Trump’s Iran Policy: A Good Start

As the Washington Post said years ago, if you want an enduring solution to the Iran nuclear program, you must work for regime change in Tehran, and while Trump effectively laid out the rationale for such a policy, he did not call for it. Instead, he called for harsh measures against the regime, not its removal.

That was years ago. Since then, we’ve had a number of clear lessons about how regime change imposed from the outside—often at enormous cost—usually works out. The Washington Post has learned something. The Trump administration apparently has not.

The Trump administration wants regime change in Iran. But regime change usually doesn’t work.

The fundamental problem, as we argue in a recent article, is that foreign-imposed leaders answer to two masters — the intervener that placed them in power, and their own citizens. Interveners typically replace a government to avert or eliminate perceived security threats, hoping to install elites who will implement their preferred policies.

But once in power, newly installed foreign leaders are confronted with the political realities of ruling their countries. Often, they find that keeping their domestic audiences happy brings them into conflict with their foreign backers.

Foreign-imposed leaders thus face a Catch-22. If they placate their foreign patrons, they risk alienating those at home, who may take up arms against them. If they turn against their foreign backers, however, those patrons may seek to remove them, reigniting conflict between the two states.

Our unnecessary overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime removed the single greatest obstacle to the regional ascendancy of Iran. Removing Saddam’s imaginary nuclear weapon program freed up Iran’s time and resources to pursue an entirely real one.

That’s ultimately what we got for thousands of American lives and trillions of dollars of additional national debt. If a lesson goes unlearned, it will likely be repeated.

Well, we know how it works out when all our forces are pulled out before the regime in power is ready to stand on its own. That’s disastrous.

Nouri al-Maliki set an unacceptable condition for U.S. troops to remain beyond a withdrawal date that had already been established because he was a textbook model of a leader imposed from the outside who then found himself having to respond to the demands of powerful factions on the inside to remain in power. His ability to set such a condition was created by a specific provision of the Status of Forces Agreement, which prevented the United States from making a unilateral decision to extend our stay.

That presidential dilemma was created one month before Obama took office.

However, suppose a progressive, pro-Western regime ruled Iran, representing no threat? War discussions would be unnecessary. Yet many forget that, until 30 years ago, exactly such a regime led Iran, until it was toppled with the help of the same U.S. foreign policy establishment recently beating war drums.

@Deplorable Me, #7:

BOTTOM LINE, settled science, end of debate, Obama pulled the troops out of Iraq because he WANTED TO.

That’s simply not true—which is no doubt the explanation for all of the BOTTOM LINE, settled science, end of debate verbiage. The actual bottom line is that to leave American personnel in Iraq after the withdrawal date previously established by the Bush administration, Obama would have had to agree to put them under the legal jurisdiction of local Iraqi courts. That was the play the SOFA had empowered al-Maliki to make—and that condition, no responsible American Commander in Chief would ever have accepted.