Doing regime change right again, like we used to

Throughout most of our history, we pulled off frequent regime changes, and it usually worked well. But that was back when we believed in ourselves.

Since Vietnam, we have been short on belief in ourselves, and heavy on ideological fragility. We have had a series of ideological Administrations. They have talked against the very idea of regime change. When they did it anyway, it tended to be in the wrong places – against friendly and moderate regimes that were vilified in our press – and the wrong ways to boot.

Trump was elected on a platform of being a practical, non-ideological American president again. That is an important platform plank to be acting on now, regarding regime change in Iran.

Doing regime change in the right place, right time, right way

What is the right place? Enemy countries where we have a good shot at a better replacement regime. Right now, Iran absolutely. For three reasons:

• It has an enemy regime: an Islamist ideological regime that by its very nature cannot change from being an enemy to America and the West.
• The Iranians are the most pro-Western and secular people in the Mideast, after Israel itself. Its enmity is unnatural, a product of an extremist regime that keeps the people down. Empowering the people is not going to make us another enemy, as the Bush-Obama regime changes tended to do.
• The one half-good survey we have of Iranian opinion found that the people favor three political models: parliamentary republic, presidential republic, and constitutional (parliamentary) monarchy. It found 80% of Iranians wanting to replace the regime along these lines. This is a solid basis for making the regime change stick.

What is the right time?

• Now, when the regime is weak and it’s easier than ever – but when it’s also very near to nuclear breakout, making time of the essence.

What is the right way to do it? What do the Iranian people need from us? It is for us to:

• Topple the Islamist regime, if it does not fall in less than a week on its own. Each day adds heightened risk of a nuclear breakout.
• Help Iran’s many moderate factions to coalesce in forming a legitimate replacement government. This is crucial for avoiding chaos.
• Help them get through the inevitable problems, twists, and turns in forming a new, decent governing authority.
• Don’t renounce in advance doing any of these things. Don’t jinx our ability to do them well. Accept the fact that there will be mistakes, you’ll have to make adjustments, and you’ll get attacked from left and right. Show the courage to stick to it and win.

In sum: don’t bug out the way Obama did the moment Qaddafi fell, leaving Libya in chaos – chaos that it’s still mired in a decade later. Stay around. Help a friendly regime stabilize. And probably get some permanent advantages for America in return.

We could have had a great naval base in Tripoli, in a grateful allied Libya – except for Obama’s visceral hatred of the “hypocrisy” and “imperialism” of getting advantages for America out of the regime change. That was why he bugged out. Hillary Clinton explained their attitude: America must not have any interest of its own in a regime change that it’s supporting. Why not? Perhaps because she’d be attacked by her fellow leftists if she strengthened America, and she’d feel guilty before them.

There’s no need for Trump to pull another Obama-Clinton. Pull a Reagan-Trump.

Why do the Iranian people need any help at all from us? It’s not just because we ourselves helped the regime deprive them of agency over the decades, telling them repeatedly not to use force against it when they were out protesting en masse. But it’s because it is hard to make a revolution. And even harder to make a good one. The more repressive the old regime is, the harder it is for a revolution to organize a new order, and the more easily the vicious regime forces could hijack the revolution.

Most revolutions are for the worse. A purely domestic revolution in Iran would be well-justified, but that doesn’t mean it will go well. It might get brutally repressed. It might also enable the Revolutionary Guard, to take over in an “own coup”.

The change goes far better when a solid external power, the USA, facilitates the people’s path to power and helps their divers factions coalesce for forming a new government.

Time to put aside our self-hatred

We have undermined the willpower both of our allies and of ourselves to do this. We’ve been in a long funk, begun in Vietnam and renewed in every generation since. We’ve in effect cut off our thinking on the subject, by repeating for decades the mantra that we should never do “regime change” again. We almost never dare to talk about it — except to denounce it.

Bush campaigned against regime change for the sake of his political attack on Clinton’s foreign policy. Obama repeated the lines for his political attack on Bush. They symbiotically made it a national phobia.

Both were demagogic about it. Obama was probably the worse for also being more clearly anti-American about it.

Both Bush and Obama found out that they had to do regime change anyway. Their slogan simply hobbled them from doing it intelligently. They resorted to ideological rationalizations for ill-considered regime changes, without opening up space for a serious discussion about it – that would have required admitting how wrong they had been in denouncing the very idea of it. They used amateurish methods for carrying out regime changes, methods predetermined by advance denials of what we would do — self-restrictions that left very little flexibility for dealing with the complex changing situation. Deflected by their own ideologies and rhetoric, they ended up doing most of their regime changes poorly – often in the wrong places, often late and in worsened conditions, usually with inadequate planning, and with inadequate flexibility for dealing with side-effect and making it turn out right.

