For decades, a handful of Washington think tanks spent millions of dollars and countless hours pushing for one outcome in the Middle East: the fall of the Iranian government. On February 28, 2026, when the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes on Iran under Operation Epic Fury and Operation Lion’s Roar, killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, those organizations got exactly what they had been advocating for. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the Center for Security Policy, and United Against Nuclear Iran were not passive observers of American foreign policy — they were active architects of the pressure campaign that led to this moment. The story of how regime change in Iran went from fringe policy position to military reality is also a story about dark money, weapons manufacturers, and ideological networks that operate largely outside public scrutiny.
The Sarah Scaife Foundation funneled more than $1.6 million to FDD. Donors Trust, a dark money vehicle with deep ties to Supreme Court kingmaker Leonard Leo, sent more than $2.7 million to the Center for Security Policy between 2020 and 2023. These are not donations made in the public interest — they are investments in a specific geopolitical outcome. This article traces the money, the organizations, the people, and the consequences of a policy agenda that took decades to reach its bloody conclusion.
Table of Contents
- Which Think Tanks Spent Decades Advocating for Iran Regime Change?
- How Dark Money Networks Funded the Push for Confrontation With Iran
- From the JCPOA’s Death to Operation Epic Fury
- Can Air Power Alone Achieve Regime Change?
- The Weapons Manufacturers Behind the Policy
- The Leonard Leo Connection
- What Comes Next for Iran and American Foreign Policy
- Conclusion
- Frequently Asked Questions
Which Think Tanks Spent Decades Advocating for Iran Regime Change?
Three organizations stand above the rest in the long campaign to reshape American policy toward iran. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, led by CEO Mark Dubowitz, has been the most visible and arguably the most effective. The New York Times called Dubowitz’s campaign to kill the Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA) “among the most consequential ever undertaken by a Washington think tank leader.” FDD employs former Iran hawks from both the Trump and George W. Bush administrations and collaborated directly with Trump’s 2018 State Department on what was described as an “Iran disinformation” project. On the very day the strikes began, FDD published an analysis titled “Regime change in Iran is underway — and it won’t be easy,” urging Iranians to “seize this moment.” The Center for Security Policy, founded by Reagan-era staffer Frank Gaffney, took a different but complementary approach. Gaffney pushed for investigations into supposed jihadi infiltration of the U.S.
government, creating a climate of suspicion that made hawkish Iran policy easier to sell. The organization is backed by weapons manufacturers, including the maker of the bunker buster bombs that were used in the strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities — a detail that raises uncomfortable questions about whether the think tank’s policy positions were shaped by the financial interests of its backers. United Against Nuclear Iran rounds out the trio. Founded in 2008 by Ambassador Mark D. Wallace, the late Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, former CIA Director Jim Woolsey, and Middle East expert Dennis Ross, UANI carried bipartisan credibility that the other two organizations sometimes lacked. Former Senator Joe Lieberman chaired it from 2015 until his death in 2024, and Governor Jeb Bush has served as chairman since August 2024. That bipartisan veneer made UANI’s advocacy harder to dismiss as ideological overreach.
How Dark Money Networks Funded the Push for Confrontation With Iran
The financial infrastructure behind the Iran regime change lobby is deliberately opaque, but enough has been uncovered to sketch its outlines. Donors Trust, a donor-advised fund that allows wealthy individuals to make contributions without public disclosure, funneled more than $2.7 million to the Center for Security Policy between 2020 and 2023 alone. Donors Trust has deep ties to Leonard Leo, the conservative legal strategist best known for reshaping the Supreme Court. Leo’s dark money network received a record-breaking $1.6 billion donation from Barre Seid, a conservative, pro-Israel billionaire who reportedly helped fund the anti-Iran film Obsession: Radical Islam’s War With the West. The Sarah Scaife Foundation, financed by the Mellon oil and banking fortune, gave more than $1.6 million to FDD during a similar period.
The Scaife Foundation is also a major donor to organizations that authored portions of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation blueprint for a second Trump administration. This overlap matters because it suggests these are not independent policy shops arriving at similar conclusions — they are nodes in a single ideological and financial network with shared donors, shared personnel, and shared goals. However, it would be a mistake to assume that dark money alone explains why regime change became policy. These think tanks were effective because they operated at every level simultaneously — producing policy papers, placing alumni in government positions, cultivating media relationships, and maintaining pressure on lawmakers who might otherwise have pursued diplomacy. The money made all of that possible, but the strategy was sophisticated enough that even well-funded organizations without such clear-eyed focus on a single outcome might not have achieved the same result. The limitation of focusing solely on the funding is that it can obscure the decades of institutional knowledge and political maneuvering that actually moved the policy needle.
