Trump's Iran Hat: A New Dimension in US Regime Change Chic
The spectacle of a former US president sporting a 'Make Iran Great Again' hat, fresh after Venezuelan defectors alleged a US-backed plot to abduct Nicolás Maduro, is pure kinetic hypocrisy. Al Jazeera frames this as just another Trump headline, but it's really a flashpoint for American exceptionalism. We're meant to focus on the absurdity of the hat, not the absurdity of US foreign policy in Iran,
which has included orchestrating the 1953 coup that overthrew democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, installing and propping up the brutal Shah, and relentlessly sanctioning the current regime into civilian suffering. 'Great' for whom, exactly? One might wonder if 'greatness' involves decades of crippling sanctions designed to starve a population into submission, or perhaps a
pre-emptive strike (as Trump himself threatened in 2020 following the killing of Soleimani) that could plunge the entire region into war. The media often treats such statements as isolated incidents, detached from a consistent, bipartisan US commitment to economic and military pressure wherever oil, influence, or perceived threats to allies like Israel are concerned. How many times must US
administrations threaten to 'make' a sovereign nation 'great again' before we, the public, start asking what that means for the people actually living there?