Regime Change Is Not the Answer

The U.S. has no right to interfere in Iranian affairs, and I suspect most Iranian opponents of their government would want nothing to do with Washington’s “help.”

Surprising no one, Danielle Pletka wants the U.S. to seek regime change in Iran:

Rather, it is the Reagan doctrine and the collapse of the Soviet Union that should guide a policy for change in Tehran. Like the Soviet Union and its satellites, Iran’s regime is deeply unpopular with its own people. Three major uprisings took place in 2009, 2019, and 2022, despite the government’s increasingly repressive police state.

In none of those instances, did any Western country provide more than token support for the Iranian people.

Regime change is a misguided and destructive policy. If it “worked,” it would be destabilizing for the wider region and it would probably trigger civil war in Iran. The current regime would not go quietly. That could create a disastrous conflict like the one that engulfed Syria, but on a much larger scale. If the Reagan Doctrine’s record is anything to go by, the U.S. would be plunging Iran into years of bloodshed and atrocities committed by death squads, but the casualties and the number of refugees would be far greater than in Nicaragua or Angola.

If the U.S. managed to bring the current system down, there is no guarantee that it would lead to a better government. It is not at all certain that it would lead to the changes in Iranian foreign policy that many Westerners want to see. The assumption that this “solves” anything is baseless. More to the point, the U.S. has no right to interfere in Iranian affairs, and I suspect most Iranian opponents of their government would want nothing to do with Washington’s “help.”

Our government’s policies have done so much harm to the Iranian people over just the last fifteen years that the vast majority of Iranians has an extremely negative view of the U.S. Having made the Iranian people our enemy for years with cruel economic warfare, the U.S. is in no position to gain the trust of ordinary Iranians in any case. Anyone that did work with our government would be discredited by the association, and any political movement that the U.S. supported would be understandably perceived as a puppet of a foreign power.

The Iranian government has faced several massive protests, and it has been able to suppress those protests with less difficulty each time in no small part because U.S. sanctions have strangled the Iranian people and stifled the political opposition. The best thing that the U.S. could do to help the Iranian people is to lift as many sanctions as possible. That would allow them to have more resources and time that they could use to organize their own efforts to achieve political change according to their preferences. If durable political change for the better is going to come to Iran, it will happen without U.S. interference, and the more that the U.S. inserts itself into the mix the worse it will be for the Iranian people.

Economic warfare and overall hostility towards Iran help the current Iranian leadership to tighten their grip and to entrench themselves in place. If our policymakers really wanted to see a freer and more prosperous Iran, they would stop impoverishing the people with sanctions and they would absolutely not pursue an insane policy of regime change. Regime change is not the answer in Iran or anywhere else.