From the JCPOA’s Death to Operation Epic Fury
The path from policy advocacy to military strikes runs directly through the destruction of the Iran nuclear deal. When trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA in 2018, it was a victory that FDD and its allies had worked toward for years. Mark Dubowitz had been widely described as “the architect of many of the sanctions against Iran,” and the reimposition of those sanctions after the JCPOA withdrawal created the economic stranglehold that defined U.S.-Iran relations for the next eight years. Each round of sanctions, each confrontation, each escalation moved the baseline closer to the military option that had once seemed unthinkable. By early 2026, conditions inside Iran had deteriorated dramatically. Iranian university students were protesting despite brutal crackdowns. In January 2026, the government killed at least 7,000 people in a crackdown on demonstrations.
The internal instability that regime change advocates had long predicted — and that sanctions were designed to accelerate — was finally materializing. When Operation Epic Fury launched on February 28, 2026, President Trump confirmed that Khamenei, who had been in power since 1989 as the Middle East’s longest-serving dictator, was dead. “Khamenei, one of the most evil people in History, is dead,” Trump stated. The immediate aftermath revealed just how closely the think tank playbook was being followed. FDD urged Iranians to seize the moment and overthrow their government. Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi called on Iran’s armed forces to defect. The strategy was not to occupy Iran — it was to create the conditions for an internal revolution that the United States could claim credit for without bearing the costs of another ground war.
Can Air Power Alone Achieve Regime Change?
The Christian Science Monitor published an analysis on March 1, 2026, that cut to the central tension of the entire enterprise: “No country’s government has ever been deposed and replaced with a friendlier one by air power alone.” This is the uncomfortable tradeoff at the heart of the current strategy. The United States can destroy military infrastructure and kill leaders from the air, but it cannot build a new government from 30,000 feet. Arash Reisinezhad of the Tufts University Fletcher School described the approach as a “decapitation strike” targeting both military infrastructure and leadership. The comparison to previous decapitation strategies is not encouraging.
Killing Saddam Hussein’s sons did not end the Iraqi insurgency. Killing Muammar Gaddafi left Libya in a state of civil war that persists to this day. The theory that removing a single leader will cause an authoritarian system to collapse assumes that the system is held together by that leader’s personal authority rather than by institutional structures, security services, and patronage networks that can survive any individual’s death. Vali Nasr of the Center for Strategic and International Studies offered a more nuanced assessment: “Even if Iran’s rulers survive this uprising, it could prove to be a Pyrrhic victory.” The implication is that the strikes may have weakened the regime without finishing it off, creating a wounded and desperate government that is more dangerous, not less. The Conversation published analysis under the headline “Despite massive US attack and death of ayatollah, regime change in Iran is unlikely,” noting the gap between destroying a government’s military capacity and actually replacing it with something stable.
The Weapons Manufacturers Behind the Policy
One dimension of this story that deserves more scrutiny is the role of defense contractors. The Center for Security Policy is backed by weapons manufacturers, including the company that produces the bunker buster bombs used in the strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. This is not a conspiracy theory — it is a documented financial relationship between organizations advocating for military action and companies that profit from military action. The warning here is about conflicts of interest that are structural, not necessarily conspiratorial.
A think tank funded by weapons manufacturers does not need to be explicitly told to advocate for war. It simply needs to hire analysts who already believe military force is the answer, publish their work, and promote it to policymakers. The funding creates an ecosystem in which hawkish conclusions are rewarded and dovish ones are not. Over time, the think tank’s output naturally aligns with the interests of its funders, even if no one ever picks up the phone to say, “We need you to push for strikes on Iran.” This is a limitation that applies to think tanks across the political spectrum, but it is particularly acute when the policy outcome being advocated involves the use of specific weapons systems produced by specific companies that provide specific funding. The public has a right to know who is paying for the analysis that shapes decisions about war and peace, and the current system of dark money and donor-advised funds is designed to prevent exactly that kind of transparency.
