During a recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Vice President JD Vance laid out a familiar fear about Iran: that a U.S. push for regime change could turn into another Libya, with state collapse, terrorist infrastructure, mass migration, and pressure for America to manage the aftermath.

That concern should not be dismissed. Americans have lived through Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and the long hangover from promises that the fall of a bad regime would quickly produce a better order. No serious person should want American soldiers occupying Tehran. No one should imagine that Iran’s future can be arranged by Washington as if a country of more than 90 million people were a conference-room exercise.

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But from a serious concern, Vance draws the wrong lesson.

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The lesson of Iraq and Libya is not that hostile regimes must be preserved because their collapse might be messy. The lesson is that serious countries should plan for transition before events force the issue.

That distinction matters because the Trump administration keeps treating Iran’s current regime as if it were the thing standing between Iran and chaos.

The Islamic Republic is the chaos.

For nearly half a century, the regime has exported terrorism, armed proxies, crushed dissent, ruined its economy, alienated its own people, and turned one of the world’s great civilizations into a permanent revolutionary project. It has made enemies of its neighbors, held its own population hostage, and treated the region as a chessboard on which Lebanese, Syrians, Iraqis, Yemenis, Israelis, Palestinians, and Iranians are all expendable pieces.

And yet, when Washington looks at the regime, it keeps seeing a structure to preserve.

That is the fatal confusion in Vance’s argument. He worries about what might happen if the Islamic Republic falls, while understating what the Islamic Republic has already done by remaining in power.

Vance worries about terrorist infrastructure after regime collapse. But Iran’s terrorist infrastructure is not a future risk. It is already here. It has been built, funded, trained, and exported by the regime itself. Hezbollah is not a hypothetical danger in a post-regime Iran. It is the regime’s most successful foreign project. Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthis, Iraqi militias, assassination plots abroad, attacks on shipping, and threats against American forces are not symptoms of regime absence. They are instruments of regime policy.

The same........

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