JD Vance Wrong on Iran: Continuity Equals Chaos

Vice President JD Vance’s recent comments on Joe Rogan’s podcast have reignited debate over American policy toward Iran, with the vice president expressing concern that pushing for regime change could replicate the failures seen in Libya—state collapse, terrorist expansion, mass migration, and open-ended American involvement in the aftermath.

According to Arie Blitz writing in Washington Examiner, while such concerns should not be dismissed lightly—given America’s painful experiences in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya—the vice president may be drawing the wrong conclusion from those lessons. No reasonable observer wants American troops occupying Tehran, nor does anyone imagine that a nation of over 90 million people can be remade through Washington’s design, Blitz acknowledges.

Yet the fundamental error, Blitz argues, lies in treating the current Iranian regime as a bulwark against chaos rather than recognizing it as the primary source of regional instability. The Islamic Republic has spent nearly five decades exporting terrorism, arming proxy forces, crushing internal dissent, devastating its economy, and alienating its own citizens while turning one of history’s great civilizations into a permanent revolutionary experiment.

The regime has antagonized its neighbors, held its population hostage, and treated the broader Middle East as a strategic game board where Lebanese, Syrian, Iraqi, Yemeni, Israeli, Palestinian, and Iranian lives alike are considered expendable.

Vance’s concern about terrorist infrastructure emerging after a potential regime collapse misses a critical point: Iran’s terrorist infrastructure already exists and flourishes under the current government. Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthis, Iraqi militias, assassination plots abroad, attacks on international shipping, and threats against American forces are not hypothetical future risks but active instruments of current regime policy.

The same applies to migration concerns. Vance warns of desperate Iranians flooding Europe and the United States if the regime falls, yet Iranians—students, dissidents, professionals, women, religious minorities, and ordinary families—have been fleeing for years precisely because the Islamic Republic has made normal life increasingly untenable. The regime is not preventing a refugee crisis; it is manufacturing the conditions for one.

Blitz contends that Washington’s fixation on continuity is fundamentally misguided. Continuity becomes stabilizing only when the institutions being preserved serve the state rather than the regime. A future Iran will require functioning hospitals, power infrastructure, ports, water systems, airports, schools, oil workers, civil servants, honest judges, and military officers who prioritize the nation over clerical authority. This kind of continuity—maintaining essential services and state functions—is indeed vital.

But preserving the machinery of the Islamic Republic itself is an entirely different matter. Maintaining the Revolutionary Guards, the Basij militia, clerical veto authority, hostage diplomacy, proxy warfare networks, terrorist financing channels, censorship apparatus, and torture infrastructure does not constitute stability—it represents chaos with official sanction.

This distinction between preserving the Iranian state and preserving the Islamic Republic’s instruments of coercion is critical. The former may prevent collapse; the latter ensures the same pathology survives under new management.

A similar mistake, according to Blitz, appeared in the administration’s Iran memorandum of understanding, presented as a diplomatic breakthrough aimed at reopening the Strait of Hormuz and moving toward a final agreement. The deliberately vague diplomatic language allowed both sides to claim victory: Washington heard de-escalation, while Tehran heard leverage; Washington heard free passage, while Iran heard future administrative control; Washington heard a pause toward peace, while Iran heard time and space to regroup.

The recurring pattern reveals a fundamental confusion in American policy: treating the preservation of a hostile regime as synonymous with regional stability, when in reality the regime itself has been the primary driver of instability, terrorism, and suffering for nearly half a century.

With information from Washington Examiner