INTRODUCTION
The Regime Change Temptation
Since the end of World War II, the United States has set out to oust governments in the Middle East on an average of once per decade. It has done so in places as diverse as Iran, Afghanistan (twice), Iraq, Egypt, Libya, and Syria, to count only the instances where regime change—the removal of a country’s leaders and transformation of its political system—was the goal of U.S. policy and where an administration made sustained efforts to bring it about. The motives for U.S. interventions in all of these countries have been equally varied, including countering communism, competing with geopolitical rivals, preventing the development of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), combating terrorism, saving civilian lives, and trying to promote democracy. And the methods by which the United States has pursued regime change have also been extraordinarily diverse: sponsoring a military coup, providing covert or overt military assistance to opposition groups, invading and occupying, invading and not occupying, providing airpower to opposition forces, and relying on diplomacy, rhetoric, and sanctions alone. What is common to all these efforts, however, is that they invariably failed to achieve their ultimate goals, produced a range of unintended—and often catastrophic—consequences, carried extraordinary financial and human costs, and in many cases left both the target country and the United States worse off than they were before.
This book is the story of how regime change in the Middle East has proven so tempting to American policy makers for decades and of why it always seems to go wrong. I’ve called the book Losing the Long Game because regime change often seems to work out in the short term—leading to premature declarations of victory by its proponents—but then ends up failing badly as costs mount, unintended consequences arise, and instability spreads in the wake of the apparent initial success. In fact, the long-term results of regime change in the region are so consistently disappointing—regardless of the reasons why it was tried or the manner in which plans were executed—that it is surprising so many policy makers and analysts keep coming back to it as a viable policy option, hoping that somehow it will work out better next time. The track record also shows that the reason for the recurring failure is not just a matter of poor implementation or lack of sustained follow-up—the most common excuses of regime change proponents. Instead, it shows that there are inherently high costs, unexpected consequences, and insurmountable obstacles that make it exceedingly difficult for the United States to replace objectionable Middle Eastern regimes and leaders without creating new, different, and often bigger problems.
With few exceptions, the history of U.S. regime change efforts in the region reveals remarkably familiar patterns. Once U.S. policy makers become determined to remove a given regime, they overstate the threat, underestimate the costs and risks, overpromise what they can accomplish, and prematurely claim success if and when the targeted regime falls. Invariably, however, stability quickly proves elusive, a security vacuum develops, insecure and suspicious neighbors interfere, allied contributions fall short, and long-standing ethnic, sectarian, geopolitical, and personal rivalries emerge that the United States is unable to control. As unexpected challenges emerge and costs mount, those who conceived of and oversold the policy blame the results on implementation, and an “if only” phase begins—“if only” we had sent more troops, or fewer troops, or different troops, or more money, or better diplomats, or “if only” we had followed up on any one of a number of other policy options that were not pursued. Books and articles are written by key protagonists, explaining that victory could have been achieved if only U.S. leaders had been wiser, more determined, and willing to commit adequate resources to the task. Over time, the American public sours on the results of the intervention and tires of the costs of trying to make it a success, and the policy is shelved, usually after a new president enters office and blames the problem on the ill-conceived or poorly implemented strategy of his predecessor. This rejection of the policy then lasts until the next time leaders consider trying it again—sometimes in the very same country where it failed the first time.
Not every case of Middle East regime change conforms exactly to this pattern, of course. In some cases, certain U.S. goals are met initially before problems emerge later; in others, some objectives are achieved while new, different, and unexpected problems are created; in many cases, the United States derives strategic benefits from its intervention while the citizens of the target countries pay the price; and in some cases the result is a disaster for almost all concerned. In other words, to paraphrase Tolstoy, every unsuccessful attempt at regime change is unsuccessful in its own way. But the patterns and outcomes are consistent enough—across a wide range of countries, circumstances, and administrations—that future U.S. leaders would be wise to take them into careful account before concluding, yet again, that U.S. efforts to oust existing regimes will prove worth the high costs and risks.
