Things Can Always Get Worse

The U.S. has usually been far too careless in pursuing regime change without thinking through what happens when it “succeeds.”

Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Erica Frantz make the case that whatever follows Putin’s rule won’t necessarily be worse:

Of course, it would be imprudent for the United States to adopt a formal policy of regime change, but Washington need not pull any punches in fear that what follows Putin would be worse. The patterns of post-Cold War history suggest that political dynamics in Russia are unlikely to get worse and might even get better once Putin departs.

Reviewing the history of just the last hundred years does not give me much confidence that the next Russian leader or regime will be any less repressive, authoritarian, or nationalist than Putin has been. A Putin successor would likely be in the same mold, and there is a good chance that he would be even more crudely nationalistic and dictatorial. There is also a possibility, however small, that in the wake of regime collapse the country could find itself split up around competing centers of power comparable to what happened during the civil wars after the revolution.

A civil war to determine the successor would definitely be worse for everyone, and the instability that would create across Eurasia would be like nothing we have seen in decades.