A Regime Change Policy By Any Other Name Is Still Horrible

Jason Rezaian challenges the Trump administration to call its Iran policy by its true name:

Why won’t President Trump’s foreign affairs advisers call their approach to Iran by its true name? They owe that to the American people.

If the administration’s goal is regime change, they should come out and say it. They should present a plan outlining how they intend to bring it about and what they intend to do once they’ve achieved it. They should explain what the benefits of doing so would be to the American public and our strategic interests.

They should make that case and see if it resonates.

As Rezaian suspects, making the goal of regime change explicit would not be popular here, and it would provoke even more international opposition. The U.S. record of seeking regime change in the Middle East and North Africa over the last two decades has been abysmal. When the policy is “successful” and the regime is overthrown, the result is chaos, bloodshed, and displacement of millions of people, and when it is attempted and fails the result is much the same. No one who has the slightest concern for the Iranian people wants to plunge their country into the upheaval and violence that would follow the forced collapse of the regime. A destabilized Iran would cause enormous problems for all of its neighbors, and it would introduce even more instability into the region. Just by attempting to bring down the Iranian government, the U.S. has increased the risk of war.

Trump won’t openly make a case for regime change in Iran because it is a political loser for him, and so he and his officials keep up the absurd pretense that the administration wants to negotiate. Everything that the administration has done has made it politically impossible for Iran to enter negotiations with the U.S., so we know that the offers to talk are meaningless. That leaves only one plausible explanation for what the administration’s real goal is, and that is to force the Iranian government to fall. Trying to strangle Iran into submission doesn’t make the U.S. the slightest bit more secure, but it does earn us the resentment and distrust of tens of millions of Iranians. Our interference has served only to make regime hard-liners stronger and to impoverish the rest of the population. If regime change ever comes to Iran, it will happen because that is what most Iranians want, and it isn’t going to be forced on them by a foreign government that clearly holds them and their country in contempt. The U.S. has no right to try to force that outcome, and it is wrong of our government to be making the attempt whether they admit what they’re doing or not