← Videos
Tucker Carlson vs. Ted Cruz on Regime Change in Iran (June 2025)
Tucker Carlson and Senator Ted Cruz arguing over regime change in Iran.
Tucker Leaves Ted Cruz Struggling to Respond on His Push for Regime Change in Iran · Tucker Carlson Network · uploaded 2025-06-19 · 12:15
Original: youtube.com/watch?v=hd1E-bMveQw · IPFS QmYEcAzT62mzM22g9bBNeVv4u7cpQeEUvXKuJ5jGsHFcS5
What this video is evidence for
In June 2025, in the middle of the 12-Day War, Tucker Carlson interviewed Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) about his call for regime change in Iran. The full two-hour interview went viral for the moment Cruz could not say how many people live in Iran. This official 12-minute clip from the Tucker Carlson Network is the part where Carlson presses on the question that matters most: how?
Cruz says he supports regime change, "somebody else in charge," and frames it simply: "Is America better off with a country that has a leader who hates us... or to have a country with a leader who likes us?" Carlson keeps asking how it gets done, pointing out that the United States has tried and failed to topple Venezuela's Maduro and Cuba's government for decades. Cruz first says regime change "has to be a popular uprising," then insists, "I don't think we need to use military force to do regime change. I said, I support it."
The clip also shows whose analysis Cruz relies on. Asked how Syria's Assad fell, Cruz cites a private meeting: "When Netanyahu was in DC a couple of months ago, he and I sat down for a couple of hours. He's a good friend of mine." He then repeats Netanyahu's account.
This exchange split the American right. It is where the "America First" base first loudly asked whether a war for regime change in Iran served Americans, or someone else.
Where this fits: see American Soldiers Iran Videos for the full explanation and sources.
Transcript
Machine transcription (apple-speechanalyzer) of the full 00:12:15. It can mishear names and words, so check exact wording against the video before quoting it.
So you'd come out for regime change in Iran as distinct just from taking out the nuclear sites. What does regime change look like in Iran? somebody else in charge. How do you get there? Look, that ultimately has to be a popular uprising from the people.
And it's not a complicated question. Is America better off with a country that has a leader who hates us and want to kill us, wants to kill us, or to have a country with a leader who likes us and wants to be friends with us? Definitely the latter's better. Of course. And so that's not a complicated statement.
Look, I believe you look across the world when you have countries that have dictators that are viciously anti-America. Venezuela. Maduro hates us. Would we be better off with Maduro out of power? Absolutely.
I want our enemies out of power and I want our friends in power. I could not agree more. The question is how do you get there? Of course. We've been trying to kill Maduro for quite some time.
We have troops there. I don't know that we've been trying to kill them. We have. And I think you know that. Okay, I don't know that.
Okay. Well, we, as a statement of fact, we have. So we do have massive sanctions. We try to pressure him out of all. Yeah, I'm not aware of that.
I'm just saying there's a lot of pressure coming from various parts of the US government on that government and it's still there. Same, the country of variancestors, Cuba. You know, 1959. We been working on that, hasn't worked. So we both agree it's hard.
to do it. It absolutely is hard. And look, I think you're reasonable to ask, how do we produce that? And I think there's a distinction between what your objective is and the means to get it. There are all sorts of things, I would say.
We would be better off. We'd be better off in China without she there. Should we invade China and topple she? Of course not. Better off with no national debt.
You know, there are lots of things. But it's good to say, all right, what are our objectives? So with the Ayatollah in Iran, saying you're for regime change, I don't view as complicated. I mean, the guy literally leads mobs chanting death to America. So that's not good.
Definitely not good. But the reason, I think it's important to get a little more detailed about how that might happen is because there's military action in progress, which we're supporting, and the president has said, clearly, including last night, that he is focused on eliminating the capacity of the Iranian government to produce nuclear weapons, you are saying we need to use military force to affect regime change. I have not said that. Oh, I must have. No, no, no.
I have not said that once. I don't think we need to use military force to do regime change. I said, I support it. I would like to see it happen. You asked me how should it happen?
