Evening Edition: Is Iran Ripe For Regime Change?
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I'm Shannon Bream. I'm Will Kane. I'm Dana Perino. And this is the Fox News Rundown. Monday, June 23rd, 2025. I'm Eben Brown. Iran is weakened. Israel is vindicated. And the U.S. makes good on its threat to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. And that brings a sober lens to the Middle East. The Islamic Republic is a revisionist power.

And they are alone because they chose to be alone. For so many years, the Islamic Republic's foreign policy tried to stigmatize Israel as the one in the region who does not belong. But when you look at the foreign and security policy of this regime, they are the ones who are the aberration here. This is the Fox News Rundown Evening Edition. ♪

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Iran's Islamic regime is in a tough place. It's endured more than a week of strategic attacks by the Israeli military, focused on degrading its conventional weapons, eliminating its military and terrorist brain trust, and eroding its domestic power grip on its citizens. Israel destroyed missile supplies and mobile launchers. They've assassinated military echelon and put the Ayatollah into hiding.

And then in a display of extreme power, the United States Air Force heavily damaged or maybe even destroyed three key facilities in Iran's program for developing nuclear weapons. Retaliation against Israel and U.S. military positions has been weak, to say the least, a few missiles that don't even reach targets.

And yet the Islamic Republic is still in power and may be acting like a constrained, threatened animal. Well, they haven't had their feet held to the fire like this before. Benham Ben Taliblu leads the Iran policy studies at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. They are unfortunately better managers of chaos.

than us and sometimes our partners. Usually, we have to first build something. The Islamic Republic, unfortunately, as you know, excels in destroying things. It's a fundamentally destructive force rather than a constructive force in the region. And while, yes, they cannot fight conventional wars anywhere as well or with anywhere the wherewithal that the U.S. and the Israelis have in terms of military capabilities, they are quite comfortable expanding crises and trying to use resources

little weapons of war as a way to increase their leverage. I certainly see them here thinking that they had to land a blow, that they had to somehow draw blood against America for targeting the crown jewel of their nuclear program. But make no mistake, they are cornered, but they are still lethal. And your reference to a cornered animal is very prescient because a former Iranian intelligence minister just a few years ago

said, don't put Iran in the position of being a cornered cat, because that's when they lash out. So this is all part of the regime's well-known and well-documented threats. I guess we're all just living in the period where the regime is acting on those threats. Acting on the threats is pretty scary. This is a regime that not only boasted about its capabilities or its desires to inflict mass carnage,

But it has long seeded terrorism around the world, around the region, but also in the United States. We know that a significant number of Iranian nationals crossed the U.S. border from Mexico during the Biden administration. How quickly can they flip a switch, if that's the right analogy, to to use that to their advantage? You know, because you're right. They are not going to defeat either Israel or the United States by firing guns.

Well, they're certainly not going to be able to defeat any conventional military power just by firing. But what they are hoping is that by flexing, by signaling resolve, by showing muscle, they are signaling that it will be costly for us or for the Israelis to continue to carry out military operations against them, to basically become something like a porcupine, to make victory harder or...

or more elusive. I mean, you even saw this before the Iranian missile barrage against the US bases in the region where following the US strike against the three nuclear sites, particularly Fordow, the one buried under 300 feet of rock, the Iranians were saying that actually, no, we had ferried out the highly enriched uranium before you struck.

Therefore, making it look like that which was only destroyed was a facility rather than the uranium Iran needed for a bomb and that potentially there was loose uranium all around Iranian territory. So again, they're trying to make victory harder for a country that has more capability to use military means to accomplish a political end.

I've always felt that Iran has always been given some kind of cover from Western governments, often in Europe, that every time the situation got too tense, that some European powers would come in and sort of coerce.

calm everyone down and we would get back to a status quo, which isn't a good status quo. It would leave the Iranian leadership in power and free to continue doing what they've been doing. Has a tide been turned over the past couple of days here? We've seen a lot more not-so-nice rhetoric, let's say from Germany, for instance, saying that absolutely they were pursuing a nuclear weapon and they've praised Israel for the actions, they've praised the United States for the actions.

Are they losing their friends, the Iranian government? Well, a tide has been turning, but it hasn't been turning for the past few days. It's been turning for the past few years. What you've seen even when the Trump administration was out of office was that Trump's detractors in Europe, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the European Union, actually began to adopt slowly but surely in response to the Iranian threat,

of Trump's first-term maximum pressure policy. And they did that against a backdrop of increasing Iranian threats, be it nuclear threats, like enrichment to 60% purity of uranium, be it maritime threats, like the threats against the Houthis leveled in the Red Sea against international shipping and against Israel, be it against...

domestic issues and threats like the massive repression of the women life freedom movement in 2022 2023 uh beat against the transnational apparatus of the islamic republic uh that you know was willing to send drones and ballistic missiles to russia for use against ukraine as well as of course the multiple conflicts of the post october 7 middle east i mean the europeans have gone after the iranians think 14 times in the past three and a half years with different sanctions

packages, going after their airlines, going after elements of their IRGC space force and aerospace force. I mean, there is tough stuff coming out of Europe. And the comments you mentioned by the German chancellor, as well as the increasingly tough rhetoric you hear from European political officials, represents this. And make no mistake.

