Trump’s Iran masterclass in how not to conduct regime change
We should have become used to it by now, but the idea that the President of the United States would introduce the idea of regime change via his social media platform still shocks.
Not only because he is supposed to be the leader of a liberal democracy, or because his own cabinet members were saying the opposite, but because it lacks insight about the nature of regime change.
The problem with changing regimes is ensuring that what follows is better than what has been replaced. Not only better for the interests of Washington, but, most importantly, for the people who are ruled.
The process of regime change is rarely neat or peaceful, so those advocating it have a responsibility to try to understand how it could come about from within without being imposed from without.
Washington has a poor record of managing political change in the Middle East.
Its disastrous invasion of Iraq unleashed a range of forces that could have been foreseen, but its advocates chose to ignore the realities of a culture different to its own. The experience of backing Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress is an example of the danger in promoting carpetbaggers who exist in emigre communities and who promise democratic change in a society in which they haven’t lived for years.
Libya’s descent into a civil war and continuing instability following the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime, Yemen’s downward spiral into civil war after the end of Ali Abdullah Saleh’s more than 30 years in power, and Syria’s decade-long brutal civil war that ended in a victory for Islamists are all examples of how fragile Middle Eastern societies can be when subject to political shocks.
Iran is a large, multiethnic society with its own potential fracture points.
But one thing that Iran has developed over the past century, well before the coming of the Islamic Revolution, has been the development of a national identity.
Ethnic Persians may be nearly two-thirds of the population, but the current President, Masoud Pezeshkian is an ethnic Azerbaijani; the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, half-Azerbaijani; and his former political adviser, Ali Shamkhani, an ethnic Arab.
How this sense of Iranian nationalism translates into popular support for the government in a “rally around the flag” moment, or to a desire to enact popular change is hard to tell.
The lack of an effective opposition that could conceivably replace the current theocratic model is precisely the product of the regime’s own repressive policies.
External actors who claim support inside Iran, such as Reza Pahlavi, son of the last shah of Iran, or the so-called National Council of Resistance of Iran, have at best niche support and neither are viable short- or long-term solutions.
At the same time, Iranian nationalists inside Iran would be unlikely to spontaneously rise up and challenge the government, let alone attempt to seize power.
To begin with, there is no indication that the core Iranian military and intelligence assets, on which the government relies for domestic stability, are failing. And where it has been weakened, it has come courtesy of Israeli airpower. Nationalists would lose some of their lustre were they to take advantage of this.
The unique theocratic governance model that has developed in Iran includes a range of sub-national actors; individuals, sectors and organisations that all rely on the status quo being maintained. Hence reforms to its nature are rare.
But these are desperate times and they will realise that if they don’t control change it may be imposed on them.
Internally driven reforms could be an option, but they would have to be significant enough to satisfy the Iranian population. Smaller voter turnouts at parliamentary and presidential elections show just how little faith the average Iranian is showing in their political system.
Regime changes are most likely to endure if they are indigenously driven, and where the fighting between pro- and anti-government forces is limited in duration and scope.
The more an external actor promotes one side over the other, however, or calls for the overthrow of a government without providing the means to do it, the more they can be painted as a pawn of another state actor.
Years ago a presidential address may have given succour to an oppressed people and encouraged them to rise up. Today, a presidential social media post asking a people whose country is under attack to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN is unlikely to inspire much other than mockery.
Dr Rodger Shanahan is a Middle East analyst, former army officer and author.
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