A popular uprising. So what I've advocated for. right, let's step back a second. You and I, we've known each other a long time. I would say we agree on about 80% of the things on Earth.
For sure. There are a lot of things, and we can get into the nitty-gritty foreign policy as much as you want. There are a lot of things on which you and I agree, not just a little bit, but violently. I totally agree. I was rooting for you in your last campaign, for sure.
Well, thank you. Look, you have been heroic on the border. You have been one of the clearest and best voices in the whole country on securing the border and of the absolute crisis we're facing. And in Texas, I see it and live it every day. Um, in COVID.
In fact, you may recall, in the middle of the COVID lockdown, I was out walking my dog when the whole world was shut down and we were living in lunatic times. And I called you and said, Tucker, your nightly monologues are the single best thing on television. Like, I watch them like an injection of crack. Okay, I'm mixing my metaphor because you don't inject crack, but you get what I'm saying. No, I mean, it was, you were standing up and speaking like, what the hell are we doing in a way that we desperately, desperately needed?
And so whether it's securing the border, whether it's the insanity of COVID lockdowns and the vaccine mandates, whether it is the Second Amendment or the First Amendment, you and I agree on a ton of stuff. The 20% where we disagree, I do think is meaningful. And it's mostly in the foreign policy space. And what I would say, if he'll allow me to get a little theoretical, and then I'm happy to get specific. For a long time, people have perceived 2 different polls of Republican foreign policy.
There have been interventionists, and those have been people like John McCain and Lindsay Graham, George W. Bush, and there have been isolationists. And then the most prominent of those have been Ron Paul and Rand Paul, and there are others. And people perceive, those are the 2 choices. You got to be one or the other.
I've always thought both were wrong. I don't agree with either one. Um, the way I view my own foreign power. I'm with you, by the way, for whatever it's worth. I agree with you.
Okay, good. I don't know who set up that binary, but there are lots of choices actually. I mean, people sort of naturally fall into, I think they want to classify people and they're like, okay, you're one or the other, and you got to be all or nothing. And the interventionist, it seems, have never seen a country they didn't want to invade, and that doesn't make any sense to me. And the isolationist, I think, don't take the threats to America seriously, and I think that's naive and it doesn't work.
And so my view, I consider myself a 3rd point on the triangle. And what I describe that as is that I am a non-interventionist hawk, which sounds a little weird, but what do I mean by that? I mean, the central touch point for U.S. foreign policy, and for any question of military intervention, should be the vital national security interest of the United States.
How does this make America safer? How does this protect Americans? If it does, we should be strong. And actually, another way of conceiving what I'm saying. I'm speaking theoretically, but Reagan referred to it as peace through strength.
And actually, I think Donald Trump's foreign policy is very much what I'm describing a non-interventionist hawk. where he understands that, and I think this is historically true, the best way to avoid war is being strong, that weakness and isolationism, I think, encourages war. So, going back to regime change, where you started in Iran. Just to make, I don't think I disagree with anything you've said, so we may not be that far apart, really, because you said that the single criterion for making decisions about America's foreign policy is America's national interest. Yes.
That's it. Yeah. Which is also America first. That's another way of putting that as well. the definition of it.
The question is are we watching that now? We're sorry to say it, but this is not a very safe country. Walk through Oakland or Philadelphia. Yeah, good luck. So most people, when they think about this, want to carry a firearm, and a lot of us do.
The problem is there can be massive consequences for that. Ask Kyle Rittenhouse. Kyle Rittenhouse got off in the end, but he was innocent from the 1st moment. It was obvious once on video and he was facing life in prison anyway. That's what the anti-gun movement will do.
They'll throw you in prison for defending yourself with a firearm. And that's why a lot of Americans are turning to Burna. It's a proudly American company. Burna makes self-defense launchers that 100s of law enforcement departments trust. They've sold over 600,000 pistols, mostly to private citizens who refuse to be empty handed.
