Why Doesn't Regime Change Ever Seem To Work?
The problem is not that revolution is bad or that some cultures can’t rule themselves—it’s that social engineering is hard.
Regime change are dirty words in American politics. Even politicians who are defending wars abroad insist that "regime change" isn't the goal. Looming over the conversation is the Iraq War, the Bush administration's 2003 attempt to overthrow the Iraqi dictatorship and install a new democracy, which ended with the collapse of Iraq and violent blowback around the world. When the Obama administration helped overthrow the ruler of Libya without trying to micromanage the new government, that also ended with a Libyan civil war and the infamous attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.
So why did those campaigns go so badly? With the Trump administration fresh from deposing Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and weighing a war to support the Iranian uprising, the question is more relevant than ever. And no one in American politics can seem to agree on the answer. A common left-wing criticism is that regime changes are a form of imperialist violence bound to destroy countries. A budding right-wing criticism is that the U.S. hasn't done enough imperialist violence. If only the U.S. military had been more brutal in Iraq and taken the country's oil, President Donald Trump insists, then Washington would have gotten its way.
And then there's the idea that some nations simply aren't ready for freedom, either because their countries aren't real or because their cultures are backward. After the failure of the Libyan campaign, President Barack Obama himself sighed that Middle Easterners and their "tribalism" required "a few smart autocrats" to manage. Last week, CNN commentator Van Jones claimed that regime change in Iran might work out differently because Iranians are ethnically different from Arabs.
But libertarianism has a much neater explanation, one that Trump himself gestured at in his Riyadh speech last year: Social engineering is hard. A revolution is not just a matter of shuffling around a few leaders. It is an attempt to change the way society is run. That is hard enough for a political movement to pull off in its own country, usually requiring years of preparation and organization. To force that process on another country—which is what most people mean by regime change—is more difficult yet. To make matters worse, foreign regime change is usually only on the table when domestic forces are failing. If a revolution can succeed on its own merits, then why does it need international intervention?
Successful revolutions happen when they become "a state-in-waiting, a force capable of contesting and wielding sovereignty," explains the Iranian writer Ali Terrenoire. The fundamental purpose of the state is to manage "millions of zero-sum conflicts inside the country," he writes, and revolutionaries prepare for that role by dealing with the smaller-scale coordination problems of the revolution itself. Simply coming up with a popular political platform is not enough. Before you can hold elections (or impose a dictatorship) for millions of people, you have to learn to run an organization of a few hundred; once you're able to seize and hold institutions of government, then you might be ready to run them, too.
The politics of regime change, however, are biased toward helping the revolutions that are least likely to succeed. For Americans, a doomed uprising makes for a very sad, compelling, and urgent appeal on cable news. And for foreign revolutionaries, the promise of American salvation creates a classic moral hazard, encouraging risky, premature action. For example, the intervention in Libya convinced other Arab rebels "that if they could only escalate violence to a high enough level, the world's most powerful militaries would intervene on their behalf as well," writes Philip Gordon, a former official in the Obama and Biden administrations, in his book, Losing the Long Game.
If U.S. help is too little or too late, the rebellion is crushed. But if the U.S. goes all out to destroy the government, then it ends up short-circuiting the whole process that makes revolutions succeed. The state is destroyed before its replacement is ready to take over. As Terrenoire writes, the hope of the Iranian monarchist movement is that Trump will decapitate the Iranian government and then "replace the head with a core group that is zealously hostile to the ideology, interests and even existence of the rest of this hierarchy that forms the state," expecting them to fall in line.
In Iraq, the plan was even worse. The Bush administration installed U.S. envoy Paul Bremer as de facto dictator of Iraq, and his first two orders were to dissolve the entire Iraqi government and military at once. Then the administration tried to build a new Iraqi democracy from scratch on a one-year deadline. Elements of the old government and former opposition factions all armed themselves while jockeying for position. Trump referenced this disaster when explaining his strategy in Venezuela to reporters on Friday: "If you ever remember a place called Iraq where everybody was fired—every single person, the police, the generals, everybody was fired—and they ended up being ISIS."
While it's too early to tell, Venezuela may be an exception that proves the rule. Rather than trying to destroy the Venezuelan government and build a new one, the Trump administration simply reshuffled the current top-level leadership in hopes of getting a more pliant leader. And should Venezuela eventually return to democracy, the revolution would not have to be built from scratch. Venezuela's descent into dictatorship was relatively recent, so the country still has the skeleton of democratic institutions, including an opposition that won parliamentary elections a few years ago.
Other countries where the Trump administration is contemplating forcible regime change don't have such favorable conditions. A real danger is that the Venezuelan operation, by proving that regime change "works," will cause the administration to forget the lessons it thought it had learned from Iraq. Immediately after Maduro's capture, Trump began naming other countries he would like to use force on. Other officials, sounding a bit like the Bush administration in 2002, have been insisting that no one can stop the United States from imposing whatever reality it wants on the world.
The only way out of this cycle of hubris and disappointment is understanding exactly why regime change doesn't work. That doesn't mean becoming allergic to any military force ever, or booing any revolution that happens in a foreign country. But it does mean realizing that, for all its impressive destructive capabilities, the U.S. military can't rewrite other countries' social contracts from a distance.