The Leonard Leo Connection
Leonard Leo’s involvement in the Iran regime change network deserves particular attention because of how it illustrates the interconnection of seemingly unrelated conservative projects. Leo is best known for his role in selecting and confirming conservative Supreme Court justices, but his dark money network extends far beyond judicial politics. The $1.6 billion donation from Barre Seid — the largest known political donation in American history — gave Leo’s network resources that could be deployed across multiple fronts simultaneously, from reshaping the federal judiciary to funding organizations that advocate for military confrontation with Iran.
Seid himself reportedly helped fund Obsession: Radical Islam’s War With the West, a film distributed to swing-state voters before the 2008 election. The thread connecting a pro-Israel billionaire’s film project to a dark money network to a think tank advocating for Iran regime change to the actual bombing of Iran is long, but it is not broken. Each link is documented. The question is whether the public and its elected representatives understood, before February 28, 2026, that these connections existed and what they were building toward.
What Comes Next for Iran and American Foreign Policy
The think tanks that spent decades advocating for this moment now face a different challenge: they got what they wanted, and the consequences belong to them as much as to anyone in government. If Iran descends into chaos, if a power vacuum produces something worse than what existed before, if regional instability spreads, the organizations that pushed hardest for confrontation will bear responsibility alongside the policymakers who pulled the trigger. The Christian Science Monitor’s observation that air power alone has never produced a friendly replacement government should haunt every analyst at FDD, every donor to the Center for Security Policy, and every board member of United Against Nuclear Iran.
The history of American-backed regime change — in Iran in 1953, in Iraq in 2003, in Libya in 2011 — suggests that the hardest part is not the destruction. It is what comes after. And for what comes after, no think tank has ever published a credible plan.
Conclusion
The strikes on Iran did not emerge from a vacuum. They were the culmination of a decades-long campaign waged by a small number of well-funded organizations that placed alumni in government, shaped media narratives, killed diplomatic alternatives like the JCPOA, and created the political conditions in which military action became not just possible but inevitable. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the Center for Security Policy, and United Against Nuclear Iran operated with funding from dark money networks tied to Leonard Leo, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and defense contractors who stood to profit from the very strikes these organizations advocated. Whether the outcome serves American interests, Iranian interests, or anyone’s interests beyond those of the people who funded and executed this campaign remains an open question.
At least 7,000 Iranians were killed in government crackdowns before the strikes even began. Khamenei is dead, but the institutional structures of the Islamic Republic remain. Experts across the political spectrum have warned that regime change from the air has never worked, and there is no reason to believe this time will be different. The think tanks got their wish. Now the rest of us live with the consequences.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Foundation for Defense of Democracies?
FDD is a Washington, D.C.-based think tank led by CEO Mark Dubowitz that has been one of the most aggressive advocates for sanctions and confrontation with Iran. The New York Times described Dubowitz’s campaign against the Iran nuclear deal as “among the most consequential ever undertaken by a Washington think tank leader.” FDD employs former Iran hawks from the Trump and George W. Bush administrations.
How was the campaign for Iran regime change funded?
Through a network of dark money organizations and foundations. Donors Trust, tied to Leonard Leo, gave more than $2.7 million to the Center for Security Policy between 2020 and 2023. The Sarah Scaife Foundation gave more than $1.6 million to FDD. Leo’s network received a record $1.6 billion donation from Barre Seid, a conservative, pro-Israel billionaire.
What happened on February 28, 2026?
The United States and Israel launched coordinated military strikes against Iran. The U.S. called the operation “Epic Fury” and Israel called it “Lion’s Roar.” Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who had ruled since 1989, was killed during the strikes.
Who chairs United Against Nuclear Iran?
Governor Jeb Bush has served as chairman since August 2024, following the death of former Senator Joe Lieberman, who chaired the organization from 2015 until his death in 2024. UANI was founded in 2008 by Ambassador Mark D. Wallace, the late Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, former CIA Director Jim Woolsey, and Dennis Ross.
Has regime change through air power ever worked?
According to the Christian Science Monitor, “No country’s government has ever been deposed and replaced with a friendlier one by air power alone.” Experts have warned that destroying military infrastructure and killing leaders does not automatically produce a stable, friendly replacement government.
What was the situation inside Iran before the strikes?
Iran was experiencing significant internal unrest. University students were protesting despite brutal government crackdowns. In January 2026, at least 7,000 people were confirmed killed during a crackdown on demonstrations.