WSJ What’s News - Trump Muses About Regime Change in Iran. Could It Happen?

Episode Date: June 23, 2025

A.M. Edition for June 23. As the U.S. investigates how much of Iran’s nuclear program it destroyed in weekend strikes, the WSJ’s Sudarsan Raghavan and Chatham House analyst Sanam Vakil discuss the political and military crisis facing leaders in Tehran. Plus, “buy now, pay later” loans could soon affect your credit score. And Tesla robotaxis hit the streets in Austin, Texas. Luke Vargas hosts.  Sign up for the WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Iran's embattled leaders, they find themselves now in a bit of an existential struggle domestically and at stake is basically their nearly half century of rule. Plus buying now and paying later could soon affect your credit score and Tesla's robo-taxis hit the streets. It's Monday, June 23rd. I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal, and here is the AM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today.

Iran's top diplomat has landed in Moscow for meetings with President Vladimir Putin. At a press conference before departing, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi described Russia as a friend of Iran with the meeting and opportunity to coordinate our positions. So far, Iran has given few clues about how it intends to respond to U.S. strikes against its nuclear facilities over the weekend, though Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said this morning that Israel, quote, must be punished and it is being punished.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon is continuing to investigate just how much of Iran's nuclear program was destroyed by its strikes. Speaking yesterday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegsath said Iran's nuclear ambitions had been obliterated and dealt a final blow. It was an incredible and overwhelming success. But journal reporter Lawrence Norman says that behind the scenes, the extent of the damage, especially at Iran's underground nuclear complex, Fordow, is less clear.

We know that the U.S. seemed to have hit what they wanted to hit, where they thought the vulnerabilities at Fordow were, but we do not know whether all of the equipment in Fordow was damaged or destroyed and we do not know if the site was put out of action. Rafael Grossi, the head of the UN Atomic Agency said yesterday, there is no way of knowing at this point without his inspectors being able to go to Fordow exactly the extent of the damage. And we've heard from Israeli officials who have echoed that. And beyond Fordow, Lawrence said that comments yesterday by Vice President JD Vance suggested

Iran may have managed to hold onto its stockpile of enriched uranium. Why is it important? Well, if Iran decides we're going to try and build a bomb without anyone knowing in sites that we have not declared, they need fissile material that they can then fairly quickly and easily turn into weapons-grade material and then they would actually have to build a nuclear warhead out of it, which is something they've never done. But without that stockpile of material, it's very, very difficult for Iran to divert enriched uranium in order to fuel a bomb.

So what happens next? Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said yesterday his country was very, very close to completing its war goals of destroying Iran's ballistic missile arsenal and ending its ability to enrich uranium. However, President Trump is hinting that there could be more in the works. Posting on Truth Social, he said Sunday that, quote, it is 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? Well, to better understand the domestic backdrop in Iran against which those comments are playing out, I spoke to Wall Street Journal senior Middle East correspondent Sudarsan Raghavan and Sanam Fakil, the director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the London think tank Chatham House. And note, this conversation was conducted

before the US's weekend strikes. Iran's embattled leaders, they find themselves now in a bit of an existential struggle domestically and at stake is basically their nearly half century of rule. What we're seeing inside now is they're basically in damage control. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is pretty much responsible for Iran's security, has been utterly humiliated. Israel's attacks have shown how thoroughly its intelligence agency, Mossad, has been able to penetrate Iran, killing these top commanders in their homes. And it was the same with the nuclear scientists as well. And that kind of intelligence must have taken years. It needed spies inside Iran.

And the regime now is extremely aware how vulnerable it was and even more so now. Right now there's an entire propaganda campaign going on inside Iran where the state media outlets are publishing story after story about the Revolutionary Guards finding cells who are working for the Israelis. The political, military, and security establishment inside Iran is really trying to regain this social contract that they had with the people, which

basically was that we are going to protect you. And they didn't. And right now, that social contract or the destruction of it is now the biggest challenge for them pretty much internally. Sennam, a propaganda effort underway to regain the social contract. Do we know how that's going over with the Iranian public? Well, I think the social contract has long been damaged in Iran. The Islamic Republic has been facing a legitimacy crisis of its own making for quite some time. Part of the reason why it engaged in initial negotiations with the Trump administration was that it of course needed sanctions relief to rehabilitate itself domestically to bring back

investment into the country. Now of course there are groups in the diaspora particularly rallying around the former monarch's son, his name is Reza Pahlavi, that are seizing the opportunity to support his candidacy for new monarch in a liberated Iran. There hasn't been a huge amount of domestic support because people inside that I have seen find his calls and support for protests and unrest to be a little tone deaf in the middle of a military conflict. But internally, of course, there are groups, there are activists, there are plenty of aspiring and visionary people in Iran's jails.

