There Is No 'Right' Way to Pursue Regime Change

The U.S. should not be doing any of this.

Ilan Goldenberg and Nate Swanson make their case for regime change in Iran done the “right” way. This part stood out to me for its sheer incoherence:

Washington should also support the Iranian opposition carefully and patiently. Rather than a compliant government willing to accede to U.S. demands, the United States should be seeking an Iranian government that fundamentally alters Iranian foreign policy [bold mine-DL] and respects the rights of its own people.

If the U.S. is seeking an Iranian government that fundamentally alters Iranian foreign policy, it is absolutely trying to create a compliant government that will do what Washington wants. The authors want to distinguish their position from Trump’s crude imperialism, but the difference between what they support and what he wants is paper-thin. Like Trump, they think the goal of our policy should be to get people in power who will remake Iranian foreign policy to our liking. They all imagine that Iran can be turned into some sort of vassal, and they differ only on how to get there.

The U.S. should not be doing any of this. Trying to engineer a transformation of Iranian foreign policy by punishing the Iranian people with sanctions is foolish and cruel. It isn’t likely to work, and it is wrong to make the attempt in any case.

There isn’t much of disagreement in the essay about what U.S. policy should be. The authors support a “strategy of containment and pressure,” which is essentially the Trump administration’s policy. Their essay amounts to endorsing Biden’s bankrupt approach of imitating Trump. Biden just continued almost everything that Trump had been doing since at least 2018.

The authors’ support for a bankrupt status quo isn’t surprising. Goldenberg and Swanson are Biden administration veterans. Like Biden, they have no principled objections to Trump’s Iran policy, but they are sure that they have a smarter way to do it. This is unfortunately typical of a lot of what has passed for Democratic foreign policy thinking for a long time: they agree with Trump’s hawkish goals and they have no real problem with his methods, but they dislike his erratic and sloppy execution. With critics like these, Trump doesn’t need allies.

The authors draw the line at military action, but even here it is not as clear cut as it should be. They don’t think that the president should follow through on his insane threats now, but that’s because an attack would be too late. They write, “At this point, such strikes, coming weeks after the violence, would have less to do with toppling the regime than with assuaging hawkish critics of the administration at home.” They are against bombing for the moment, but once again they have no serious objection to launching an unprovoked attack on another country. Their only concerns are that an attack would be ill-timed and that it could have undesirable effects on the protesters. This is akin to the half-hearted opposition to invading Iraq that faulted Bush for how he committed criminal aggression.

If they don’t currently support a military attack, they are fine with escalating economic warfare. They say that the U.S. “should intensify economic and diplomatic pressure to isolate the regime internationally and hasten its demise.” This a full-throated embrace of “maximum pressure” for the sake of regime change. It’s completely insane, but this is what some establishment Democrats are openly endorsing.

The U.S. should not be in the business of regime change. Our regime change policies tend to fail and produce even worse outcomes, but those aren’t the only reasons not to do it. We shouldn’t have these policies in the first place.

If the current system in Iran falls and a new government is established, the U.S. should establish normal and peaceful relations with that government. If the current system remains in place, the U.S. should lift as many sanctions as possible and stop strangling the Iranian people with senseless economic warfare. The policy of “containment and pressure” is dreadful and it should end no matter what happens inside Iran.

There is no “right” way to pursue regime change because the interference and coercion required make the attempt inherently illegitimate. Any government that takes power as a result of our interference will be tainted by that illegitimacy. Our government should not be seeking what the authors call “a managed leadership transition” in Tehran or in any other capital. Regime change by any other name still stinks.