Regime change has occurred in Iran. Or it hasn’t. It is a goal of the war. Except it isn’t.

伊朗已经发生了政权更迭。又或者根本没有。这是这场战争的目标。可又并非如此。

Those are some of the dizzying messages that have come from President Trump and his aides in recent days. The phrase “regime change” has flown from lips this week like fighter jets crisscrossing the Persian Gulf.

这些都是特朗普总统及其幕僚近几日放出的表态，令人无所适从。本周，“政权更迭”这个词从他们口中频频冒出，犹如波斯湾上空往来穿梭的战斗机。

But there appears to be disagreement among top administration officials on what the phrase means, or whether the United States and Israel have achieved it in four weeks of war against Iran.

但关于这个词的真正含义以及美以两国在对伊朗开战的四周里是否实现了这一目标，美国政府高层官员之间显然存在分歧。

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made an unequivocal declaration about the Iranian government at a news conference on Tuesday: “This new regime, because regime change has occurred, should be wiser than the last. President Trump will make a deal. He is willing.”

在周二的新闻发布会上，国防部长皮特·海格塞思针对伊朗政府作出了斩钉截铁的表态：“既然政权更迭已经发生，这个新政权理应比上一届更明智。特朗普总统会达成协议的，他愿意这样做。”

A common definition of regime change is a forced transformation of government or leadership that results in structural alterations in policies, politics and governance. In Iran, a theocratic leadership that is authoritarian and anti-American — and that continues to wage war — remains in place.

政权更迭的普遍定义是通过强制手段改组政府或领导层，进而带来政策、政治格局与治理体系的结构性变革。而在伊朗，那个威权、反美、且仍在持续作战的神权领导层至今依然掌权。

On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also the president’s national security adviser, expressed some doubt in an interview with ABC News about whether anything had really changed in Iran.

周一，在接受ABC新闻采访时，身兼总统国家安全顾问的国务卿鲁比奥对伊朗是否真的发生了实质性变化表达了些许质疑。

“The people who lead them, this clerical regime, that is the problem,” he said. “And if there are new people now in charge who have a more reasonable vision of the future, that would be good news for us, for them, for the entire world. But we also have to be prepared for the possibility, maybe even the probability, that that is not the case.”

“领导他们的人，这个神职人员政权，才是问题所在，”他说。“如果现在掌权的是对未来抱有更理性构想的新领导层，那对我们、对伊朗、对整个世界而言，都会是好消息。但我们也必须做好准备，应对这种情况不会发生，甚至是大概率不会发生的可能性。”

美以联军对德黑兰的空袭仍在继续。

Later, speaking to Al Jazeera, Mr. Rubio made it clear that destroying Iran’s weapons was important because the current leadership — the new regime, as Mr. Hegseth puts it — is an adversary.

随后，鲁比奥在接受半岛电视台采访时明确表示，摧毁伊朗的武器装备至关重要，因为该国现任领导层——也就是海格塞思口中的“新政权”——仍是美国的对手。

“I think the best way to stability, given the people who are in charge in Iran, is to destroy the ability of Iran in the future to launch these missiles and these drones against their infrastructure and civilian populations,” Mr. Rubio said.

鲁比奥称：“鉴于伊朗当前执掌权力的人，我认为，实现地区稳定的最佳途径，就是彻底摧毁伊朗未来针对基础设施与平民发射导弹与无人机的能力。”

He added that “our objectives here from the very beginning had nothing to do with the leadership.”

他还补充道：“我们从一开始的行动目标就和该国领导层无关。”

Mr. Trump opened the war on Feb. 28 by working with Israel to carry out a strike that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, and other top officials. Hours later, he called for Iranians to overthrow their government sometime after the bombing stopped. The uprising, which was promised to Mr. Trump by Israeli leaders, has not materialized, but the president is saying mission accomplished on regime change.

2月28日，特朗普联合以色列发动空袭，炸死了伊朗最高领袖阿亚图拉阿里·哈梅内伊及其他多名高层官员，就此开启这场战争。空袭结束数小时后，他便呼吁伊朗民众在轰炸停止后推翻本国政府。以色列领导人曾向特朗普承诺的伊朗民众起义至今并未发生，但总统却宣称，政权更迭的目标已经达成。

In fact, he said, the United States has been so successful that it has ended not just one, but two Iranian regimes.

事实上，他还声称，美国取得的战果极为辉煌，不仅终结了伊朗的一个政权，甚至是两个。

“We’ve had regime change, if you look, already because the one regime was decimated, destroyed. They’re all dead,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Sunday aboard Air Force One. “The next regime is mostly dead. And the third regime, we’re dealing with different people than anybody’s dealt with before. It’s a whole different group of people. So I would consider that regime change.”

“你看看就知道，我们已经实现了政权更迭。因为上一个政权已经被彻底摧毁、毁灭，他们都死了，”周日，特朗普在空军一号上对记者表示。“继任的这个政权也基本都死了。现在是第三个政权，我们打交道的是以前从没有人接触过的一群人，是完全不同的一群人。所以我觉得，这就是政权更迭。”

To emphasize the point, he said, “Regime change is an imperative, but I think we have it automatically.”

为了强调这一点，他还说：“政权更迭是必须实现的，但在我看来，我们已经自动完成完成了这个目标。”

Mr. Trump’s talk of the destruction of two regimes appeared to refer to the initial attacks that killed Mr. Khamenei and other senior officials and also injured his son Mojtaba Khamenei, who was later appointed by a group of clerics to be Iran’s new supreme leader. Iranian and Israeli officials say the son suffered leg injuries, and he has not appeared in public during the war.

