It's time for America to remember how dangerous regime change is

The Guardian

3 days ago

The ceasefire between Iran and Israel might still hold, but if not, the United States might double down on its weekend strikes and seek the overthrow of the Iranian regime. Donald Trump threatened this in comments and tweets earlier, and top officials such as Marco Rubio have said they wouldn't mind it if it happened. Israeli leaders are openly in favor. If the US goes down this road, it will not be for the first time.
In the last 80 years, Washington has overthrown many regimes. For a superpower, toppling foreign governments is not so hard to do. Getting the outcome you want is. This makes regime change as dangerous as it is seductive, as past US attempts clearly show.
The US overthrow of the Japanese and German governments in the second world war made a whole generation of American leaders too optimistic about regime change. Germany's and Japan's transformation into strong democratic allies was a source of inspiration for the regime changes that dotted the cold war – but a misleading one. The only successful changer of regimes in the two centuries before had been Napoleon Bonaparte – and his regimes were fleeting.
The United States helped overthrow Iranian leader Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, but this sowed seeds of resentment that helped birth today's extremist government. In 1954, the CIA recruited a group of Guatemalan exiles to overthrow the Soviet-leaning leader Jacobo Árbenz. In 1961, US-backed rebels landed at the Bay of Pigs, in a failed attempt to overthrow Cuba's Fidel Castro. The US and the Soviet Union fought covert and overt wars to topple regimes from the 1960s until the 1980s, especially in Latin America, but also in Africa and beyond.
After the cold war, regime change took on a new purpose as American leaders imagined a better world, free of violent ethnic hatred and a post-Soviet space full of flourishing democracies aligned with the United States. The popularity of the theory of democratic peace, according to which democracies are unlikely to go to war with each other, made the practice of turning non-democratic regimes around seem like the bedfellow of world peace and helped justify regime change on moral as well as national security grounds. And so, the US and its allies overthrew more regimes.
The first target was Serbian autocrat Slobodan Milošević. His overthrow proceeded in stages, beginning with coercive airstrikes on his allies in 1995, spreading to Serbia itself in 1999, and ending with the toppling of his regime in elections in 2000. The US role in changing the regimes in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan over the next few years – the so-called color revolutions – was indirect and more limited than adversaries like Russia have made it out to be, but two decades later none of these countries is very stable or democratic. Serbia is ruled by a Kremlin-leaning nationalist. Kyrgyzstan is unstable, Georgia has become a client state of Russia and, sadly, Ukraine is under siege from a vengeful Russian president.
The long-term outcomes of fostering uprisings against unwanted regimes have thus not been promising.
The 9/11 attacks unleashed a fury of American vengeance that made possible military action on a much larger scale. If the US role in changing the regimes of these post-socialist states was visible mostly in the 'grey zone', nothing was opaque about the overthrow of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.
In Afghanistan, America's lightning-fast campaign made quick work of the Taliban. But US technological advantages melted in the face of an insurgency in a country that was foreign to most Americans who went to fight there, and in which the US national interest was limited to finding Osama bin Laden. After two decades of trying to construct an Afghan democracy, Joe Biden wisely withdrew, acknowledging defeat, and with it the limits of America's regime-changing power.
In 2003, the US military also crushed the Iraqi regime with 'shock and awe' that impressed the world – just as the Trump administration's recent bombing of Iran initially did. The regime that replaced Saddam in Iraq was more democratic, but it was also a strategic gift to Iran, who now expanded its power into the vacuum that regime change had created.
Military intervention in Libya in 2011 removed Muammar Gaddafi, nobly enforcing the UN doctrine of 'Responsibility to Protect'. But it left behind a sore in the side of all of north Africa and the Mediterranean basin, one that added to the chaos in Syria, encouraged the collapse of Mali and facilitated Europe's immigration crisis.
Russia is now attempting regime change in Ukraine but has encountered similar challenges. Its experience there is an abject reminder of the fact that to everyone except the would-be regime-changer, these operations mostly look like brutal imperialism.
The unsatisfactory history of regime change can hide the practice's allure. To live with imperfection, with messiness, with injustice, and with enemies, is very hard to do – especially as the stakes mount, as in Iran in recent weeks. Meanwhile, the diplomatic path is arduous and often leads to dead ends. Diplomatic outcomes are usually tenuous and can be short-lived – as demonstrated by the short life of the original Iran nuclear agreement, negotiated painstakingly under Barack Obama and torn up three years later by Donald Trump.
But decades of regime-change attempts that yielded lackluster results at best should make the US hesitate before going down that road again.
Some may hope for internal regime change – an uprising like the color revolutions. But uprisings have not produced stability in most recent cases, and there is no guarantee they would produce a regime in Iran any more conducive to American and Israeli security than today's ayatollahs. And the more the people rise up, the more a regime like this will crack down. Chaos – in other words, no regime at all – is a likely result.
Other leaders and pundits may intend to walk the Trump administration ever closer to the regime-change strategies of George W Bush. A full-scale invasion might eliminate Iran's nuclear weapons programs, but it would be unmatched in scope and consequences since the second world war. Any hope of success would require the US to prepare to pay a hefty price in blood and treasure.
None of this is to deny the serious problem that Iran and its nuclear ambitions present, nor the role that coercion must play in containing it. But decision-makers must not focus single-mindedly on Iran's nuclear program. They must ask deeper questions.
What are America's real interests in this? How does the character of the Iranian regime affect the lives of ordinary US citizens who simply want to live in peace? How would a forced change of regime affect the character of America's own democracy, especially if it is carried out without congressional approval by a president who has played fast and loose with the constitution? How will it affect the people of the region? Will they view the US as a liberator or just another one of history's empires, determined to possess their resources and control their lives?
Given the US habit of regime change, to avoid these questions would be as irresponsible as it would be dangerous for the nation and the world.
Chris Chivvis is a senior fellow and director of the American statecraft program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace