Yeah I mean, pretty obvious this is all just kind of a sick joke to him and his handlers. All of it.

It's not merely a joke. This is a real and functional international cartel. Trump's doing The Five Families shit on a global stage. All of these members cooperate with the US military and proliferate US technologies. All of them profit off the exploitation of captured human labor. All of them are ravenously hungry for fossil fuels. All of them want to encroach on their neighbors' borders.

The point is to destabilize America

It's to destabilize local power structures within the domestic polity and consolidate more authority through the chief executive. An easier feat in a small country like Hungary or Argentina or Israel or Azerbaijan than the mega-states of India, Indonesia, the US, or Pakistan. But by cartelizing military and surveillance powers, this new Rogue UN can leverage (at least the appearance of) cooperation to bring whatever's left of the democratic interior under a new kind of martial law.

The truth is that even if the Iranian people do what they’re supposed to do, and topple the remaining pieces of the regime, the Oligarch who will replace Khamenei had already been selected long before bombs started dropping on Saturday.

Reza Pahlavi is a useful idiot who can operate as a "legitimate" figurehead in the country. But he's not going to be in charge, any more than Abdel Fattah el-Sisi runs Egypt or Ahmed al-Sharaa runs Syria or King Abdullah II runs Jordan. He'll be on the end of a US/Israeli leash.