Patient diplomacy and social chane are more likely than war to accomplish regime change.
President Trump is engaged in audacious efforts to bring about regime change quickly through military activity. He did it in Venezuela, is trying it in Iran, and moving towards that in Cuba. We will see the results, but that approach is very different from accomplishing regime change through long term diplomacy, which was the standard technique developed by professional diplomats in both Republican and Democratic Administrations with the exception of Clinton going to war to stop concentration camps flourishing again in Europe. Trump may not think of his ventures as experiments. He does not think that way, and neither do people of the left, who think these ventures are unplanned and doomed to fail and morally wrong, or by the right who think that any foreign intervention is wrong or applaud Trump for his decisiveness. I think of it as pursuing a different way of doing international relations, whether or not the goals are worthy. I don’t like any of thse three regimes, but the question at hand is whether his procedures can likely work, however much they are opposed to the conventional wisdom.
This Trump effort was anticipated by his attempt to bluster Canada and Greenland to join the American union. That was heartily rejected by the rest of the Free World and there was an irony in hat Germany sent troops to resist invasion, an irony of history for those who reach back three quarters of a century.
Venezuela was more [rp,ising. It had long been subject to American intervention. TR’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine insisted that Venezuela not become beholden to European banks. For a while, Venezuela was a fiefdom of Nelson Rockefeller before he went into politics. So Trump used the military to oust Maduro and got the compliance of the rest of the regime so that the United States oil companies could control its oil reserves and make the oil fields productive though the biggest oil company balked because the political situation was too unreliable for it to make sense for make a big investment on building Venezuelan production and refining capacities. But the real point is that, despite this coup a success, all it did was shift control of oil. There was no regime chane in that different parties or ideologies changed power, only oil control.
Trump’s most recent claim to regime change concerns Cuba, which, l;ike Iran, has been a thorne in the American side ever since the Castro regime replaced the strongman Fuljhensio Batista m who was subservient to American interests. Castro’s was a true revolution in that it brought in new cadres and ideologies and shifted allegiance to the Soviet Union. Castro was soon after taking power engaged in show trials and treating gays as illegals and so drew American liberals away from him just as American conservatives were also offended by Castro wanting to negotiate sugar quotas and other American interests. Kennedy tried a military solution for regime change. He was convinced to believe thatCuba would revoltagainst Castro as soon as the Bay of Pigs invasion was started. Nor did exploding cigars accomplish the trick of decapitating Castro. So both Democratic and Republican administrations took on the long view that the Soviet-like regime ninety miles from Florida would be embargoed until the regime collapsed from the economic strain. American leftist volunteers to harvest the Cuban sugar crop would not save Communist Cuba.But Cuba survived even if a diminished and and economically unprogressive country. It exported medical doctors and other professionals to other Latin American countries despite the United States embargo. The Clinton and Obama Administration tried to engage in more cordial relations with Cuba by allowing more visitors across the Florida Straits and allowing some foreign investment so that gradually Cuba without abandoning its authoritarian rule might become more part of the fraternity of nations. That long term endeavor, this patient gradualism, is what establishment diplomatists thought was the way to accomplish regime change: not war but modifying social structure.
Trump in his first as well as his second term was not interested in gradual accommodation. He was belligerent against Cuba’s regime and some people found his exasperation with Cuba, as in other places, exasperating. So he has put in an oil embargo without calling it that and that has led to power blackouts in Cuba and has demanded that the President of Cuba resign, apparently following the Venezuelan model to get rid of the top and have the remaining regime be compliant, which might mean Trump resorts in Cuba, it having numerous beaches. Trump may imagine that Havana would become as it was under Batista, the whorehouse for Americans. What other is Trump’s goal for Cuba other than the status quo ante after the wrong road followed from 1959 to the present? Regime change often means restoration rather than doing something new partly because something new is unlikely . A Hispanic country will likely remain that way, dominated by hierarchy and tradition rather than entrepreneurial. Mexico is only gradually changing into a westernized country in the last few generations, in no small measure because of the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement deal constructed by President George H. W.Bush which allowed Mexican factories to be built in great numbers on the southern side of the Rio Grande. The gradualist approach is slow but successful and might have worked with Cuba.