特朗普口中两个政权的覆灭似乎指的是最初的空袭行动：此次袭击不仅炸死了哈梅内伊及其他多名高层官员，还炸伤了他的儿子穆杰塔巴·哈梅内伊，穆杰塔巴随后由一众神职人员任命为伊朗新任最高领袖。伊朗与以色列官方均表示，哈梅内伊之子腿部受伤，自战争爆发以来从未公开露面。

The younger Mr. Khamenei is considered a hard-line ally of a powerful arm of the Iranian military, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. The government in Tehran vows resistance and continues to fight the United States, Israel and Arab partners, and to block energy shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, disrupting the global economy.

外界普遍认为，小哈梅内伊是伊朗军方核心力量伊斯兰革命卫队的强硬派盟友。德黑兰政府已誓言抵抗，仍在持续与美国、以色列及阿拉伯盟友作战，并持续封锁霍尔木兹海峡的能源航运，对全球经济造成冲击。

“There has been personnel change in Iran, not regime change,” said Karim Sadjadpour, a scholar of Iran at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. “Different men with the same ideology.”

华盛顿卡内基国际和平基金会的伊朗问题专家卡里姆·萨贾德普尔表示：“伊朗发生的只是人事变动，绝非政权更迭。换了人，但意识形态没有变。”

Mr. Trump’s remarks about regime change have muddied the waters. But his military actions and coercive economic warfare against a handful of nations — Iran, Venezuela and Cuba — are aimed so far at decapitating leadership to put in power someone who will accede to U.S. demands, rather than effecting a wholesale transformation of the political system.

特朗普关于政权更迭的表态让事态变得愈发扑朔迷离。但截至目前，他针对伊朗、委内瑞拉、古巴等少数国家采取军事行动与强制性经济战，核心目标始终是对他国领导层实施斩首，扶持愿意屈从美国要求的人上台，而非对该国政治体系进行彻底的全面变革。

The president’s aim is to create client states by coercing regime compliance, part of a greater project of resurrecting empire. And he constantly talks about a template: the U.S. military’s violent incursion into Venezuela in January to seize Nicolás Maduro, the country’s president, and Mr. Trump’s subsequent negotiations over oil and other matters with the acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, who like Mr. Maduro is a hard-line leftist.

总统的目标是通过逼迫他国政权顺从打造一批附庸国，这也是他复兴帝国这一宏大计划的一部分。他还频频提及一个模板：今年1月，美军暴力入侵委内瑞拉，抓捕了该国总统尼古拉斯·马杜罗；随后特朗普便与代总统德尔西·罗德里格斯就石油等事宜展开谈判，而罗德里格斯与马杜罗一样同属强硬左翼阵营。

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said at a news conference on Monday that the United States and Israel had to kill the older Mr. Khamenei and some of his aides after it proved too difficult to do diplomacy with them. Those previous leaders “are now no longer on planet Earth,” she said, “because they lied to the United States and they strung us along in negotiations, and that was unacceptable to the president, which is why many of the previous leaders were killed.”

白宫新闻秘书卡罗琳·莱维特在周一的新闻发布会上表示，由于与老哈梅内伊及其部分幕僚开展外交谈判的努力彻底落空，美国与以色列不得不将其除掉。她称，这些前领导人“如今已经不在人间，是因为他们欺骗了美国，在谈判中敷衍了事，这是总统无法接受的，这也是众多前领导层成员被杀死的原因”。

Mr. Trump’s braggadocio over accomplishing what he calls regime change is fairly new. In 2016, when he was running for president, he criticized the wasteful U.S. “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying that “we must abandon the failed policy of nation-building and regime change.” In May, he gave a speech in Saudi Arabia in which he said that “in the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built, and the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand.”

特朗普吹嘘自己完成了所谓政权更迭其实是近期才有的论调。2016年竞选总统时，他曾批评美国在伊拉克和阿富汗发动的劳民伤财的“永久战争”，称“我们必须摒弃国家建设与政权更迭这套失败的政策”。去年5月，他还在沙特阿拉伯发表演讲称，“到头来，这些所谓的国家建设者，毁掉的国家远比建设的多；而这些干涉主义者，干涉的是他们根本一无所知的复杂社会。”

Despite his embrace of war and military violence, Mr. Trump’s instinct to refrain from committing the United States to completely transforming hostile nations appears to persist for now.

尽管如今他已然拥抱战争与军事暴力，但截至目前，特朗普不愿让美国背负起彻底改造敌对国家的重担，这一本能似乎并未改变。

The president’s remarks this week asserting that leadership decapitation is regime change can be interpreted as an attempt to redefine the phrase so that he can say his original war goal has been met.

总统本周宣称“对领导层实施斩首就是实现政权更迭”的言论可被解读为他试图重新定义这个词汇，以此宣告自己已经达成了这场战争的初始目标。

“The administration as a whole seems to be moving away from deep regime change as a goal of the war,” said Rosemary Kelanic, the director of the Middle East program at Defense Priorities in Washington. “A real regime change war in Iran would require boots on the ground — and a lot of them — and Trump wisely doesn’t want to commit that level of effort when the costs and risks far outweigh the benefits.”

华盛顿智库“国防优先”中东项目主任罗斯玛丽·凯拉尼克表示：“整个美国政府，似乎正在逐步放弃将深度政权更迭作为这场战争的目标。想要在伊朗发动一场真正意义上的政权更迭战争，就必须投入地面部队——而且是大量地面部队。特朗普很明智，不愿在这件成本与风险远大于收益的事上投入如此多的精力。”