Killing Khamenei: Regime-Change Roulette in a Powder-Keg World

But Trump insisted he already destroyed the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear-weapons program! A sudden U.S.–Israeli decapitation campaign against Iran and the killing of Supreme Leader Khamenei shatters nuclear diplomacy, destabilizes energy markets, and teaches every medium power the same lesson: get an operational deterrent—nuclear-threat or leader-family threat, by bomb, missile, drone, or assassin—fast. This war is less a precision strike than a stress test of a wobbling world order, from Hormuz to Kyiv to the South China Sea and beyond…

The most important thing this morning, Sunday March 1: The chances that in fifty years Tel Aviv, Damascus, and more are seas of radioactive glass. Have those fallen or risen as a result of the unconstitutional war against the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran launched this weekend?

I cannot judge. But that is the most important thing people should be thinking about this morning.

Meanwhile—and far out of my wheelhouse—my notes so far:

In the early hours of 28 February 2026, U.S. and Israeli forces began a substantial coordinated air and missile campaign against Iran with the declared U.S. objectives, according to Donald Trump, (i) of toppling the Islamic Republic government, (ii) destroying its nuclear and missile capabilities (which had, Trump claimed, already been destroyed), and (iii) crippling its navy <https://www.cfr.org/articles/gauging-the-impact-of-massive-u-s-israeli-strikes-on-iran>. Perhaps 900 strikes in the first twelve hours.

Let’s pause on that (ii). The White House was still, as the attack went on, calling “fake news” on reports that Iran still had a nuclear-weapons program:

Secretary Marco Rubio (Jun 25, 2025) <https://twitter.com/SecRubio/status/1937879123285663831>: ‘This is the game these intelligence leakers play. They characterize and spin the intelligence the way they want to because they have an agenda. Here’s the truth: Iran‘s nuclear sites are destroyed…

@RapidResponse47 (Jun 25, 2025) <https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/1937932160146772449>: ‘@PressSec: “That CNN story does not change the facts: There was a TOTAL and COMPLETE obliteration of Iran‘s nuclear facilities, and because of @POTUS‘ strike... Iran no longer has the capability to produce a nuclear weapon...”

Of course, Donald Trump is not a reliable narrator. No one in the Trump administration is a reliable narrator. Plus the U.S. these days cannot be understood, even as shorthand, to be a unitary actor with coherent objectives. It is chaos monkeys all the way down.

Trump has offered no endgame: there are no articulated conditions for success beyond