
His latest performance came on Saudi state-owned television, where he asked, with theatrical incredulity, “How is it in America’s interest to decapitate the government of Iran on behalf of Israel?”
That question is wrong in every possible way, and it purposefully deceives many Americans and other viewers into believing that confronting Iran is a favor to Israel rather than a direct defense of American lives, interests, and global stability.
First, America is not acting “on behalf of Israel.” If anything, the strategic reality has often been the reverse: Israel absorbs regional threats, tests military technologies, and neutralizes hostile actors that would otherwise target American interests directly.
But even that is beside the point.
Dealing decisively with the Iranian regime is not a favor to Israel. It is one of the clearest, most direct steps the United States could take to stabilize the global order and protect its own citizens.
Iran, under the Islamic Republic, is the single-most destabilizing force across the Middle East and North Africa. Its regime has spent decades building a network of armed proxies, ideological allies, and terror-financing pipelines designed to undermine the West, choke regional modernization, and expand its own revolutionary doctrine. Wherever instability flourishes in the region — from Lebanon to Yemen to Iraq to Gaza — Iran’s fingerprints are present.
But this is not merely a regional problem. It is a direct American one.
For nearly half a century, the Islamic Republic has not merely threatened America — it has been killing Americans. The conflict effectively began in 1979, when revolutionaries seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held American diplomats hostage while Ayatollah Khomeini boasted that America “can’t do a damn thing against us.”
That taunt became operating doctrine.
In 1983, Iranian-backed terrorists bombed the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 220 Marines and 21 other service members. Iranian officials later openly acknowledged their role. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Hezbollah — Iran’s most powerful proxy — kidnapped, tortured, and murdered American intelligence officers, soldiers, and civilians, from CIA Station Chief William Buckley to Navy diver Robert Stethem and Colonel William Higgins.
The pattern continued into the modern era. Iranian-backed militants bombed the Khobar Towers in 1996, killing 19 U.S. service members. During the Iraq War, Iranian-supplied improvised explosive devices were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American troops — by some estimates as many as 1,000. Tehran also provided support, transit, and safe haven to Al-Qaeda figures before and after 9/11, and has continued directing or enabling proxy attacks on American soldiers and contractors across the Middle East into the 2020s. Even today, Iran continues detaining American hostages and funding militias whose explicit purpose is to target U.S. forces.
No matter how often commentators insist that America is not at war with Iran, the Islamic Republic has been at war with the United States for 47 years. It only takes one side to wage a war for one to exist. For decades, Tehran has operated under a simple assumption: that it can shed American blood without facing decisive consequences. As long as that assumption holds, the attacks will continue.
Contrary to the caricature often presented in Western media, an overwhelming number of Iranians themselves despise the regime that rules them. For years, ordinary citizens have risked imprisonment and worse to protest corruption, repression, economic collapse, and religious authoritarianism. Women have led demonstrations. Students have filled streets. Workers have staged strikes. Each time, the regime has responded not with reform, but with force, violence, murder, and fear.
Regime change in Iran would not simply serve American or Israeli interests. It would first and foremost serve the Iranian people — one of the most educated, globally connected, and historically sophisticated populations in the Middle East, currently held hostage by a clerical leadership that has systematically impoverished and isolated them.
Even within the region, this reality is quietly acknowledged. A Saudi royal family source told Israel’s N12 News on Sunday that the solution for Iran is no longer limited strikes or symbolic containment, but a fundamental transformation of leadership, including the removal of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Khamenei and the regime “must be eliminated one by one,” and “the only solution is to change the regime in Iran in one way or another,” the source said.
“We see the regime as a regional threat,” they continued. “If Iran does not produce nuclear weapons within five years, it will do so afterwards.”
This is not fringe rhetoric. It reflects a growing consensus among governments that have lived for decades under the shadow of Iranian expansionism.
That consensus exists for concrete, structural reasons — reasons that make clear why the United States and Israel, acting either together or in coordinated sequence, have both the interest and the justification to neutralize the Islamic Republic as a geopolitical threat.
Start with the facts: The West tried the diplomatic route more than a decade ago. The 2015 Iranian nuclear deal — formally the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, signed and engineered by Barack Obama’s administration — was sold as the agreement that would permanently block Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon. Sanctions were lifted, billions of dollars flowed back into the regime, and the world was told that Tehran’s nuclear ambitions had been contained.
Look where that experiment has gotten us. Today, Iran is enriching uranium to levels as high as 60 percent — far beyond the deal’s limits and only a short technical step from weapons-grade material. Its stockpile of enriched uranium is now many times larger than what the agreement allowed, and international monitors warn that the regime possesses enough highly enriched material that, if further refined, could produce multiple nuclear weapons. After years of concessions and diplomacy, the Islamic Republic is closer than ever to a bomb — and far richer, more entrenched, and more emboldened than when the deal was first signed.
