Members of Washington’s foreign policy elite (which Ben Rhodes, Barack Obama’s deputy national security advisor, once labeled “the blob” during a moment of candor) are extremely fond of “regime change” as the preferred method for dealing with adversarial governments. Hawkish allies in Europe share that mentality.
Some activists now want to see if the strategy can work to oust Russian president Vladimir Putin and end the war between Russia and Ukraine with a definitive victory for NATO’s Ukrainian proxy. A few hawks even advocate pursuing regime change in China.
In both cases, the strategy likely would prove catastrophic.
The love affair with regime change, whether through direct force or indirect destabilizing actions, has had a firm hold on the thinking of Western interventionists for a long time. As far back as 1953, the CIA worked with the British government to remove Iran’s democratically elected but sometimes uncooperative prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, and restore the autocratic Shah to power. Washington’s targets throughout the international system over the decades number well into the double digits. Recent adversaries removed through direct or indirect U.S. action include Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, and (just last year) Syria’s Bashar al-Assad.
As the Iran episode confirmed, dictators are not the only rulers put on Washington’s regime change hit list. Barack Obama’s administration aided—and perhaps even organized—the efforts of anti-government demonstrators to unseat Ukraine’s elected pro-Russia president, Viktor Yanukovych, in 2014.
U.S. leaders regarded such regime change missions as great successes and have failed to learn two important lessons in the process. One is that apparent short-term successes frequently turn into longer-term fiascos. Getting rid of Gaddafi, for example, turned Libya into a cauldron of chaos where there were even credible reports of open-air slave markets for black African refugees. The overthrow of Mosaddegh ultimately helped pave the way to power for the current repressive Islamist regime and fostered an abiding hatred of the United States among many Iranians. Washington’s undermining of Yanukovych highlighted growing American contempt for Moscow’s view that Ukraine was crucial to Russia’s security. Repeated warnings from Putin and his associates that NATO’s continuing expansion toward Russia’s border, especially attempts to make Ukraine a NATO member or asset, would cross a bright red line went unheeded. The Kremlin’s subsequent military actions against Ukraine in turn led to the onset of a dangerous proxy war between NATO and Russia.
The other lesson that too many Western hawks have failed to learn is that even when regime change may prove feasible against relatively small, weak opponents, it will not work against larger, more powerful countries. Moreover, it is extraordinarily dangerous even to try such a coercive move. The risks include a vastly destructive war that could equal or even exceed the horrors of the two world wars. Nevertheless, reckless hawks indulge in regime-change fantasies with respect to both the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Russia.
Gordon G. Chang, a distinguished senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute, has pushed the dual narrative of China’s unrelenting hostility toward the United States and the PRC’s alleged internal weaknesses for more than two decades. In his 2001 book, The Coming Collapse of China, Chang stressed the latter theme. In his 2024 book, Plan Red: China’s Project to Destroy America, he placed primary emphasis on Beijing’s allegedly evil intentions and capabilities. The proper U.S. goal in either case, he contends, should be to undermine and facilitate the overthrow of the communist regime in Beijing.
As yet, though, vocal support for a regime change strategy directed against the PRC is confined to Chang and a handful of other extremely hawkish analysts such as Bradley Thayer, a writer for the Center for Security Policy. Trump administration officials, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, state firmly that the U.S. has no goal of pursuing regime change in China.
Although PRC officials remain suspicious of Washington’s long-term intentions, hardliners in the West focus more on strengthening Washington’s informal commitment to defend Taiwan than they think about fomenting regime change in the PRC itself. Even some of Beijing’s most aggressive opponents in the U.S. and its security partners in East Asia have concluded that seeking the overthrow of China’s communist government (however odious the regime might be) is a bridge too far.
Such prudence is not as apparent regarding regime change schemes with respect to Russia. Joseph A. Bosco, a Department of Defense official during George W. Bush’s administration, fills a role akin to that of Gordon Chang as a vocal lobbyist for regime change in Russia. But his extreme stance enjoys far more support from Western “mainstream” analysts and political leaders. Alexander J. Motyl, a professor of political science at Rutgers University–Newark, seems even more militant than Bosco. The title of a recent article of his in The Hill conveys the depth of his hatred for Putin: “Forget Carthage: Putin Must Be Destroyed.”
Motyl’s reason for choosing such an inflammatory title confirms why the chance of Western leaders adopting a regime change crusade against Russia is much greater than the emergence of such a strategy against China:
Latvian President Edgars Rinkēvičs recently caused a storm by posting on social media ‘Russia delenda est.’ This is a variant of the Roman senator Cato the Elder’s famous mantra in the last years of his life, prior to the Third Punic War, that ‘Carthago delenda est,’—‘Carthage must be destroyed.’ In proudly asserting its barbarism, the Putin regime has effectively made Rinkēvičs’s proposal thinkable and perhaps even necessary.’
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Witnessing the leader of a NATO ally make such a belligerent, irresponsible statement should alarm U.S. policymakers. There should be even greater concern that Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, is openly lobbying his country’s NATO supporters to pursue the objective of overthrowing Putin. Other Western leaders have hinted at favoring a similar course since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. At one point, even President Joe Biden exclaimed, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” Biden’s top foreign policy advisers quickly walked back the president’s remarks, giving assurances that Washington was not embracing a regime change policy toward Russia, but doubts understandably lingered. Given Donald Trump’s notoriously impulsive nature, concerns about U.S. intentions are still warranted.
It is imperative that U.S. leaders avoid the temptation to pursue the objective of regime change in either China or Russia. Both powers are much more serious and capable geostrategic players than any of Washington’s previous targets. It is profoundly dangerous and unwise to equate such adversaries with the likes of Iran, Guatemala, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Libya, or Syria. Those countries were all second-tier or even third-tier military powers. Their ability to inflict damage on the U.S. military was quite limited, although regime change in even those small, weak countries gave the U.S. far more trouble than anticipated.
Russia and the PRC are full-fledged great powers capable of mounting very damaging diplomatic, economic, and even military countermoves against the United States. Most importantly both countries possess nuclear arsenals that could inflict enormous damage on the American homeland. The U.S. has been able to overthrow adversarial regimes running much weaker countries, but it would be extremely dangerous, and quite possibly suicidal, to attempt the same strategy with respect to China or Russia. U.S. political and policy elites must abandon such irresponsible regime change fantasies.
