Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is under house arrest after Israel spent years secretly cultivating him as a replacement for the Tehran regime — a covert regime-change scheme that blew up in his face and should remind every American why this isn't our fight.
The New York Times reports that Israeli intelligence ran a yearslong operation to groom Ahmadinejad as an asset who could be installed as Iran's leader when the moment arrived. The operation included at least two secret meetings in Budapest — in 2024 and 2025 — disguised as climate change conferences at Ludovika University of Public Service. The university's rector, Professor Gergely Deli, told the Times a top Hungarian government official asked him to host the events as cover for Ahmadinejad to meet with Israeli intelligence operatives. "You have two enemies, and if these enemies want to talk with each other, then it's best to do what you can to make them talk," Deli said.
The operation collapsed spectacularly. The New York Post, citing the Times, reports that Ahmadinejad, 69, is now being held by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' intelligence wing after he left a Mossad-run safe house. He had not been seen in public since an Israeli airstrike hit his compound on February 28 during what the Post calls "Operation Epic Fury" — the same strike that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Ahmadinejad was spirited to the Israeli safe house before resurfacing at Khamenei's funeral last week, apparently flanked by security.
Four Iranian officials confirmed the house arrest to the Times. The IRGC clearly knows what he was up to.
So let's take stock. Israel's Mossad tried to install a former Iranian strongman — a man who ran the Islamic Republic with an iron fist from 2005 to 2013 — as their preferred puppet in Tehran. The scheme failed. Ahmadinejad is now detained. And the Iranian regime, fractured enough that its own former president was willing to cut a deal with its deadliest enemy, is showing every sign of internal rot.
Good. Let them rot.
The Post framed this as a "stunning" Israeli intelligence gambit. The Times played up the cloak-and-dagger Budapest front. Neither outlet asked the question that matters: how much of this operation was underwritten by American taxpayers who send billions in military aid to Israel every year with no audit and no exit strategy.
A regime so fragile that its ex-president was conspiring with the enemy next door is a regime on borrowed time. That is not a reason for Washington to intervene — it is a reason to keep our distance and let the chips fall. No troops. No aid. No more Middle East entanglements sold to the public as inevitabilities.
The founders didn't plot foreign coups from taverns in Philadelphia. They worried about entangling alliances. They were right.
