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Thune: Iran strikes should result in regime change

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said Thursday that any military strikes against Iran should result in regime change to effect real change in a country that has long been hostile to the United States and its allies, particularly Israel.

“In my view, if you’re going to do something there, you better well make it about getting new leadership and regime change,” Thune told reporters.

“If you’re going to take some sort of action, I think you want to achieve a result that actually brings about the transformational change that I think we want in the region” Thune said.

The GOP leader made his comments amid growing expectations on Capitol Hill that President Trump will order strikes against Iran in the next few days or weeks if negotiations led by special envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff fail to produce a deal to end Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

The Trump administration has destroyers and aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, and the Mediterranean Sea to prepare for a possible strike on Iran.

“The president I don’t think, to my knowledge, has made any decisions  but I think they’re gaming out what contingencies might look like and what’s in our national security interests. Of course, first and foremost is to prevent them from having a nuclear capability but there are also other threats that they represent in the region,” Thune said.

Trump told lawmakers at the State of the Union address on Tuesday that Iran has resumed its nuclear weapons program and could soon develop a ballistic missile capable of reaching the United States.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who has spoken to Trump recently, has urged him to take advantage of what he and foreign policy experts view as the growing weakness of Iran’s regime in the aftermath of a bloody crackdown on anti-government protesters.

“I said, ‘Listen, the regime has never been weaker. They are teetering,’” Cruz told CNBC in an interview Tuesday, recounted, recounting his conversation with Trump.

“We are at a moment … where in the next six months we could realistically see the regimes in Iran, Venezuela and Cuba all fall and we could see them replaced with governments that want to be friendly with America,” he said.

“If that happened, that would be the biggest geopolitical shift since the fall of the Berlin Wall,” Cruz argued.

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