US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has made refusing regime change acentral tenet of his diplomatic approach, promising as early as March 2021not to “promote democracy through costly military interventions or byattempting to overthrow authoritarian regimes by force.
“We have tried these tactics in the past. However well-intentioned, theyhaven’t worked,” he said.
The history of US foreign policy is littered with such attempts bothclandestine and overt — and more or less successful — to resolve a crisisby replacing the leaders of an adversary country.
It first took place in Latin America, when the CIA played a role,particularly during the Cold War, in military coups aimed at overthrowingleft-wing presidents.
But the regime change strategy did not disappear with the rise of the IronCurtain: now the only global superpower, and confident of beinguntouchable, the United States began asserting its power even more overtlyat the turn of the 21st century.
As early as 1998, a Congressional text signed into law by Democraticpresident Bill Clinton stated that “it should be the policy of the UnitedStates to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Husseinfrom power in Iraq.”
When Republican George W. Bush arrived at the White House in 2001, hesurrounded himself with neoconservative figures — sometimes branded as warhawks — who theorized a return to American interventionism as a way topromote the democratic model.
The September 11 attacks accelerated the shift. The “war on terror” quicklyled to the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Soon after, Washington put its words about Saddam Hussein into actionduring the 2003 Iraq War, by overthrowing him after wrongly accusing him ofhiding weapons of mass destruction.
*‘Catastrophic’*
In Libya, the 2011 intervention by Washington and its European allies wasofficially to protect rebels who took up arms against Moamer Kadhafi duringthe Arab Spring uprising. But the mission was actually extended until thedeath of the Libyan dictator.
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In Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, the primary objective of bringing theregime down appeared to have been quickly achieved.
On the other hand, the goal of “nation-building”, or the necessaryconstruction of a stable — and Western-allied — state to succeed the fallenpower, ended in failure at best.
The Islamic State group took advantage of Iraqi instability in themid-2010s. Twenty years of costly military presence in Afghanistan ended infiasco when the United States withdrew last summer, only to see the Talibansweep back to power.
Libya is still unable to extricate itself from a decade of chaos.
US politicians, almost unanimously aligned with a public opinion weary ofthe “endless wars” waged on the other side of the world, are now promotinga less interventionist foreign policy.
Without the military option, though, the United States does not necessarilyhave the means to achieve its ambitions. Under the presidency of DonaldTrump, Washington wanted to force Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro frompower through a campaign of international sanctions — a plan that ended infailure.
From the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Biden drew a red line: neverenter into direct confrontation with Russia, to avoid a “Third World War.”
For Kreps, the professor, “even the most hawkish policy makers seem to havelearned from the foreign policy outcomes of the last few decades.”
“The instability in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan were bad enough, butinstability in a country with thousands of nuclear weapons would becatastrophic,” she said.