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Debates about the pros and cons of regime change in the Middle East and elsewhere have gone on for many decades, and as both an analyst and a policy maker I’ve been involved in them for nearly thirty years. The issue took on renewed practical relevance in 2018, however, when President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran—apparently pinning his hopes on a strategy of regime change there. To be sure, the Trump administration didn’t officially embrace that goal and insisted it just wanted to change Iranian behavior. But it was hard to avoid the conclusion that regime change was the actual policy. Trump alleged in 2017 that the nuclear deal had come “just before what would have been the total collapse of the Iranian regime” and that it had impeded the Iranian people’s ability “to reclaim their country’s proud history, its culture, [and] civilization.”1 While the administration said it only wanted to negotiate a “better deal,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo used his first speech in May 2018 to spell out demands on Iran—including completely and indefinitely ending all uranium enrichment, abandoning ballistic missile development, providing international nuclear inspectors unqualified access anywhere and everywhere, and abandoning all its regional allies—that seemed designed to be rejected.2 Trump surrounded himself with prominent proponents of regime change (including Pompeo, National Security Adviser John Bolton, and Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph Giuliani), lent strong rhetorical support to Iranian protesters (“TIME FOR CHANGE!” he tweeted in January 2018), and set up the special Iran Action Group at the State Department to coordinate a “maximum pressure” campaign.3 Encouraged by outside supporters in think tanks and Congress—many of whom had been strong proponents of regime change in Iraq fifteen years previously and in Syria more recently—the administration seemed to see the solution to the Iran problem as a sanctions campaign that would cripple the regime and lead to a popular uprising to overthrow it. As the scholar and former Bush administration official Eliot Cohen observed, Trump’s “real theory of victory” in Iran was not that the Iranian regime would negotiate a new and better deal but “that American sanctions, rather, will bring down a regime whose economy is already collapsing.”4
Facing skepticism that the administration sought only to influence Iranian policy, Pompeo acknowledged to an interviewer in May 2019 that he didn’t actually expect Tehran’s behavior to change, but “what can change is the people can change the government. What we’re trying to do is create space for the Iranian people.”5 In Trump’s more simplistic formulation, a fight with the United States would mean the “official end of Iran.” “Never threaten the United States again!” he warned in a May 2019 tweet.6 As Trump’s Iran policy unfolded—demonizing the Iranian regime, exaggerating intelligence about weapons of mass destruction and Iranian links to al-Qaeda, associating with unsavory opposition groups, and overselling the likely benefits of confrontation—it was hard to avoid having flashbacks to 2002 and the run-up to the Iraq War.7
A U.S. policy of promoting regime change in Iran would certainly be in America’s interest if it led to a new government that treated its people better, abandoned its nuclear program, stopped supporting terrorism and meddling in its neighbors’ affairs, and was ready to cooperate politically, militarily, and diplomatically with the United States. Far less clear was whether that goal could be achieved by the United States through the imposition of economic sanctions, diplomatic isolation, covert action, or military force; whether the results would be the intended ones if it somehow were accomplished; and what the costs and side effects—for Americans, Iranians, and the region—would be of trying and failing to do so.
Trying to think through those questions led me to think even more about the track record of previous U.S. regime change efforts, which turns out to be replete with cautionary tales of hubris, overreach, and magical thinking. A look back at previous efforts since World War II—ironically, the first of which was a 1953 intervention in Iran that contributed to some of the very problems later generations of Americans would seek to solve with regime change again—shows no case of clear success, some catastrophic failures, and universally high costs and unintended consequences. In every case it has proven far more costly and difficult than expected, and in no case has it led to anything even close to stable democracy, despite the promises of some of its proponents. If the U.S. experience in the region over the past seventy years is any guide, the prospect that external pressure—whether through economic isolation or covert or overt military intervention—can bring about the replacement of adversarial regimes in the region with more stable, friendly, and democratic ones is poor. If past is prologue, any administration that pursues such an approach should do so with its eyes wide open, and the American public should be very skeptical about its claims and promises.
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More broadly and on a more personal level, my interest in this issue arose from my own direct experience with regime change in the Middle East as a member of the Obama administration from 2009 to 2015. First as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs and then as the White House coordinator for the Middle East at the National Security Council, I was closely involved in efforts to try to stabilize two countries where the previous administration had ousted regimes—Iraq and Afghanistan—and also in Obama’s own, ultimately unsuccessful efforts to promote political transitions in Egypt, Libya, and Syria. Obama’s experience with Middle East regime change would prove to be another cautionary tale, full of painful lessons about the limits of America’s ability to foster positive change in the region and about the risks of pursuing regime change without the will or means to bring it about.
