Trump’s Iran War Revives Israeli Plan to Remake Middle East that Drove Post-9/11 Invasions

President Donald Trump’s war on Iran resurrects a 30-year-old Israeli-American regime change doctrine that drove the post-9/11 invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and is part of a wider strategy to destabilise seven countries across the Middle East.

Byline Times can reveal that the network behind the 1996 ‘Clean Break’ strategy — originally drafted for incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and subsequently executed through the Bush administration’s wars — has reorganised under a Washington-based organisation called the Vandenberg Coalition.

The latter holds ties to the Trump Cabinet and National Security Council, and has seen its policy recommendations translated into binding presidential executive orders.

The Vandenberg Coalition is a neoconservative foreign policy organisation founded by Elliott Abrams, Trump’s former Special Envoy for Iran and Venezuela.

The Coalition’s advisory board reads like a ‘Who’s Who’ of individuals that have driven the case for regime change in Iran across three decades.

In its 2025 annual report, the Coalition claimed credit for shaping Trump’s Middle East policy, stating that it was “pleased to see some of our policy recommendations set as the course of action for US policy in the Middle East, including President Trump’s Executive Order ending funding to certain United Nations Organisations, including UNRWA”.

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The 1996 Israeli Policy Paper

The origins of the current confrontation with Iran can be traced to a single document. In 1996, a study group led by American neoconservatives — including Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser — drafted a policy paper for incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu titled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.

Prepared for the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS), the paper advocated a radical departure from the “land for peace” diplomatic frameworks of the post-Oslo Accords era. Instead it proposed that Israel, operating with unconditional US backing, should achieve permanent security by aggressively reshaping Middle East order through military interventions.

The strategy called for “regime change” starting with the removal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq as a vital Israeli strategic objective, followed by containment, destabilisation and rollback of Syria, Iran and potentially Lebanon through strategic alliances with countries like Turkey and Jordan.

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The PNAC Pipeline

Following the publication of ‘Clean Break’, its core arguments were adopted and amplified by a neoconservative think-tank, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

PNAC’s 1997 founding Statement of Principles — which called for the United States to “shape a new century favourable to American principles and interests” through pre-emptive war — was signed by both Elliott Abrams and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, alongside Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Paula Dobriansky, all of whom would become senior officials in the George W. Bush administration.

Abrams, Libby and Dobriansky now all sit within the Vandenberg Coalition’s leadership or advisory structure.

In 1998, PNAC sent an open letter to President Bill Clinton urging him to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The letter was co-signed by ‘Clean Break’ author Richard Perle alongside Abrams and Dobriansky, representing the convergence of the personnel who authored the original Israeli strategy with those who now lead the network advising Trump.

After 11 September 2001, the ‘Clean Break’ architects and PNAC principals moved into positions of direct power in the Bush administration. Douglas Feith served as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, where a Pentagon Inspector General report later found his office had produced false intelligence assessments on an Iraq-al-Qaeda relationship.

David Wurmser became Middle East Adviser to Vice President Cheney. Abrams served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Near East and North African Affairs at the NSC. Libby served as Cheney’s Chief of Staff and Assistant to the President, attending nearly all NSC and Homeland Security Council meetings.

Eric Edelman — now a Vandenberg Coalition board member — succeeded Feith as Under Secretary of Defence for Policy in 2005.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq was viewed by PNAC adherents not as an isolated counter-terrorism operation but as the first domino in a sequence intended to destabilise Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.

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The Vandenberg Coalition: A Generational Pipeline

When Trump left office in January 2021, Abrams established the Vandenberg Coalition as a hub to keep hawkish, pro-Israel foreign policy experts organised and prepared to reintegrate their strategies — and their personnel — into a second Trump term. The organisation’s executive director, Carrie Filipetti, had also served in the first Trump administration as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Cuba and Venezuela.

An examination of its advisory board by Byline Times reveals that the connections to the original ‘Clean Break’ network are extensive.

David Feith, the son of Douglas Feith — one of the principal “Clean Break” authors — serves on the Vandenberg Coalition’s advisory board. The younger Feith had also served in Trump’s first administration as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, and in January 2025 was appointed as a senior director on Trump’s NSC, where he oversees national security and technology issues.

His father, Douglas Feith, continues to publish on Middle East policy at the Hudson Institute, where he has co-authored work with fellow Vandenberg advisory board member Lewis Libby.

Libby — widely known as “Scooter” Libby — is himself a founding signato