Accelerating regime change in Iran: a delicate proposition

Richard Haass, the President of the Council on Foreign Relations, has recently put out a piece calling for the U.S. to actively promote regime change in Iran.  His article is surprisingly blunt and characterizes the regime’s determination to develop nuclear weapons in urgent terms. Most importantly, it’s worth paying attention to this piece because what Haass says matters– the Council on Foreign Relations often performs a consensus-building function across large swaths of the foreign policy community.

It’s also important to recognize what Haass is and is not saying.  Although he’s calling for regime change, he aims to achieve it through means other than war — targeted sanctions, name and shame campaigns, etc.

The controversial aspect of Haass’s position has everything to do with another debate entirely:  whether the Iranian opposition is better able to overthrow the regime with or without American assistance?  Haass’s argument is simple:

Critics will say promoting regime change will encourage Iranian authorities to tar the opposition as pawns of the West. But the regime is already doing so. Outsiders should act to strengthen the opposition and to deepen rifts among the rulers. This process is underway, and while it will take time, it promises the first good chance in decades to bring about an Iran that, even if less than a model country, would nonetheless act considerably better at home and abroad.

Yet, I’m not sure this logic passes the scratch-and-sniff test.  It doesn’t matter what the Iranian regime is saying about America.  What matters is whether or not the Iranian people believe what the regime is saying about America.

Right now, the regime is baselessly accusing the US Government of interfering in its domestic politics in order to spark a nationalist backlash against the revolutionaries.  But there’s a problem – the accusations aren’t sticking.  There is very little evidence to suggest that the regime’s efforts to sully the reputation of the revolutionaries by linking them to “American imperialists” is resonating with the people.

If the US does begin to actively assist the Iranian opposition, wouldn’t that make the regime’s efforts to tar the revolutionaries significantly more effective?  Almost certainly.  The key question then is to determine whether or not the benefits of American assistance to the revolutionaries would outweigh the reputational costs to the revolutionary movement.  The jury is out on that one.

What to do about failing states: A false choice between the lesser of two evils

During the Cold War, there was never any debate about what to do with weak, failing, and failed states.  The consensus was that the U.S. should do whatever was necessary to prevent them from falling into the enemy’s orbit.  Democracy was desirable but often unachievable.  More often than not, the U.S. Government was willing to accept something far short of “Jeffersonian democracy” in hotspots around the world.

The end of the Cold War began a running debate about what threat failed states presented and how that threat should be dealt with.  In a widely-cited article, scholar Robert H. Dorff argued that the dangers posed by failed states were understood well-before 9/11.  The real challenge has been reconciling two competing imperatives regarding what should actually be done about failed states.

On one side of the debate, idealists argue that the U.S. should promote a freedom agenda to democratize the struggling states of the world.  On the other, realists insist that any government is better than no government.  These two camps give rise to seemingly incongruous U.S. support for flailing democracy initiatives in corners of the world that have never before known it and odious regimes in others.

Towards a “legitimacy agenda”

This disconnect can be resolved through a re-conceptualization of what it is the U.S. should be trying to do in the first place.  Instead of pursuing democratization for democracy’s sake or equipping dictators to improve the internal security of their oppressed states, Dorff notes that the U.S. should be promoting the cause of legitimate governance the world over.  Dorff argues that legitimate governance is simply government by consent of the governed.  In other words, government that is tolerated by the people even if it is not a government of the people, by the people, and for the people (sound familiar?).

The key here is to recognize that totalitarian states and ungoverned states actually present much the same problem, albeit for slightly different reasons.  When a state fails to fulfill its obligations under the most basic social contract, for reasons of commission or omission, it is bad news for global security.  To begin to operationalize a legitimacy agenda, the U.S. would need to identify indicators of legitimacy (hint: if you are using gangs of motorcycle-mounted paramilitaries to beat your people into submission, you are probably illegitimate), and customize policies to facilitate peaceful, incremental change wherever possible.  Sometimes, that will mean doing much.   Other times, it may mean doing nothing at all.