By the time Obama took office in January 2009, the United States had already invested nearly $2 trillion and had suffered thousands of casualties in post-intervention Iraq and Afghanistan yet was still struggling to stabilize both. The 2003 Iraq invasion—originally sold as a way not just to prevent the development of weapons of mass destruction but also to put Iraq on a path to democracy and transform the Middle East—had instead led to widespread violence and instability, empowered Iran and its proxies in Baghdad, fanned the flames of Kurdish separatism, exacerbated Islamist extremism globally, and instigated seething resentment and a violent rebellion among Sunni Arabs not just in Iraq but across the region, in Europe, and beyond. Afghanistan was not in much better shape, with the Taliban still controlling significant parts of the country and the government in Kabul—like that in Baghdad—weak, corrupt, and often uncooperative. Whereas in Iraq Obama had tried to manage the situation by withdrawing most U.S. forces and turning over security responsibilities to the Iraqis (to reduce U.S. burdens and because the Iraqis demanded it), in Afghanistan he instead deployed tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops to help the government provide security and combat terrorism. That military surge brought the total number of American and allied forces to more than 100,000, but they were still unable to turn the tide. By the time Obama left office, almost fourteen years after the United States had ousted the regimes of those two countries—and notwithstanding extraordinary investments of money, political capital, and lives—the prospects for security, stability, and democracy in both countries remained dim. To be sure, in both cases hostile dictatorships had been eliminated, but the goal of making America safer by eliminating the sources of extremism and promoting political stability was a long way from being achieved.
Even more telling were Obama’s own—unanticipated—attempts to implement regime change in the region. Obama had come to office as a foreign policy “realist” with a professed admiration of President George H. W. Bush and his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, both of whom were well-known regime change skeptics. Obama had strongly opposed President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq and considered his “freedom agenda” for the Middle East unrealistic and unwise. Yet in another great irony of history, whereas the younger Bush had for all practical purposes abandoned that agenda by the end of his presidency, Obama—driven by unexpected public uprisings in the region—would soon find himself trying to implement it. Despite his instinctive opposition to U.S. intervention in the Middle East and skepticism about what the United States could accomplish there, Obama ended up throwing U.S. support behind opposition forces in Egypt, Libya, and Syria that were trying to replace those regimes—and even falling prey to some of the same wishful thinking as his predecessors. In Egypt, he sided with revolutionary protesters and used U.S. diplomatic leverage to help drive its longtime president, Hosni Mubarak, from power. In Libya, he declared that the dictator Muammar Qadhafi had to go and then launched a NATO-led bombing campaign that was ostensibly limited to protecting civilians but that in reality targeted—and eventually brought about—the violent ouster of Qadhafi’s regime. And in Syria, far from “doing nothing,” as many of his critics allege, Obama in 2011 called on President Bashar al-Assad to step aside and eventually invested heavily in a political, military, and diplomatic campaign designed to oust him. All these cases were of course very different from one another: the United States used no military force against its ally in Egypt, it led an allied military intervention against the regime in Libya, and it relied on proxies and partners to promote regime change in Syria. But the results in all these cases were similar: a failure to engineer a successful political transition to pro-Western democracy—or even to more effective, tolerant, or cooperative autocracy for that matter—and a legacy of protracted violence, sectarianism, instability, and geopolitical competition.
