Foreign Policy Brief #206 | Ibra Castro | July 2, 2025
With Israel and Iran now having engaged in a direct war, trading attacks on each other’s cities, and the US carrying out attacks inside Iran, there’s a high chance that the US could be dragged into a full on war. It’s a prospect that is causing fear in many in the United States, but also being pushed for by others. Regime change has come up as one of the goals of the war and there are those in the US who are in favor of going to war and overthrowing the Iranian government.
Once again, not only is an enemy nation baselessly a short-way away from a nuclear weapon that they would obviously be compelled to use immediately, but the government is oppressive to those that live under its rule and Americans must fly across continents to liberate them. Women, ethnic minorities and the LGBTQ community would apparently welcome American/Israeli forces invading and overthrowing their government.
Now of course, this is not to say the Iranian government is not oppressive, one would only need to look at the recent sweeping public protests that erupted across Iran in response to the death of Mahsa Amini in custody of Iran’s morality police in September 2023. Iranian authorities after suppressing the protests adopted an even more draconian law that further targeted the rights of women and girls, imposing the death penalty, flogging, prison terms and other severe penalties to crush ongoing resistance to compulsory veiling, according to a 2024 report by Amnesty International. Many more examples could be given and presented by this point alone proves that the egregious situation for women in the country is true.
There is no question that in Iran women are less free than men in society and other minority communities or dissidents to the government’s policies do live under religious authoritarian rule. However, that is not a justification for overthrowing a government of a sovereign nation, and especially one in a region that has already seen multiple governments toppled and then thrown into instability. The argument over different oppressed groups in Iran is being used primarily to manufacture consent for the US to go to war. Even as the IAEA recently made statements that Iran has no nuclear weapons program, the facts proved irrelevant when faced against the argument that because Iran is run by an evil regime it clearly needed to be invaded. Only recently and very quickly have many media pundits, commentators, and politicians come to care about the well being of various groups in this foreign country.
Take this excerpt from an article published in Politico, written by Mathias Döpfner, titled “Iran’s Target Isn’t Just Israel. It’s Us”. The article seeks to make the claim that the US should go to war, with a section stating “In Iran, women are systematically oppressed and abused. Homosexuals are murdered. Those who think differently are imprisoned and tortured.”
Another example, from a journalist that has gained notoriety over the last few years covering events in the Middle East, Pierce Morgan, who on a recent episode of his show Pierce Morgan Uncensored, interviewed Iranian Professor Mohammed Marandi. While interviewing the professor, he read a list of repressive aspects of Iranian society, stating “women face severe restrictions when it comes to marriage, women banned from certain professions… Lgbt people suffer systematic discrimination and violence… authorities censor the media… it doesn’t sound like a great place to visit” he said.
Chris Cuomo on his podcast took aim at both Bernie Sanders and AOC for making statements against going to war with Iran, saying “If you’re a feminist how do you not decry the fact that Iran would jail you for how you speak, for how you dress?… they would slaughter your LGBTQ plus constituents.”
On the popular morning talk show The View, Alyssa Farah Griffin, a republican former White House director of strategic communications said, “Let’s remember too, the Iranians literally throw gay people off of buildings. They don’t adhere to basic human rights,”.
These arguments in other contexts are wholly justified and should be made, people regardless of gender, sexual orientation or race should not be made to live in fear or as second class citizens in any state around the world. However the arguments are being presented now not out of genuine concern but are the same claims used to launch and sustain decade long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The mental leap from having issues with a country’s domestic and social policies to then suggest that they then can only be solved through regime change by our armies overthrowing and occupying the country is outrageous.
There are numerous other examples of government oppression and oppression of minorities from all across the globe. For example, in 2024 Peru classified transgender identities as ‘mental health problems’. In 2023 Uganda passed one of the world’s harshest anti-gay laws. The law states that “a person who promotes homosexuality commits an offense and is liable, on conviction, to imprisonment for a period not exceeding twenty years.” It also requires Ugandans to report suspected homosexuals or violations of the law to the authorities. In Saudi Arabia, one of Donald Trump’s most closely allied foreign partners, women only gained the right to drive in 2018 and are still subjected to strict male guardianship laws. We must also not pay mind that different states in the US have varying degrees of discrimination towards the LGBTQ community and that there is currently a nationwide hunt in the United States by masked agents for both documented and undocumented people of a particular ethnic group with many being sent to a detention facility in Central America with no due process.
Under the arguments made by those listed and others in the media that cite Iran’s treatment of various groups, all of the above-mentioned countries should have their governments toppled. An obviously ridiculous suggestion, which if not only for the hardship it would create within those countries, for the damage it would do to an already unstable international system. If we seek to ameliorate the situation of women, ethnic minorities, the LGBTQ community and others in Iran and elsewhere, we could do so through uplifting their voices internationally. Funding projects and encouraging journalism, education, diplomacy and more through international programs like those cut by the Trump administration. We should offer refuge to those fleeing oppressive regimes and not close our borders or implement travel bans to any and all nationals escaping said “evil regimes”. There are numerous ways to help and none of those should include invading and occupying those we claim to seek to protect and liberate.