The Islamic Republic is a revisionist power, and they are alone because they chose to be alone. For so many years, the Islamic Republic's foreign policy tried to stigmatize Israel as the one in the region who does not belong. But when you look at the foreign security policy of this regime, they are the ones who are the aberration here. They are the ones who are partnerless here.

Our guest is Benan Ben-Taliblu of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. We are discussing the after effects of this weekend's attacks on Iran and what Iran will do next and what the future of the Islamic Republic might look like on the Fox News Rundown Evening Edition. Please like and subscribe. We'll have more straight ahead.

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And that brings me to another point. There are different groups competing to be the point people, if you will, for what would happen next. A very big personality held a press conference this morning. It's Reza Pahlavi, the supposed crown prince, the son of the deposed Shah.

saying that he is ready to help lead a true move to secular democracy in Iran. He offered that if the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, would peacefully step aside, that he would get a fair trial and not be killed, which, in his own words, said that's far more than what you've offered everyone else.

I know among Iranian expatriates here in the United States and in Europe that Pahlavi is quite popular. Is he as popular, say, domestically in Iran with dissidents?

Oh, for sure. I would say certainly popular back in Iran. I mean, you know, one of the interesting things looking at the ebbs and flows of various Iranian opposition movements, and one has to be honest, they're not organized. There's lots of issues. But the son of the late Shah or the crown prince's popularity has largely been rooted in the fact that he's had a consistent message arguing for representative government, a secular government.

democratic kind of system that respects the current territorial integrity of the country of Iran and that ultimately the voice of moderation won out. You saw the Iranian population for many years support various elements of the Reform Movement.

But from 2017 to present, Pahlavi has experienced something of a renaissance in an Iranian pop culture and an Iranian dissident political support. And I think actually he's more popular now than at any other point in the past 46 years of Iranian political history. It's interesting because his family is out of power because of discontent with his father originally. That was sort of one of the motivating factors behind the revolution in 1979.

Indeed, Iran in the 20th century was at the heart of Great Game 2.0, which was essentially the Cold War. And there's no doubt the regime of the late Shah was an authoritarian system. But there's also no doubt that I think compared to anything around it in the Middle East today, I mean, compared to any of the autocrats who rather than leave when their population, say, leaves, hunker down and fire on civilians and do all of the atrocious things,

I mean, the late Shah is not at all, with immense respect, in the category of the likes of Assad or Gaddafi or Saddam or any of the other monsters in the Middle East. And the fact that now we in the West are beginning to call progress, or beginning to spot progress in places like Saudi Arabia, where there really is a page being taken from the late Shah's book, just

In my view, it goes to show how progressive he may have been. So how quickly would something like this happen, do you think? I mean, how much more life can the Islamic regime have at this point?

Well, this is all very much like that famous quote about bankruptcy, which is slowly and then all of a sudden. We saw this with the melting away of the Assad regime's security forces in late 2024. You know, the Assad regime fought a brutal, brutal war against its own population, against an unarmed population. That became a civil war. That became a transnational conflict. That became a conflict that had elements of great power competition and terror actors and proxies all over it.

But then all of a sudden, once that security apparatus was unwilling to fire and there was a more organized cohesive force, they melted away. Today, Syria is nowhere out of the woodwork yet, but it is a significant change compared to the half-division

you know, half century of Assad family rule. Here in Iran, the first thing is, of course, just like anywhere in the Middle East, the norm is buyer beware because things can always get worse, not better. But that being said, it is pretty hard to get worse than the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is pretty hard to get worse than a clerical dictatorship

that was born of third world anti-imperialist strands of political Islamism married with Marxism that brought you this regime today. And there really is a renaissance inside of Iranian society when it comes to nationalism that for us here in the West who rightly have to prioritize America first, who rightly have to prioritize American interests and American security and American strategy, if you ever do get a fundamentally different government,

in Iran that represents the views, values, and interests, that would be the ultimate plus-up for America first. That would be the ultimate plus-up for a more stable, prosperous regional order. And the way that can be achieved is by the next generation of Iranian leaders, hopefully post-Islamic Republic, being able to put

Iran first. Benham Ben-Taliblu, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracy, long scholar on their Iran program. Thank you so much for being with us on the Fox News Rundown Evening Edition. Always a pleasure. Great to be with you.

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