As the coordinator for Middle East policy at the White House, I was closely involved with all these efforts and did all I could to help them succeed. But I also saw how whatever we did inevitably came up against some harsh realities that thwarted success, and I observed firsthand that despite enormous differences in the way successive U.S. administrations approached these issues going back to Iraq and even further, the results were similarly disastrous. A few months after I left government in 2015, I wrote an article in Politico called “The Middle East Is Falling Apart” in which I made the following observation:
When implying the United States can “fix” Middle Eastern problems if only it “gets it right” it is worth considering this: In Iraq, the U.S. intervened and occupied, and the result was a costly disaster. In Libya, the U.S. intervened and did not occupy, and the result was a costly disaster. In Syria, the U.S. neither intervened nor occupied, and the result is a costly disaster.8
As obvious as the point seemed to me, the argument got a lot of attention. The New Yorker editor, David Remnick, wrote that it neatly summarized the “dispiriting reality of American foreign policy in the twenty-first century,” while Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, even labeled it the “Gordon dictum.”9 The argument also caused some controversy, and plenty of criticism, from those—including many friends and colleagues—who thought I was being too negative about America’s ability to shape world events or, worse, who blamed me and my colleagues for “allowing” the Middle East to spin out of control. On Twitter, for every commentator who thought the quotation concisely summarized the challenges of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, there were others who thought I was just looking for an excuse for what they saw as Obama’s inaction. The point I was trying to make, however, is that the issue was not so much that we didn’t “get it right” as that there isn’t always a “right” way of getting it. It wasn’t just rotten luck that two successive and very different administrations—Bush’s and Obama’s—happened to apply the wrong tactics to the wrong situations; it was that there were powerful reasons why using American power to install stable and friendly democracies in place of Middle Eastern dictatorships was simply beyond our reach, and why trying to do so had consequences that we did not foresee and did not like.
To be sure, these were all hard cases in which the status quo, prior to the American intervention, was hardly appealing. In foreign policy, inaction has costs and consequences that must be weighed against the costs of action, and particularly in the Middle East the “road not taken” is also fraught with danger and risk. In most of the cases discussed in this book, it must be acknowledged that the costs of inaction would likely have included enduring or even increased repression, human rights abuses, violence against civilians, and continued risks of regional conflict or even terrorist attacks against Americans or others. But when the menu includes only bad options, such outcomes must be weighed against the results of a choice to seek to remove—usually violently—an existing regime and to accept all the costs of pursuing that goal and the unpredictable consequences that follow. And when the United States sacrifices thousands of American and local lives, spends billions or trillions of dollars, alienates potential partners, exhausts the U.S. military, violates international laws and norms, fans the flames of nationalistic resentment, and undermines public support for international engagement, even a “wash”—exchanging one set of problems for another—is simply not good enough.
Nor can it be said, after such a wealth of experience, that regime change is a sound concept, with success proving elusive only because successive administrations failed to follow up effectively. As we’ll see in the chapters ahead, administrations of very different orientations tried very different approaches to the challenges of filling the political and security vacuum created by the overthrow of an existing regime, yet doing so always proved beyond their reach. That evidence suggests not that the problem results from incompetent officials from both major parties somehow failing to find the magic formula for making it a success but that there’s something inherently difficult and inevitably costly about removing Middle Eastern governments and institutions and replacing them with something better.
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My focus in this book is on the broader Middle East, because that is where U.S. regime change policy has been most active in recent decades and where it is most relevant today as policy makers and pundits continue to debate whether to pursue it in places such as Iran, Syria, Yemen, the Palestinian territories, and even in traditionally U.S.-aligned countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Egypt.10 But it is important to note that the track record in other parts of the world has not been much better. Scholarly studies looking at dozens of cases of regime change from all over the world have concluded that most attempts fail and that even when the United States manages to replace unwanted systems or governments, the result is rarely democracy or better relations with the United States.11 Indeed, most U.S. attempts to change regimes in other parts of the world over the decades—whether overt or covert—show familiar patterns of exaggerated threats, wishful thinking, costly or failed military interventions, premature declarations of victory, and often disastrous long-term results. And of course the poor historical track record of regime change in the greater Middle East is hardly limited to the United States. The Franco-British invasion of Suez in 1956, Egypt’s effort to overthrow the regime in Yemen in the early 1960s, the Soviet-backed coup in Afghanistan in 1978, the Israeli attempt to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization leadership in Beirut in 1982, and the Saudi-led coalition’s 2015 intervention to oust the Houthi regime in Yemen are all examples of Middle Eastern regime change attempts that ultimately backfired badly.
