Many of the critiques of the Trump administration’s decision to go to war in Iran have come from familiar groups that believe he should have first sought approval from Congress and the international community. But after Tuesday’s fragile cease-fire, a new strand of criticism has emerged from the camp of Iran hawks: that the United States should have stayed the course and enacted regime change.

On the latest episode of FP Live, I spoke with John Bolton, a former national security advisor in U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term. Bolton has long been an advocate for regime change in Iran. Subscribers can view the full discussion in the video box atop this page. What follows here is a lightly edited and condensed transcript.

Many of the critiques of the Trump administration’s decision to go to war in Iran have come from familiar groups that believe he should have first sought approval from Congress and the international community. But after Tuesday’s fragile cease-fire, a new strand of criticism has emerged from the camp of Iran hawks: that the United States should have stayed the course and enacted regime change.

On the latest episode of FP Live, I spoke with John Bolton, a former national security advisor in U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term. Bolton has long been an advocate for regime change in Iran. Subscribers can view the full discussion in the video box atop this page. What follows here is a lightly edited and condensed transcript.

Ravi Agrawal: You think it was wrong of Trump to de-escalate this week. Explain that.

John Bolton: I think it was wrong if his objective is regime change. I honestly don’t know what his objective really is. It seems to keep shifting. But given the closure of the Strait of Hormuz by the regime, and by intimidating shipping and insurance, they’ve established something that is really, in my mind, a threat in many respects equivalent to the nuclear threat they were developing, the terrorist threat they’ve nurtured over decades—really, a direct threat at the world economy.

To walk away with that scenario still unresolved sets a dangerous precedent. I think our military was working on clearing the strait. I’m not suggesting it’s an easy job. But it’s obviously something that needs to be resolved. It has been unacceptable to the United States since Franklin Roosevelt and the king of Saudi Arabia met during World War II to have any country, whether it’s an outsider like the Soviet Union or a Gulf country like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, to have domination over the total oil production of the Gulf region. That has to remain our objective, and it’s obviously jeopardized now by what the regime in Tehran is doing.

RA: And part of what you’ve been saying is that the regime can rebuild, which makes it dangerous.

JB: I think that’s right. I think Trump made a number of mistakes before beginning hostilities. He didn’t make a very compelling case to the American people that regime change is the only way to protect ourselves and our allies in the region, especially, from Iran’s menace. If you don’t prepare your own people for why you’re about to use military force, it’s just a mistake in Politics 101. A corollary to that is he didn’t prepare Congress. An international corollary is he didn’t brief any of the allies. It’s not just that he didn’t brief NATO. He didn’t brief the Gulf allies. He didn’t brief our allies in the Pacific, like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and others who get a lot of their oil from the Gulf. He didn’t brief anybody, and we’re paying some of the price for that now.

Most importantly, he didn’t prepare the opponents of the regime inside Iran. He didn’t work with them. He didn’t assist them. This all could have started after the 12-day war, the campaign against Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile program last year. If you had a functioning National Security Council (NSC) process, that could have been an exercise for the NSC to say, “What have we learned from that episode of ‘mowing the lawn,’ as the Israelis call it? And are we ready for something more than that?” As far as I can tell, none of that happened.

RA: I have to say, I find that term, “mowing the lawn,” very distasteful.

But let’s interrogate the idea of regime change. I know you’ve been a proponent of this for many years now. Part of the issue here is that from everything we know about the Islamic Republic, the regime has many contingencies for key positions, and that’s why the regime is still intact right now. The military controls some 40 percent of the economy, so incentives to defect from the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] or the Basij are extremely low. This is now a military-clerical regime. How many of the hundreds of thousands of people in the........

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