I found this article highly revealing on the Trump Administration's Iran policy. It says that the Administration's policy is based on a book that encapsulates to conservative view of Ronald Reagan and our victory in the Cold War. In this view, which is conventional conservative wisdom, all Presidents from Truman to Carter accepted the Soviet Union and in inevitable fact of life and merely wished to contain it. This led to a nuclear standoff, with the Soviet Union gradually growing in power and ultimately poised to win over the very long run. Ronald Reagan made a dramatic change in strategy, launched a massive military buildup, supported anti-Soviet insurgencies, and relentlessly confronted the Soviet Union, thereby bringing it down. It particularly focuses on Reagan saying, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" as the magic words that toppled, not only the Berlin Wall, but Communism world wide.
This theory is subject to question. It ignores how uniquely weak and illegitimate the Communist governments in Eastern Europe were, little better than foreign occupation, primed to fall the minute Soviet intervention ceased to be a threat. It underestimates internal Soviet weaknesses and the long grinding-down of policies of containment and military buildup since Truman's day. It glosses over the Soviet Union spending a third of its GDP on the military well before Reagan and how unsustainable that was. It also glosses over previous anti-Soviet insurgencies backed by previous Presidents. Finally, it seriously underestimates how corrupt and sclerotic the Soviet system was, how much it was rotting from within, and the old adage that the worst time for a bad government is when it begins to mend its ways -- as it attempted under Gorbachev. And by the time Reagan uttered is alleged magic words, the Cold War was in deep thaw, making such a thing seem possible for the first time since the Wall was built.
Still, let us grant these premises. Let us assume that if Reagan had not done so, we would still be in the Cold War with the Soviet Union, much as we were in 1980, but probably in a weaker position. Let us assume that Reagan's resolve alone was responsible for regime change in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and that we can do the same to any country the world over.
The fact remains that even if we can topple hostile governments at will by our opposition, we cannot topple foreign governments on a time table of our choosing.
Ronald Reagan began his military buildup as soon as he was inaugurated in 1981. Our support for anti-Soviet insurgencies had already begun in many cases; he added a few and expanded others. He gave the "Tear down this wall" speech on June 12, 1987. Yet the Berlin Wall did not fall and Communism did not end in Eastern Europe until after Reagan was out of power in November, 1989. The Soviet Union itself did not fall until 1991. So if your goal is to squeeze a regime to death, the lessons of Reagan and the Cold War seem to be that you should give it a decade to work -- longer than two presidential terms.
Contrast this with Bolton/Pompeo/Trump, who believed that they could topple the Maduro regime in Venezuela in a matter of weeks, or at most months, or that they could topple the government of Iran within a year. They are learning the hard way that regime change cannot be done at the snap of a finger.
Nor is this unique to this current Administration. Bush I believed that Saddam Hussein's defeat in Kuwait would topple his regime. This was not unreasonable; many dictators have been overthrown after losing a war. And, in fact, many uprisings did occur, although all were defeated. The big mistake was in assuming that Saddam was equally dangerous whether he had an army or not and maintaining sanctions in a vain attempt to topple the regime, rather than learning to deal with it in its weakened form.
And then there is the matter of Bush II and North Korea. At the time Bush II came to power, he was confronted with a North Korea bent on building a nuclear bomb, but he rejected either war or diplomacy as a way to deal with the situation. When North Korea unsealed its plutonium rods, expelled the weapons inspectors, and withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Bush II was unwilling either to go to war or to negotiate. Instead, he resolutely did nothing, and North Korea developed nuclear weapons. What was he thinking. The best guess was that he believed that refusal to talk to the North Korean government would bring it down. Give a moment's thought to that believe. One of the reasons Bush II was unwilling to go to war with North Korea was not just the fear of casualties, but that he thought such a war would interfere with his planned war in Iraq. Keep in mind that Iraq had lost the war in Kuwait twelve years earlier and had been under severe sanctions ever since. Yet it was apparent by then that nothing short of invasion was going to topple the Saddam Hussein regime. And consider that North Korea had been a pariah state since the end of the Korean War in 1953, that it had been severely isolated and sanctioned ever since, that that in the 1990's the North Korean regime had survived a famine with mass starvation (much worse that Iraq had endured under the sanctions). Keeping all that in mind, it was absurd to believe that mere refusal to negotiate could topple the North Korean government on any short-term time table.
And so here we are again. The hardliners in the Trump Administration assumed that regime change in the case of Venezuela and Iran was something that could be done at a snap of the fingers and are now learning the hard way that it is not.
And one further thought. If there is one other lesson we should have learned by now, it is that toppling a bad government does not prove that its successor will be any better. Certainly the fall of the Soviet Union has not meant the end of our super power rivalry with Russia. The article says that the Trump Administration has taken that into account and decided that regime change is still worth pursuing. After all, they say, even if the new government in Iran is as bad or worse than the old one, they expect Iran to be sufficiently weakened by the process to be less of a threat, just as Russia is now weakened from Soviet times. To which I can only say there is a sort of ruthlessly amoral logic to that. But if that is really your policy, have the decency to drop all hypocritical cant that we care about the people of Iran and wish them a better future.
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