U.S. proponents of regime change, of course, like to point to Japan and Germany after World War II—and more recently to interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean—as examples of how the policy can succeed. In their 2003 book advocating an invasion of Iraq, for instance, Lawrence Kaplan and William Kristol cited Japan, Germany, Austria, Italy, Grenada, the Dominican Republic, and Panama as “only a few of the nations whose democratic systems were at first ‘imposed’ by American arms.”12 (They never identify the other, allegedly more numerous examples of U.S.-imposed democracy.) Kristol and Robert Kagan have also argued that those who “caution against the difficulties of occupying and reforming [countries such as Iraq and Serbia] … may wish to reflect on the American experience in Germany and Japan—or even the Dominican Republic and Panama.”13 The writer Joshua Muravchik even claims that “a significant part of the democratic world is democratic as a result of direct American coercion” and points to “Japan, West Germany, Austria, Italy, Grenada, the Dominican Republic, and Panama” as places that “have democratic systems imposed by American arms.”14 Danielle Pletka, another prominent advocate of both the 2003 Iraq War and U.S. intervention in Syria more recently, asserted in The New York Times in 2016 that “regime change has often succeeded,” citing the cases of Germany, Italy, South Korea, and Taiwan.15
It is certainly true that the results of regime change in Japan and Germany (and Italy and Austria) were spectacularly positive—all became prosperous democracies and allies of the United States—and that regime change was at the time the only way to deal with the threats those countries posed. That said, the differences between these cases and the current ones we face in the Middle East are such that those precedents would not be particularly relevant even if Americans were somehow prepared to devote the four years of total war and nearly two million U.S. troops and occupation forces that were necessary—but not sufficient—to achieve American goals in those cases.16
Prior to the war, Japan, Germany, Italy, and Austria were all relatively advanced industrial states with functioning, and in some cases democratic, institutions. They were relatively homogeneous culturally, linguistically, and ethnically, not artificial entities fractured along the sectarian, religious, and national lines that make it so hard to develop and maintain democratic institutions and internal peace. By the time the war ended, the leaders of these regimes were also all so thoroughly discredited by more than a decade of failed, reckless aggression and the domestic repression and misery that went along with it that U.S. forces were—unlike in later cases in the Middle East—broadly seen by the public as liberators, not as outside invaders seeking to occupy their lands.
Moreover, because of the long-term strategic importance of Europe and Japan, the sacrifices that had been made to win the war, and great confidence in U.S. relative power in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the U.S. public was ready and willing to commit the massive resources and take the risks of rebuilding and nation building in Asia and Europe. The Soviet threat and emerging Cold War reinforced this willingness, persuading Americans to support the Marshall Plan (which cost nearly $150 billion in today’s dollars over just four years) and deploy hundreds of thousands of troops to Europe and Japan. Germany benefited from being bordered on one side by friendly, supportive, and prosperous partners that (unlike after World War I) understood their interest in Germany’s success, while Japan sought security in alliance with the United States to ensure its survival. None of these conditions are remotely analogous to the situations of the states in the Middle East today, and none are likely to be in the near future. In short, if the best argument proponents of regime change can come up with for trying it today in the Middle East is that “it worked in Germany and Japan,” they don’t have useful guidance for, say, how to approach Iran, Syria, Libya, or Saudi Arabia today.
Some other post–World War II precedents from Latin America and Asia are also worth keeping in mind. In Guatemala in 1954, inspired in part by the low-cost “success” of the coup in Tehran a year before, the Eisenhower administration decided to get rid of the left-leaning, democratically elected Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. Afraid that Arbenz would align Guatemala with the Soviet Union and threaten U.S. economic interests, Eisenhower authorized CIA support for a military coup and found a suitable, exiled opposition leader—Carlos Castillo Armas—to lead it. With support from mercenaries from the United States and Central America, Castillo Armas forced Arbenz from power on June 18, 1954, and soon thereafter “legitimized” his presidency in a rigged plebiscite. The coup, however, led to a long series of corrupt military dictators and decades of civil war that left 200,000 Guatemalans dead, more than 90 percent of whom were killed by the government.17 And one of its many unintended consequences was that it forced out of the country large numbers of leftists who ended up working to undermine some of the right-wing, pro-American regimes in the region. Ironically, one of them was Che Guevara, who fled to Mexico, where he would meet and join forces with Fidel Castro to help topple the U.S.-supported regime in Cuba.18
A few years later, with Castro having taken power in Havana, Eisenhower tasked the CIA with bringing about “the replacement of the Castro regime with one more devoted to the true interests of the Cuban people and more acceptable to the U.S.”19 However, when Eisenhower’s successor, John F. Kennedy, launched the operation—an amphibious assault by some fourteen hundred Cuban paramilitaries at the Bay of Pigs on April 17, 1961—it backfired spectacularly. Instead of producing a popular uprising against Castro, the failed operation bolstered Castro’s standing, increased suspicions of Washington across all of Latin America and beyond, demonstrated that even the powerful United States could be defeated, pushed Cuba further into Moscow’s arms, and led directly to the Soviet decision the following year to deploy nuclear missiles to Cuba, producing the most dangerous confrontation of the Cold War. In the years and decades that followed, the United States persisted with efforts to oust the Castro regime—including assassination attempts, diplomatic isolation, and crippling economic sanctions—but never succeeded. Even successfully overthrowing a rival regime on a small, nearby island turned out to be more complicated than the advocates of that policy thought.
