When Our Leaders Stopped Making Regime Change Work

Regime changes were made by America from its start. They worked well — imperfectly of course, like all big things in life, but quite well in the main part.

This continued for nearly two centuries. Regime change was still working brilliantly in the 1940s. It was still working well more often than not in the more complex conditions of the 1950s and 1960s. And even in the 1980s, when it worked spectacularly.

This record of success is the vast bulk of U.S. history.

When there have been failures — in the 1970s, and after 1991 — it has mostly been because our elites had grown ambivalent about supporting our own side abroad. Regime change itself was not the problem. The problem was that anti-American and anti-Western ideology was taking its toll on American foreign policy. It proved to be a terrible toll, one that peoples around the world, not just Americans, suffered from.

When Ambivalent Presidents bungled regime changes

Reagan’s successors initially oversaw the many successful regime changes in Eastern Europe. But soon after, they bungled the biggest of all the changes: in Russia.

Even in Russia, the regime change worked for a time for the better. But after years of not getting coherent diplomatic and economic support from America, it went sour.

The first Bush, upon entering office, gave ostentatiously little support to the ongoing regime change in Russia. It triumphed anyway.

At that point, Bush revealed his deep ambivalence toward the pro-American regime change in Russia. When pressed to help it consolidate, he refused, with an argument that reversed his campaign lines about how America was doing fine by focusing on foreign policy: he now took up Dukakis’ old neo-isolationist campaign slogans, saying that we can’t afford it.

Specifically, he argued, we can’t afford to help make the regime changes work, we’re in decline because we’ve spent too much on foreign policy, we’re broke. He pulled out that line when it came to be time to help the Eastern Europeans and ex-Soviets make a success of their changes and solidify as allies instead of enemies. He did this for the explicit purpose of opposing the repeated calls in our media to start more seriously helping the changes under Yeltsin, and earlier under Gorbachev.

The regime changes succeeded in Eastern Europe anyway. The anti-Russian sentiment in Eastern European countries was too strong there to let them fail.

Bush did however overthrow a corrupt ally of America — the one in Panama. It was a form of virtue signaling to the Left — signaling his own virtue by joining the Left and the media in trashing America’s inevitably flawed allies.

The de facto anti-Americanism of the Clintons, and Obama in regime changes

Bush’s successors often found profoundly self-hating ways to avoid succeeding in regime change. They were not explicit on the self-hate, but gave enough Freudian slips for it to show.

They did this — rather like what Carter had done — by focusing regime changes as much as possible against our allies not our enemies. The anti-self focus enabled them to avoid what they seemed to fear most: being called “hypocrites” by their friends in the media and the Left.

Obama’s reckless prejudice for regime change against allies not enemies

Obama noisily pushed regime change against our allies, the longstanding moderate leaders of Egypt and Tunisia. He favored our ideological enemies, the Muslim Brotherhood, winning elections there.

Earlier, however, he stood strictly aside from encouraging regime change in Iran. That was when the masses were out in the streets demanding one. But then, in Iran our sworn enemies would have lost power from a regime change. A new regime truly friendly would probably have emerged and won elections.

Obama had so flagrantly refused to help against our enemies in Iran, that he was worried about being accused of hypocrisy when he turned around and supported regime changes against our allies in Egypt and Tunisia. This delayed him briefly, but soon he became a kind of revolutionary prophet from abroad against our allies in the Arab world.

He made another turnaround on Libya. It was even more revealing of the underlying ideological motivation: to change regimes only against allies. Obama had to be forced by his  domestic critics to belatedly help with regime change against Qaddafi, a longstanding thorn in America’s side. His Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, told Congress that if we got rid of Qaddafi, we would be seen by “the street” to have a national interest in it — and therefore (sic!) shouldn’t do it.

But Obama finally yielded to public pressure and belatedly supported, halfheartedly, an intervention against Qaddafi. He proceeded to bungle it badly. He dragged the war on short of toppling the dictator. He withdrew immediately after Qaddafi was killed anyway. He proudly refused the appeal for us to stay from the internationally legitimate Transitional Government.

That government had asked us stay and help it disarm the Islamist militias and stabilize Libya. It seems Obama felt that that would be a bad Western imperialism, since it would give America a foothold that would serve its own interest and that of the West. That defined it as a forbidden fruit in his progressive ideology. Instead of supporting our allies in Libya against the Islamist militias, Obama and his people let on to the press that those Islamists were the wave of the future in Libya and the entire region, and we shouldn’t stand in their way.

And so we abandoned Libya to chaos – and to the militias that needed disarming. They proceeded to perpetuate the chaos — and massacre people in our Benghazi consulate, whom we chose not to protect (our leaders explained that it would have meant fighting the future rulers of the country, the wave of the future, and only make things worse). They also proceeded but to export the chaos across the desert and throughout the Sahel. The West has suffered many further setbacks in northwest Africa as a result.

Obama also had to be compelled by political pressure to support the Syrian opposition, after waiting even longer while Assad started massacring it. One he did his half-turnaround here, he was careful to give the opposition enough arms and support to keep it from being destroyed — but never enough to win. A winning level of support, he explained, would lead to us owning the victory, which was unacceptable. And so he dragged the civil war on for years, with more than half a million killed, mostly by the regime, and many more millions exiled. It was the most immoral foreign policy conceivable, all in the name of not committing the supposed mortal sin of leading in making a regime change, i.e. imperialism.

That is how things stood in Syria for more than a decade. Then, at the end of 2024, Israel decimated Iran’s proxies — proxies that had been the Assad regime’s lifeline. Assad’s other great backer, Russia, was tied up in Ukraine. Assad finally fell — not to a Western-backed group, but rather to Turkey-backed forces with Islamist roots. Obama’s goal was in this way still achieved: we didn’t in any sense own the victory, nor benefit from it.

We must still have a strong pro-American president in DC when the regime changes in Iran

What do the cases of failure described above show? They show regime change won’t work when our government’s leadership is not really on our own side.

This is not because regime change is intrinsically wrong, but because our leaders in those cases have inbuilt inhibitions against wanting it to come out for the better for us — inhibitions fanned by the many leftist ideologues in the media and academia. They have been surrounded all their lives with anti-Western, anti-imperialist ideological narratives in the media and academia. They have too often been acting out these narratives.

It is a warning of how regime change can fail when our leaders are filled with ambivalence about American and Western power.

Fortunately President Trump does not have that problem. Some people in his entourage share from the elite’s ambivalence about American power, but not Trump himself. He loves American power. If he undertakes regime changes in the right places — against our truly bad and vulnerable enemies, starting with Iran — they will probably work well.

There is a limited window of opportunity for having a sufficiently pro-American president for this. Trump should use it, lest we all lose it.