AhlulBayt News Agency (ABNA): Tom Barak, the U.S. special representative for Syria, told National magazine that Washington has attempted to change Iran’s political system twice in recent years, yet these efforts have yielded no results.
Barak claimed the United States is no longer focused on regime change and that regional dialogue should be the avenue for addressing disputes. His comments come despite former President Donald Trump’s earlier acknowledgment of his own role in shaping Israeli operations targeting Iran.
In an interview with ABNA News Agency evaluating Barak’s remarks, William Beeman, an American scholar and a professor at the University of Minnesota, stressed that U.S. policy has not, in practice, shifted.
He said the strategy of economic pressure, sanctions, isolation, and generating social discontent to bring down the government has persisted since the George W. Bush administration and continues to enjoy support among neoconservatives and influential U.S. think tanks, despite its continual failure.
Beeman described Barak’s assertion that Trump was ready for genuine negotiations with Iran as a political tactic.
According to him, Trump’s approach is rooted in coercion, imposing conditions such as the complete halt of nuclear activities, dismantling nuclear facilities, dissolving the IRGC, and ending support for resistance groups as preconditions for talks; conditions that do not constitute negotiation and directly steer toward regime change.
Pointing to cases such as Iraq and Afghanistan, the professor argued that the strategy of “making life miserable to provoke an uprising” has never been effective.
He emphasized that despite the lack of an official declaration, the desire to change Iran’s government persists across various levels of U.S. politics, and that even some Iranian expatriates support Trump in the hope of achieving this goal.
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