Less synonymous with failure than the Bay of Pigs, but ultimately even more disastrous, was the U.S. attempt to engineer a change in the leadership of the South Vietnamese government in 1963. Frustrated at seeing South Vietnam failing in its struggle against the communist North and its local supporters, the Kennedy administration authorized a coup against the corrupt and ineffective South Vietnamese president, Ngo Dinh Diem, who was overthrown and executed by other military officers with a bullet to the back of the head (complicating the plotters’ plans to claim his death was by suicide). Far from solving the problem of South Vietnamese government legitimacy, however, the coup only exacerbated it and drew the United States deeper into the conflict. Diem’s eventual successor, Nguyen Van Thieu, turned out to be even weaker, more corrupt, and less effective than his predecessor, and the United States would spend the next decade—at the cost of some fifty-eight thousand American lives—trying and failing to support him. Foreshadowing later efforts by U.S. political and military leaders in Afghanistan and Iraq, Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon and their top generals would spend much of that decade claiming, falsely, that the military campaign was making great progress and that success was just around the corner.
In Chile in 1970, the United States turned to intervention once again to try to prevent a leftist leader from threatening U.S. economic and geopolitical interests. The Nixon administration saw Salvador Allende, a Marxist who had formed a government after winning a plurality of votes in a three-way presidential election in September 1970, as a threat that had to be stopped at all costs. With Allende nationalizing critical industrial sectors (including big American firms) and threatening—or so Washington believed—to take Chile into the Soviet orbit, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger authorized the CIA to support a military coup to oust him on September 11, 1973. Allende died, probably by suicide, in the attack on the presidential palace. As in the previous cases, the Chile coup had some positive benefits for the United States, because the new leader, General Augusto Pinochet, reached agreements with the nationalized American firms and kept Chile staunchly in the Western camp. He also began a process of capitalist economic reform that would lay some of the groundwork for future economic growth. At the same time, Pinochet launched a campaign of horrible repression, including widespread torture, summary executions, and “disappearances” of regime opponents; he even authorized the murder of Allende’s former ambassador to the United States and his American assistant, sending intelligence agents to blow up their car at a Washington, D.C., traffic circle in 1976.
About a decade after the Chile coup, the Reagan administration authorized the CIA to provide billions of dollars in covert assistance to the “contra” rebels in Nicaragua, who were fighting the Marxist Sandinista government. The Sandinistas had overthrown the right-wing dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza in 1979 and went on to win broadly free and fair elections in 1984, but they were also clients of the Soviet Union, so Reagan wanted them gone. After Congress banned U.S. assistance to the rebels in the wake of widespread human rights abuses, the administration responded by imposing a total U.S. trade embargo on Nicaragua and by maintaining support for the contras through secret and illegal arms sales to Iran.20 The Sandinistas were eventually ousted (in 1990) in a democratic election, but the price of that outcome was high—more than thirty thousand killed and massive human rights abuses including murder, kidnapping, rape, and terrorist attacks on civilians—and the outcome fragile. Ironically, since 2018 Nicaragua has experienced the largest and deadliest protests since the Sandinista era—protests targeting President Daniel Ortega, the very leader the United States spent a decade trying to overthrow!