Just as the Castro Revolution had disrupted the expected geopolitical evolution of Hispanic America, with countries becoming more modern and capitalistic under American auspices, Cuba a sore or an evil precedent that also took over Venezuela, and was thwarted in Chile by Kissinger intervening to upend Allende, Iran was also a surprise. The fear of diplomats was that the Soviets would challenge the United States and the gradual modernization of Iran by invading IOran so that the Soviets would get warm weather ports, and so there would be tank battles on the Iranian plain just as strategists thought that there might be tank battles on the north German plain if the Soviets moved westward. Instead, the Iranian Revolution was a retrogressive and parochial one where theocracy replaced modernization and a major aim of the new regime was to destroy Israel and counter what was happening towards modernization in the Sunni, Arab nations. Therefore it had to be dispatched so as to correct the “rightful” course. Decapitation, as is usual, was an early try. Then isolation and embargos. Then a thaw whereby Obama managed to use diplomacy to accomplish a treaty that would make nuclear development very difficult, buying twenty or thirty years until, likely enough, the religious flames had quelled or been suffused. But Trump abrogated the treaty partly because Obama had made it and because Trump prefers direct confrontation.
But technology in warfare moves forward. Warfare was pretty much what it had been from World War II through the war in Afghanistan: either tanks and air support or small action asymmetric warfare. Advances since then gave Israel, a nation of ten million people, an advantage over the ninety million in Iran. War was now about drones and countermissiles and electronic surveillance and counter-surveillance. The big guns in battleships and air forays from aircraft carriers were replaced by the burps of naval artillery that allowed the Ukrainians to take out a prized Russian battleship. {The U. S. S. Gerald R. Ford must have a remarkable defensive bubble around it that lets it go so close in on Arabian waters) The idea that Israel was a gigantic aircraft carrier with the disadvantage that its civilian population was on board was replaced by American made an Iron Dome shield so that Iran could not do much damage to Israel.. That plus decapitation put Iran at a disadvantage, but not without resources. It held itself together and so regime change through the military was unlikely. The Iranians lost their navy, and their missiles and their drones but retained economic leverage by cutting off oil supplies,. And the best prospect of Trump would be to declare victory as Sen. Akins of New Hampshire suggested during the Vietnam War and get out. But at the moment Trump is in denial. The wiser course in retrospect would have been to follow the diplomatist’s course and keep the Obama nuclear deal, as slow and tedious and pending on impending events, as it proposed.
The conclusion to be reached from looking at the long view is that military ventures do not accomplish regime change. The Roman Empire was evolving before the Sack of Rome. Englishness remained distinct after William the Conqueror. The French and British fought for hundreds of years and neither replaced their opposing regimes. Even if the British defeated the American Revolution and hung the Founding Fathers, the fact of a n American entity would have persisted and before long had fair representation in Parliament which is all Franklin wanted, though it would not have made the Declaration of Independence an essential creed. But the American Bill of Rights was modeled on the British Bill of Rights of a century before protecting civil liberties and the primacy of the legislative branch to meet regularly and authorize all expenditures. Napoleon defeated the Germans one time after another until they defeated him, The Restoration in France did not restore the French monarchy as it had been because France was industrializing and becoming a bourgeois nation even though the French monarchy was restored. The evolution of social processes went on rather than returning to the status quo ante. The Germans did not oust the French regime in 1870. It only wanted reparations and the use of Versailles to inaugurate a united Germany. Only 1940 was crucial, an exception to the rule. A German occupation of Great Britain would have destroyed Parliament and the British sense of civil liberties, though the British Isles might have been redeemed by North Americans, as Chirchill contemplated. The Vietnamese didn’t change as a result of war and neither did the Americans or the Russians as a result of the Cold War, each remaining one democratic and the other totalitarian. So regime change is a long term cultural process whereby for three quarters of a century, a unified Europe has emerged, and longer than that, indigenous Americans have become assimilated into the nation. Trump is too ignorant and impatient to see that.