All
I came across the following article by Gerald F. Seib and it jogged my
thoughts and I came to the conclusion that this concept is something
that has bothered me for years. It certainly is important in my opinion.
http://stream.wsj.com/story/election-2016/SS-2-738144/
Regime Change, Good or Bad? The Question Splits the Parties
Voters get black-and-white glimpse of where candidates stand
Campaign 2016 is doing the nation a favor by crystallizing candidates’
views on a big but unresolved question that has hung over American
foreign policy since the 9/11 terror attacks: Is America better off
trying to change dangerous governments, or living with and containing them?
By Gerald F. Seib
In its own inchoate way, Campaign 2016 is doing the nation a favor by
crystallizing candidates’ views on a big but unresolved question that
has hung over American foreign policy since the 9/11 terror attacks: Is
America better off trying to change unfriendly and dangerous
governments, or living with and containing them?
This question does't’t merely bedevil the nation’s policy makers. It now
splits both parties, as last week’s Republican and Democratic debates
showed. Standing firmly on the anti-regime-change side are Democratic
Sen. Bernie Sanders and Republican Sen. Rand Paul, joined to some extent
by GOP candidates Sen. Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. Good luck finding
anything else on which they agree.
The immediate cause of this debate is Syrian President Bashar al-Assad:
Should the U.S. be trying to unseat him, so that everyone can then focus
efforts on destroying the Islamic State, or ISIS, caliphate that’s been
established on Syrian territory? Or has recent history shown that
throwing out thugs and dictators like him merely opens the doors for the
kind of chaos that sucks in American troops and creates problems worse
than the ones the U.S. was trying to solve?
But this is hardly an argument about Syria alone. It is about whether
the U.S. made matters better or worse in the Middle East, and in the
broader fight against Islamic extremism, by launching an invasion to
oust Iraq’s Saddam Hussein; whether the region is better or worse off
without strongmen Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Moammar Gadhafi of Libya to
keep things stable; and whether regime change should be the goal of
American policy in Iran.
This may sound like a repeat of the debate over the realpolitik approach
that Henry Kissinger and others took in the 1970s. The essence of
realpolitik was that the U.S. should live and even work with unsavory
characters if doing so served America’s national interests.
But the new debate over regime change is different in one important
respect. The argument over realpolitik was in many ways a moral one: Did
the U.S. have an obligation to try to force out, say, tin-pot dictators
in Latin America who committed human-rights abuses yet served American
interests by standing against the spread of communism?
The debate about regime change today is less about morality than about
practical results. Those supporting regime change are arguing less that
it’s the morally correct stand, but rather that getting rid of hated
dictators who are feeding extremist anger through their brutality
enhances stability and therefore American interests in the long run. The
thugs, the argument goes, are merely sitting on kegs of dynamites that
will explode with greater force the longer they stay there.
Those who are against regime change argue that the stability those
dictators provide is better for American interests than the leap into
the unknown, and the resentment that arises within the local populace,
when American force is used to expel them. To these skeptics, the chaos
in Libya today and the bloody, decade-long occupation of Iraq illustrate
that the dangers in regime change are real, while the rewards can be
illusory. Better to keep the dictators in their box than to open
Pandora’s box by ousting them.
That argument was made forcefully in last week’s Republican debate by
Sen. Ted Cruz: “Assad is a bad man. Gadhafi was a bad man. Mubarak had a
terrible human-rights record. But they were assisting us—at least
Gadhafi and Mubarak—in fighting radical Islamic terrorists. And if we
topple Assad, the result will be ISIS will take over Syria, and it will
worsen U.S. national-security interests.”
Mr. Trump declared that “we can’t be fighting Assad. And when you’re
fighting Assad, you are fighting Russia, you’re fighting a lot of
different groups.”
Mr. Paul was more succinct: “Regime change hasn’t won. Toppling secular
dictators in the Middle East has only led to chaos and the rise of
radical Islam.” He was echoed by Mr. Sanders in the Democratic debate,
who portrayed regime change as an area of sharp disagreement with former
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: “I worry too much that Secretary
Clinton is too much into regime change and a little bit too aggressive
without knowing what the unintended consequences might be.”
The counter-argument was summarized in the Republican debate by Sen.
Marco Rubio: “Assad is one of the main reasons why ISIS even exists to
begin with,” he said. His brutality toward Sunni Muslims within Syria
“led to the chaos which allowed ISIS to come in and take advantage of
that situation and grow more powerful.”
The U.S., argued Mrs. Clinton, has to try to do two things
simultaneously, “work with the tough men, the dictators, for our own
benefit, and promote democracy.”
That’s a tough road, she noted. This campaign illustrates that, in a
messy world of shifting alliances, there is no consensus on how to
travel it.
*Write to *Gerald F. Seib at jerry.seib@xxxxxxx
<http://stream.wsj.com/story/election-2016/SS-2-738144/>
R. E. (Dick) Driscoll, Sr.
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