Finally there are the cases of Grenada and Panama, where the United States used military power to oust hostile governments at modest costs. The United States invaded the small Caribbean island of Grenada in October 1983 to overturn a coup by an extreme left-wing faction that it feared would turn the island into a Soviet outpost. The invasion—undertaken at the invitation of neighboring islands (and under the guise of saving a small group of U.S. medical students)—was tactically successful, U.S. forces suffered fewer than twenty fatalities, and a degree of democratic governance was restored. And in Panama in December 1989, the George H. W. Bush administration sent in a force of some thirty-five thousand troops to oust the government of General Manuel Noriega, whom it accused of threatening U.S. citizens, human rights abuses, and drug trafficking. U.S. casualties were again limited (twenty-three fatalities and 235 wounded, with Panamanian deaths in the hundreds), and the invasion largely achieved its goal of restoring moderate government and democracy. There is a decent case to be made that in Panama and Grenada the United States achieved its objectives at reasonable cost, but if they are indeed exceptions, those exceptions only underscore the rule. The U.S. ability to alter the political futures of one or two small, nearby states hardly means it can do the same thing in Iran, Syria, or Iraq. Just by way of comparison, deploying as many troops on a per capita basis to Afghanistan today as were sent to Panama in 1989 would require a force of at least half a million soldiers.
Some proponents of regime change also bring up Bosnia and Kosovo as cases where U.S.-led military intervention can work if only the political will is there and sufficient military force is used. It’s true that in 1995 U.S. airpower and willingness to deploy twenty thousand U.S. troops (as part of a NATO force of sixty thousand) to Bosnia succeeded in stopping the war, and in 1999 sustained NATO bombing and the credible threat of a ground invasion led the Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw his security forces from the disputed province of Kosovo, from which they had previously expelled nearly one million Muslims. But it is notable that in both cases the intervening powers explicitly eschewed regime change and in fact went so far as to work with the very leaders who were responsible for the conflict—Milosevic in Belgrade, President Franjo Tudjman in Zagreb, and even the Bosnian Serb leadership in the self-declared Republika Srpska, which was granted significant autonomy as part of the peace settlement. Working with these leaders—whose ethnic nationalism was responsible for the war in the first place—was certainly distasteful, but it was the recipe for ending a war that had led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and refugees. The same was true four years later in Kosovo, where it took three months of NATO bombing and the threat of a ground invasion just to get Serbian forces out of the rebellious province. Insisting on regime change as part of that operation not only would likely have fractured the international coalition that was implementing it but would have required a longer and costlier war, with highly uncertain outcomes. Ultimately, defeat and humiliation in Kosovo, along with subsequent U.S. efforts to strengthen democratic forces in Serbia, might even have led Milosevic to fall more quickly than if regime change had been an explicit policy goal: he held and lost elections eighteen months later. The fact that it took a sustained bombing campaign by the strongest military alliance in history, the threat of invasion, and a willingness to deploy thousands of peacekeeping forces indefinitely to achieve even limited political objectives on Europe’s borders should give pause to those who argue that modest amounts of military force can bring about maximalist political objectives—regime change—anywhere in the Middle East.21
Whatever the track record in other parts of the world, the Middle East today is particularly unpropitious for successful regime change. It is made up mostly of artificial and often economically underdeveloped states plagued by deep ethnic and religious divisions with little history of democracy and the rule of law. Its main opposition parties are not primarily liberals, who form a distinct minority in all its countries, but Islamists, nationalists, or minorities of one form or another who are no more committed to democracy or freedom or good relations with the United States than most of the current leaders. The strong history of resentment of the United States makes it particularly hard for Americans to fill the vacuum once a regime is toppled, and geopolitical rivalries among the main actors in the region—to say nothing of outside players such as Russia and China, who posture as the defenders of the principle of national sovereignty—mean that some of them will always have a stake in American failure as well as the means to bring it about. Under these circumstances, it may not be a coincidence that the only country that has emerged from the “Arab Spring” more stable, inclusive, and democratic than it was before the revolutions broke out has been Tunisia, where the geopolitical stakes are limited and where the United States played hardly any role.
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The case against regime change in the Middle East in this book is a practical, not a moral, one. It goes virtually without saying—or at least it should—that the United States and most people in the Middle East would be better off if there were different leaders, governments, institutions, and systems in many of the countries of the region today. But the question is not whether we should wish for such changes to take place. The question is whether active, coercive measures by American policy makers to undermine or overthrow those regimes make positive changes more or less likely, and whether the very fact of taking such actions is likely to advance U.S. interests or undermine them. The benefits of getting rid of hostile regimes need to be balanced with the costs, risks, and consequences of doing so, and in most cases the latter have exceeded the former, despite lots of wishful thinking that it would be the other way around.