There has also been a long history of ethnic protests in Kurdish areas and Baluchi areas. So should we see unrest? Obviously, it's worthwhile noting that the state itself has a pretty effective crackdown playbook. But secondly, it is likely that what emerges from this war, and perhaps this is what Israel is trying to achieve, is a loosening of the bolts and a facilitation or an acceleration of change, not necessarily regime change, but changing the regime in Iran. Sudarsan, your thoughts?

I think what you have to understand is that when this happened, the theocracy was already under quite a bit of pressure even before this war erupted. Israel's military has basically been battering Iran's allies in the region, Lebanon's Hezbollah, Gaza's Hamas, Syria's Bashar al-Assad was toppled in December, another close ally, and inside too, even before the war, protests were becoming even more frequent in response to economic problems within Iran. And what's happening now is that these strikes have amplified the pressure on the theocracy dramatically.

What's a likely scenario could be is that if, let's say, Khomeini was assassinated, as the Israelis are threatening to do, it could lead to a vacuum of power forcing the Revolutionary Guards and parts of the military to essentially take over and create some kind of military rule and the problem with that is there are quite a number of hardliners inside Iran who believe that the only way of Fighting Israel is by reaching nuclear parity. What could happen is a race essentially to create a nuclear bomb inside Iran.

And there's quite a lot of debate about that going now, even as we speak, amongst politicians, parliamentarians. People are wondering, why didn't Iran create a nuclear bomb earlier? That could have been a significant deterrent. Perhaps they wouldn't be in this kind of situation now. That was the journals Sudarsan Raghavan and Chatham House's Sanam Vakil. Coming up, we've got the rest of the day's news,

including Tesla robo-taxis hitting the streets in Texas. That and more after the break. Americans love using their credit cards, the most secure and hassle-free way to pay. But DC politicians want to change that with the Durbin Marshall credit card bill. This bill lets corporate megastores pick how your credit card is processed, allowing them to use untested payment networks that jeopardize your data security and rewards. Corporate megastores will make more money and you pay the price. In a potential monster deal for the financial services industry, we are reporting that Bank of New York Mellon has approached its smaller rival, Northern Trust, about a possible merger.

The chief executives of both banks have had at least one conversation about a merger, but we understand that Northern Trust is not interested. Still, Journal Deals reporter Ben Dummett says the timing makes sense for BNY. Ben Wattenberg BNY, its stock price has surged over last year. It's up more than 50 percent, giving it a market cap of some $65 billion. So BNY is in a position, if it chooses to, to use the strength of its stock price to out finance any deal. The administration has shown a greater willingness than past administrations to prove big bank deals. You know, that's supported by the decision earlier this year by U.S. bank regulators to approve Capital One's $35 billion purchase of Discover financial

services. People familiar with the matter said BNY is now considering its next steps. Spreading out your payments using buy now pay later services could soon dent your credit. We are exclusively reporting that Fair Isaac Corp, the company behind the most widely used US credit score, says it's rolling out a new model in the fall that will factor in pay later loans, one of the fastest growing types of consumer credit in recent years. Banks and credit car companies will evaluate the new data, but don't have to rely on

it. According to market research firm eMarketer, pay later transactions are expected to top $108 billion this year in the U.S., up from $94 billion last year. And Tesla rolled out its long-awaited RoboTaxi service in Austin, Texas over the weekend, where its driverless technology will be put to the test against market leader Waymo. Tesla will remotely monitor the performance of the vehicles and help them to navigate through difficult situations. Peter Stone is the chairman of the University of Texas Computer Science Program and says

that while driverless technology may never be perfect, it could soon outperform human Peter Stone is the chairman of the University of Texas Computer Science Program and says that while driverless technology may never be perfect, it could soon outperform human drivers. We can't make people as a population incrementally better at driving, but we can do that with autonomous cars. And so that's what's going on in the testing phase is trying to identify the most likely things to go wrong, to fix them once and for all, and then to make the events that they don't respond right, correctly to rarer and rarer. In a post on X, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that customers

will be charged a flat fee per ride of $4.20. And that's it for what's News for this Monday morning. Today's show was produced by Daniel Bach and Kate Bullivant. Our supervising producer was Sandra Kilhoff. And I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal. We will be back tonight with a new show. Until then, thanks for listening.