Realism and "Regime Change" in Iran Posted by Shadi Hamid

The problem with realist analyses of international affairs is that it’s not always clear when the descriptive ends, and the prescriptive begins. I usually think this after reading Stephen Walt's posts on Iran. See, for instance, this post from a couple days ago. In a different post from last month, Walt, interestingly, says he’s torn on whether a change in regime in Iran would be a good thing. He says it most certainly would, from a human rights perspective:

Judged on purely human rights grounds, a more democratic and/or liberal government would clearly be preferable.

And then the “but” comes. He removes moral considerations and looks at the question from the standpoint of American interests. As much as it might give us emotional satisfaction, a democratic Iran – with the consent of its people, it would be more effective in channeling its human capital – would be a more powerful Iran. And a more powerful Iran would probably cause us a number of problems.

This type of arbitrary extraction of human rights from interest-based assessments has always struck me as a bizarre way of looking at how American interests are furthered. This, I suppose, is the realist proclivity for compartmentalization, for separating interests from ideals, as if the latter has no bearing on the former. I don’t know if Walt’s actually saying that we should think twice about promoting even peaceful reform in Iran or simply engaging in a counterfactual exercise, but, if it’s the former, it represents a rather myopic way of thinking about U.S. foreign policy.

First of all, the argument he presents – that we should be careful what we wish for, because democratic governments will be more able to oppose U.S. policy – isn’t very convincing even on its own terms. We have at least one example of a previously authoritarian country that democratized significantly in the Middle East: Turkey (one could perhaps add Iraq to this list). Turkey sometimes says “no” to America, as it should, and this, of course, sometimes causes us difficulty. But the Turkish government – an Islamist one no less – continues to have a strong pro-U.S. orientation. Moreover, the very fact that Turkey is both democratic and Islamist-leaning - these two features are correlated - is what gives the current Erdogan-led government the legitimacy and regional credibility to plan an increasingly influential role that U.S.-backed autocracies, such as Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, appear either unable or unwilling to play.

Taken to its logical conclusion, the reasoning in Walt's post – that dictatorships, by virtue of their authoritarianism, are weaker and easier to manage – has provided the implicit and explicit justification for more than five decades of destructive American policies in the Middle East, not just destructive to Arabs and Muslims, but destructive to us and our interests (we helped create a Middle East uniquely consumed with inordinate amounts of instability, political violence, sectarianism, and religious extremism). Doesn't seem very realist to me.

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