Nor is the problem with regime change some form of American malevolence, as many critics at home and around the world seem to assume. Many of those critics have in common a principled opposition to the use of military force and often accuse the United States of exercising power for its own sake or acting exclusively on behalf of powerful corporations seeking profits or oil. They see the United States as an imperialist, mercantilist power that undermines world order and international law by seeking material gain at the expense of weaker states, often contending that “the search for markets, and for access to natural resources, is as central to American history as it has been to the history of every great power in every age.”22 There is no doubt that economic interests and a desire to wield and demonstrate power influenced American decisions to pursue regime change in Middle Eastern countries, and those factors played a role in some—though hardly all—of the interventions discussed here. But my argument is not that the United States always seeks regime change for impure motives—often the motives are honorable ones—but that doing so rarely serves, and often undermines, U.S. long-term interests, regardless of intentions. Donald Trump, of course, has floated the view that after invading Iraq, we should have “taken the oil” and even claims to have done so himself in Syria.23 But that sort of thinking has fortunately been more the exception than the rule in American history, and even Trump—for all his falsehoods and bluster—has not actually implemented such illegal, immoral, and impractical ideas.24
There is something appealing about the can-do American spirit that lures its leaders and top officials to believe, often sincerely (and like generations of financial pundits before them), that “this time is different” and that with enough commitment, willpower, and resources friendly democracies can be established in the Middle East.25 But there is something dangerous about it as well. Whereas in other fields of human endeavor—medicine, for example—we seem to accept that there are certain problems and challenges that we did not create and cannot entirely resolve (and that trying to do so sometimes makes things worse), the U.S. policy debate about the Middle East suffers from the fallacy that there is an external American solution to every problem, even when decades of painful experience suggest that this is not the case. The next time U.S. leaders or analysts argue that the solution to a Middle Eastern problem is to use coercive efforts to get rid of an adversarial regime, Americans should take it as axiomatic that the benefits of doing so will be less than promised and the costs will be higher than expected.
The alternative to regime change is not—as a growing number of Americans would apparently have it—simply withdrawal or resignation. I do not share the view, often expressed both by Trump himself and by some of his critics on the left, that the United States has little at stake in the Middle East and that relative energy independence means Americans can now ignore what happens there. On the contrary, the United States has enduring interests in the Middle East that include preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, containing terrorism, ensuring the free flow of oil, preventing mass refugee flows, and saving human lives. I support efforts, sometimes including the threat or use of military force, to protect those interests. And I believe there are often practical things the United States can and should do to reduce conflict, alleviate suffering, promote prosperity, deter atrocities, and advance political reform. In most cases, however, a mix of containment, deterrence, diplomatic engagement, support for partners, selective military actions, arms control, economic investment, and the restoration of the United States as a respected, prosperous, and democratic alternative will produce better results than the pursuit of costly, quixotic, and unrealistic campaigns to overthrow regimes.
While there are no easy fixes to the massive challenges the United States faces in the region, the global track record of engagement, diplomacy, and containment is simply better than the track record of regime change, whether in places where regime change was achieved such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya or in places where dictators held on to power such as Syria, Cuba, and North Korea. As I argue in this book’s conclusion, even the fall of the Soviet Union, the model for many current proponents of regime change, actually came about not primarily through military confrontation and economic sanctions but through long-term containment, internal corrosion, generational change, détente, and a realization by its leadership that the course it was on could no longer be sustained, just as the diplomat George F. Kennan predicted when he spelled out the original containment policy in 1945. If Americans fail to draw the right lessons from nearly seventy years of failed attempts at regime change in the Middle East, they are bound to repeat them—with enormous costs for all involved.
The next seven chapters are the stories of how and why the United States pursued its perceived national interests by intervening—through a wide range of different means—to change governments and institutions in the Middle East over the past seventy years, and how those interventions turned out. Every case started with high hopes and often the best of intentions. But all came with exceedingly high costs, and none turned out well.
Copyright © 2020 by Philip H. Gordon.