These pistols, and I have one, fire rock hard kinetic grounds, or tear gas rounds, and pepper projectiles, and they stop a threat from up to 60 feet away. There are no background checks, there are no waiting periods, burner can ship it directly to your door. You can't be arrested for defending yourself with a burner pistol. Visit burn a B-Y-R-N-A.com or your local sportsman's warehouse to get your stay.
Burna.com. So I think we are. And from what you've said publicly, I think, on Iran in particular, you and I disagree. And All right, let me contrast it when Obama was present.
When Obama was president, you remember, he talked about wanting to have military action against Syria. And at the time, I tried to keep an open mind to it. I said, okay, let me listen to the commander in chief, describe to me how this is in America's interest, and what your plan is, and Bashar Assad, was a bad guy. He was killing his own citizens, and he had chemical weapons that were very dangerous. I could conceive of a commander in chief laying out a plan for, okay, we're going to go in and say, grab the chemical weapons and leave.
Like, I could see that, if there was a real threat to America and there was a plan to prevent that, I could see supporting that. So I wanted to hear what he said to say. And I listened both in classified briefings and public questioning. And number one, they're public defensive. It was incoherent.
So, John Carey said we're going to engage in an unbelievably small strike. I think that's a quote. I'm like, okay, and to do what? At the time, there were 9 major rebel Islamic groups in Syria. I'm like, okay, I agree, but Shah Sad's a bad guy.
You topple him. And one of the 9 other groups takes over. 7 of them were affiliated with radical Islamic terrorism. You had Al Qaeda, Al Nustra. Like, wait, how is it better to have lunatics who hate us in charge.
Assad's a bad guy, but I don't want worse guys in charge. Obama administration couldn't give an answer to that. And ultimately, when you press them, John Carey in particular, I pressed, and he would say, well, we need to defend international norms. What the hell's an international norm? I don't know what it is, but I'm not interested in putting U.
S. servicemen and women in harm's way to defend one. So I opposed the Syriotech and opposed it vocally. And it was interesting. Rand and I agreed.
Rand's a friend of mine, but we agreed with that position for different reasons. What I was asking is, is, I think the question we should ask, how does this make America safer? Obama administration couldn't give me an answer, so I posed it. I think Iran is very different. Let me ask what you think of how Syria wound up because Charlotte Sudno lives in Moscow.
He was taken out by our allies, and he's been replaced by a radical Islamist who was affiliated with ISIS. So is that a win or no? Unclear. Look, Siri is a mess, so I've consistently opposed. So we had a secular leader in a religious and ethnically diverse country.
Now we have a religious extremist, Islamic religious extremist, who's overseen the purge of Christians and allowites. Is that better? That doesn't seem... Well, look, one of the things you said, as you said, he was taken out by our allies. I don't think that's right.
Israel didn't take Asada out. What happened, and I'll tell you, what about Turkey? Turkey didn't take him out. So it was interesting. I had a long time.
How did Osaka get kicked out? Yeah. Um, when Netanyahu was in DC a couple of months ago, he and I sat down for a couple of hours. He's a good friend of mine. And we talked actually about Syria.
He made an interesting point that I've not heard anywhere else. in that he said, he believes what toppled a sod was when Israel took out Nazrala. Nasrala was the head of Hezbollah, and they took him out. And he made an interesting point. He said, it's fascinating how a charismatic leader.
And Baby said, look, Nazrala was a very effective terrorist leader. And when they took him out, that power base was supporting Asad, and that ultimately, in BB's analysis, removed the support from Asad and toppled him, but they weren't trying to take out Asad. My view now, I don't know. Actually, you don't think that, and I don't, it is very confusing, and I don't know that anyone really knows all the details, but you don't think that Israel or Turkey or NATO Alley, Turkey played any role in toppling Asad? I don't know.
I don't know they did. Thanks for watching our YouTube channel. We hope you'll subscribe to it. And by the way, you can hit the little bell on there and get notifications every time we produce a video. We hope you'll do that also.
Last Updated: 2026-09-27