President Trump is now declaring that he has achieved “regime change” in Iran. It’s very welcome that that is, in fact, our purpose. So is Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s report that what’s left of the previous Iranian government is fracturing.

But the President is indicating that we are now dealing with government officials three layers down with whom we have not interacted before. He is suggesting that amounts to regime change.

Unfortunately, if such interlocutors adhere to their predecessors’ apocalypitic sharia-supremacist agenda, the inevitable result will be that the Iranian people remain enslaved and ours, among many others in the region and beyond, remain imperilled.

President Trump is right to seek regime change and to insist on new people leading the government of Iran that emerges from this war. But putting toxic old wine into new bottles will assure our defeat.

This is Frank Gaffney.