There is something badly wrong with our politicians today too. Faced with a pressing need for a regime changing, they keep aping the disastrous slogans of Bush and Obama about not doing regime change.

Trump has repeatedly expressed his contempt for Bush and Obama as fools. Does he realize that their original foolishness was their renunciation in advance, as a matter of principle, of “regime change”? All their mistakes on regime change followed from that.

Time to take responsibility

The crowd says, in effect: “We can’t want to take on the responsibility. We must rely on chance that someday the Iranian people will change the regime themselves”.

Trump was elected for the opposite purpose: so we could again have a president who could take responsibility for American power. Unlike Biden and Obama.

We need to stop repeating ideological slogans that preclude doing things we need to do. We need to stop respecting political prohibitions on what were once normal terms — “regime change” ,“nation building”, “imperialism”. These have become ideological terms – a mix of far leftist and far rightist slogans. We need to put the rhetoric aside about them so we can deal intelligently with the realities behind them.

Our ideological self-prohibitions reek of self-contempt. They deprive us of our capacity to deal intelligently with real and pressing issues. They leave it to luck to rescue all our other efforts in Iran from eventual failure, because they leave the main thing – the change from a hostile governing power – unaccomplished.

Maybe Iranians will somehow someday overthrow the regime on their own. But we can’t count on that. They’ve failed at it for 45 years. They’re rightly terrorized by the mass punishments they’ve received. And we helped train them to fail.

To overcome their terror in real time, they need active measures from us to topple the regime and enable a transitional government to come together. We ourselves need this done in real time, not years down the road like our pundits are hoping might happen. We need to take responsibility for overcoming the effects of our decades of training the people to fail.

Stop touting the ideologies of irresponsibility

Today it is grossly irresponsible of us that we are not doing this.

It is even more irresponsible, that we’re not seriously considering it.

It is viciously irresponsible for us to go on palming off the responsibility for this to the badly cowed Iranian population.

And it is recklessly irresponsible, that many among us are repeating the failed slogans, slogans that amount to prohibiting ourselves from thinking about it and doing it right.

America used to get its regime changes right. We can do it again.

Reality about regime change is simpler than the ideologies about it. It is to use common sense. Regime change is good when it makes sense, and when we don’t self-undermine in the course of it.

Quite often, it is absolutely right to do a regime change.

America is no stranger to this reality.

Wikipedia has compiled a long list of regime changes that America can get credited for, and of course gets blamed for by the ideologists. Not all of them were for the better; just many of them. Some of them were the basis for the phenomenal growth of America. Long before Trump’s wish to buy Greenland, there were the regime changes in Hawaii and Puerto Rico, plus the one in Panama that enabled the Panama Canal, plus the Alaska purchase.

Our greatest foreign policy successes, the enduring liberation of Germany and Japan, were achieved by regime changes – ones that we made by military force, and consolidated with advice and loans that were repaid with plenty of interest. We’ve had these great countries as reliable allies ever since.

We started doing regime changes poorly only when we turned against ourselves. We became afraid of doing anything right that was good for ourselves at the same time. Our left-liberal presidents went out of their way to do regime changes against our allies, so they could boast that we were no longer ‘hypocrites’ under their rule and would not favor our own interests. Too often our conservatives did it that way too, to appease the incessant attacks on them as hypocrites that were coming from the left-liberal cultural establishment. If we had sick policies toward many regimes, it was the result of sick narratives that came to dominate our discourse and deflect us into self-defeating actions, not of any sickness inherent in the fact that we dealt – as we must deal – with the critical question of regime changes.

Every Administration is likely to face an occasion that requires regime change. When it’s needed, it becomes an obligation to carry it through – in good time, intelligently, and without getting deflected by ideological obfuscations.

Iran is the Trump Administration’s occasion for it. It’s its moment to rise to history.

We are faced with a ‘have to do’ situation. As Machiavelli said, when you have to do something, it’s important to do it well, not with self-defeating, self-renouncing prohibitions. Or as Shakespeare put it, ‘twere well to do it, then ‘twere well to do it well, and quickly.

May Trump do it well, and quickly.