Then there are the geographic and economic components, namely the Strait of Hormuz, one of the most strategically critical maritime chokepoints on the planet. Roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas passes through its narrow waters every single day. The strait is only about 34 kilometers (21 miles) wide at its narrowest navigable point, and Iran’s territorial positioning — combined with its naval capabilities and missile infrastructure — gives it enormous de facto leverage over global energy markets.
Every time tensions rise, shipping insurance rates spike, oil prices fluctuate, markets react, entire national economies feel the ripple effects of a regime that routinely threatens to close or disrupt one of the most important commercial arteries in existence.
A more stable, Western-aligned Iran — or even a neutral, non-hostile Iran — would fundamentally transform global energy security. Shipping lanes would be less vulnerable to political blackmail, markets would stabilize, energy-importing nations across Europe and Asia would gain predictability, and the world economy would benefit from the removal of a regime that treats global commerce as a hostage-taking opportunity.
Then there is the question of terrorism and proxy warfare.
Iran is not merely a state with controversial policies. It is the central node in a transnational network of armed groups and militant organizations that operate far beyond its borders. Through funding, weapons transfers, training, and ideological support, Tehran has built an archipelago of influence stretching across the Middle East and into parts of Africa, Latin America, and the West (e.g., Australia and Europe). These groups undermine governments, destabilize societies, and perpetuate cycles of conflict that prevent economic growth and political modernization.
Wherever infrastructure projects stall, foreign investment retreats, or civil conflict persists across the region, Iranian-backed actors are often present. This is not accidental. It is strategic doctrine. Chaos weakens rivals and creates openings for influence.
Removing or fundamentally weakening the regime that coordinates and finances this network would not magically solve every regional problem. But it would remove the single-largest engine driving persistent instability. Countries that have spent decades diverting resources toward defense against Iranian proxies could redirect those resources toward development, trade, and internal growth.
Finally, there is the global dimension — particularly the emerging strategic competition with China.
Iran occupies a critical position in China’s long-term geopolitical planning. Through energy partnerships, infrastructure investments, and diplomatic alignment, Tehran has become a useful partner in Beijing’s effort to expand influence across Eurasia and the Middle East. A strong, defiant Iran complicates American supply chains, threatens allied energy routes, and provides China with a foothold in a region central to global commerce.
A decisive shift in Iran’s political alignment, or the emergence of a government less hostile to the West, would reshape that dynamic. It would limit China’s ability to project influence through Iranian territory and partnerships. It would strengthen American leverage in global trade routes and energy markets. And it would signal, unmistakably, that the United States is willing to defend the structural foundations of the international system it helped build.
That matters at home.
When America projects strength abroad, it stabilizes markets, secures supply chains, and reduces the likelihood of drawn-out conflicts that drain resources over decades. When hostile regimes are allowed to entrench themselves and expand influence unchecked, the eventual costs — economic, military, and political — are always higher. Americans feel those costs in fuel prices, inflation, defense spending, and global instability that inevitably reaches domestic shores.
None of this is about acting “on behalf of Israel.” It is about recognizing that the Islamic Republic of Iran has positioned itself as a systemic threat to regional order, global commerce, and Western security. Pretending otherwise is not realism. It is denial.
The world has spent decades attempting to manage, contain, or negotiate with a regime whose core identity is built around jihad and martyrdom. The results are visible across the Middle East: proxy wars, economic disruption, and a constant undercurrent of escalation.
At some point, the obvious becomes unavoidable.
Neutralizing the primary source of that instability would not guarantee peace. But it would remove one of the largest and most persistent obstacles to it — for Israelis, for Americans, for the broader region and, perhaps most of all, for the Iranian people themselves.
And that brings us back to the strange, almost grotesque irony of the moment.
Tucker Carlson chose to make his case not on American soil, not before an American audience, but on Saudi state television — effectively using a foreign government’s platform to argue that the United States should leave the Islamic Republic of Iran alone. In doing so, he found himself providing rhetorical cover for one of the most repressive and anti-American regimes on earth: a regime that has spent decades murdering Americans and, more recently, murdering its own people in the streets.
The same Iranian government he now treats as a misunderstood victim has slaughtered thousands of its own citizens for the crime of protesting — women demanding basic freedom, students demanding basic dignity, workers demanding basic economic survival. These are not rumors or propaganda. They are documented realities. Yet instead of standing with those Iranians risking everything to escape a tyrannical system, Carlson has chosen to echo the talking points of the regime that brutalizes them, portraying any serious confrontation with Tehran as reckless or unnecessary.
There is something deeply un-American about that posture. America’s global role has never been perfect, but at its core has been a basic understanding: that regimes which terrorize their own populations, destabilize entire regions, and kill Americans abroad are not moral equivalents to free societies. They are adversaries. To go onto foreign state television and frame the neutralization of such a regime as somehow illegitimate — or worse, as a favor done for another country — is plainly absurd.
In the end, Israel will have to go nuclear. We can debate what has to be targeted, but nothing else will take down the Islamonazis.
Tucker Carlson now appears to have gone full Lord Haw Haw. I wouldn't be surprised if he broadcasts from Tehran next.