Iran, Trump wants to choose the future leader of Tehran: international law for personal use.
Donald Trump wants to “clean everything up” in Iran and already has in mind who should lead the country afterward. He stated this bluntly in a phone interview with NBC News, claiming to have “a few people” in mind who could do a “good job” as leaders, and that he is taking measures to keep them alive during military operations.
These are words that, beyond their rhetorical brutality, pose a fundamental question that the Western debate seems strangely reluctant to address: can the President of the United States bomb a sovereign country and appoint its next head of government?
A blatant violation of international law.
The answer, in terms of international law, is no, unequivocally. The United Nations Charter (an organization that is increasingly useless, by the way) explicitly prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity of a sovereign state, except in cases of self-defense or under a mandate from the Security Council. Choosing and “protecting” the future rulers of a foreign country is not diplomacy: it is the very definition of regime change, a practice that the international community has condemned in every forum, at least in words.
Yet, in the face of such declarations from Washington, the silence from Western chancelleries is deafening.
The double standard that undermines democratic credibility.
It would be interesting to imagine the West’s reaction if it were Putin or Xi Jinping announcing that they had “candidates” ready to lead an enemy country following a military operation. Statements would abound, emergency UN Security Council meetings would follow one after another, and the media would speak of imperialism and barbarism, and they would be right.
But when it is Trump speaking, a veil of embarrassed silence descends. Western nations, many of which remain politically, militarily, and economically dependent on the American umbrella, simply absorb the shock, unable or unwilling to call things by their name.
This double standard is nothing new, but it has rarely manifested in such raw and shameless forms in recent years. And it comes at a very high cost: it erodes the credibility of the democratic project in the eyes of billions of people in the Global South, who for decades have watched as the values proclaimed by the West are applied selectively, depending on who sits on the “other side” of the geopolitical field.
Trump and imperial logic.
Donald does not want a leader tied to the previous Iranian leadership, as if Iran were a piece of real estate to be acquired and renovated according to his tastes. This is the language of a master, not the leader of a democracy. It is imperial logic in its most explicit form: bomb, choose who governs, and move on.
A drift that will have consequences.
Democratic states should have evolved beyond these practices. Instead, the model that is consolidating is one of an international order with variable geometry, where rules apply to adversaries but not to those who wrote them. This drift, moral before it is even political, will not remain without consequences. It will fuel resentment, legitimize alternative authoritarianisms, and accelerate the fragmentation of a world order already deeply shaken.
The real question, in the end, is not what Trump will do in Iran. It is how many more times the West will be able to look the other way before the democratic project definitively loses its reason for existence in the eyes of the world.
Photo thewhitehouse.gov
