Tom Barrack, Trump's ambassador to Türkiye and special envoy for Syria and Iraq, said it plainly. Speaking in Doha in October 2026, he put the number at 23 regime changes across the broader Middle East. "None of them have worked," he said. "Every time we try and intervene, change the person or the regime, it seems to have been a mistake."
This was not an outsider's critique. It was an admission from a man placed exactly where the policy gets carried out—and it cuts deeper than any single operation. What it exposes is an entire logic that has repeated itself for seventy years.
Josef Gregory Mahoney, an American political scholar, does not read that record as a series of unrelated blunders. He reads it as a chain. "I think we can focus on four turning points," he says. The first is 1953. The CIA and MI6 overthrew Iran's elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, and restored the Shah. The coup achieved its immediate objective: a friendly monarch, secured oil interests.
But Mahoney's formulation is precise. It "taught them that their sovereignty existed at that time at Washington's pleasure." The tactical success contained the strategic failure inside it—and 1979 was, in his words, "the bill coming due."
The chain lengthened after 1991. Sanctions, then invasion. "Sanctions, and then invasion, shattered Iraq, the Gulf's old counterweight to Iran, and handed Tehran its greatest strategic windfall." Saddam Hussein was removed in weeks, but the war cost an estimated $2 trillion, and it destroyed the regional balance that had constrained Iran. Philip Gordon's study of seven regime-change operations reaches the same conclusion: no clear success, catastrophic failures, and universally high costs and unintended consequences. Then Libya, 2011. "A mandate to protect civilians contributed to the destruction of a state."
Gaddafi was killed. What followed was not liberation but a fragmented battlefield. Libya's arsenals—heavy weapons, anti-aircraft systems and military-grade ammunition—flooded Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso. A protective mandate, a destroyed state, an armed region. And Kabul, 2021. "Twenty years and trillions of dollars, with the Taliban back in the presidential palace." The United States spent roughly $2.26 trillion in Afghanistan. The Taliban returned carrying weapons the Americans had supplied to the Afghan army.
Only after tracing that chain does Mahoney turn to what holds it together. "When we realize that the United States has never really been the good guy, but has always been very narrowly pursuing its own strategic interests." In Central Asia, "trillions of those dollars went to U.S. companies." The Taliban was not an accident: "it was the U.S. working with Pakistan in the 1970s that created the Taliban in the first place to create disorder in Central Asia." And once you leave, "make sure that continues in your absence for a time." If that is the case, he says, "maybe their strategic objectives were met, in some sense."
That is where oil enters—not as a separate subject, but as the logic underneath the sequence. Trump's National Security Strategy, Mahoney notes, aims for the United States to be "a brown energy superpower—it wants to dominate the world, but through oil and through the dollar." The dollar and dollar hegemony rest on "this type of global disorder." If the dollar–oil–military relationship fractures, "the entire U.S. system collapses." America's refusal to let go in the Middle East reflects "an increasingly anxious, weakening hegemony": sustaining debt, sustaining the military, sustaining power, all of it "requires the oil–dollar relationship to keep running."
And it cannot run forever. The contradictions are eroding the ability to sustain the logic long term. Empires at this stage cannot solve problems, because "they can't solve problems." The United States carries $40 trillion in debt; sustaining that debt, which sustains the military, which sustains power, "requires perpetuating oil, the positive relationship of oil to the dollar." But it cannot go on forever. "The U.S. knows this, and all empires know this at this stage in the game. It's about how much time I can buy. How can I get another 5 years? Can I get another 10 years?"
Barrack's 23 failures are not a closed chapter. In June 2025, Trump posted on Truth Social: "It's not politically correct to use the term, 'regime change,' but if the current Iranian regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn't there be a regime change?" The logic is still running. Mahoney's four turning points were never a history lesson. They were a pattern—and the pattern has not stopped.
Reporter: Guo Zedong
Cover: Lai Meiya
Video: Deng Yingheng
Voiceover: Xie Hongzhou
