Fifteen years ago, I attended a gathering in Gdansk, Poland, to mark the 25th anniversary of the Solidarity movement. Lech Walesa, the former labor leader turned Polish president, presided. Among the invited guests were prominent dissidents from China, Cuba, Iran, Russia, and Zimbabwe. Walesa and other Eastern European leaders spoke about how after years of struggle, change came more suddenly than anyone expected. The responsibilities of governance overwhelmed many opposition movements. With few exceptions, those who struggled for freedom stumbled, and reactionary forces made a comeback. Only with the persistence of elections did real democrats succeed.
Unfortunately, the U.S. foreign policy apparatus appears not to have learned the lesson. The State Department and National Security Council remain more comfortable managing the status quo than preparing for, let alone affecting, change. Thirty years ago, this was evident when President George H.W. Bush delivered his “Chicken Kiev” speech, reputedly written by then-National Security Council aide Condoleezza Rice. Rather than recognize the promise of the Soviet Union’s fall, he essentially sought to maintain the status quo at the expense of Ukrainian freedom.
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The foreign policy community continues to penalize those who would break new ground in pursuit of freedom. While the State Department has for more than four decades advocated diplomacy with Tehran, it has spent no time planning for regime collapse in Iran. Talk to Iranian opposition figures, labor leaders, women’s rights leaders, human rights monitors, and environmentalists, and the common factor is that the White House refuses to engage, while the State Department does only reluctantly. During the George W. Bush administration, Secretary of State Colin Powell and his policy-planning staff poured cold water on dialogue with any Iranian who did not represent the regime. Bush subsequently missed a historical Walesa moment when he refused to endorse the same type of labor movement in Iran that Ronald Reagan once celebrated in Poland.
Then, in 2009, President Barack Obama ignored a popular uprising because he did not want to antagonize Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, to whom he had already sent letters seeking dialogue. Had either Bush or Obama gotten behind forces of freedom or worked to catalyze the fissures that now threaten to bring down the regime, they might have saved the lives of several hundred Americans subsequently killed by Iranian terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nor does it take much imagination to realize how different the Middle East would be without the ayatollahs’ incitement. Regardless, it has long been clear that the Islamic Republic is not the pinnacle of Iranian political evolution. It is a clear American interest to encourage something better.
Then there is China. President Xi Jinping tries today to exude an image of strength, but there are ample signs that the rot in Chinese society is as deep as it was in the Soviet Union’s later years. An aging population and over-the-top COVID-19 policies only exacerbate decline. Yet the State Department approaches communist rule as a permanent feature when it should instead craft every diplomatic engagement as a means to delegitimize, isolate, and hasten the collapse of the Chinese Communist Party.
The same is true with North Korea. If North Koreans truly believed that their dear leader was divine, the hermit kingdom would have no need to maintain its network of concentration camps. The North Korean model is doomed to fail. Fixing the damage after decades of indoctrination and rot will be difficult. It is better to plan for its repair than to normalize Pyongyang’s tyranny.
The State Department should plan for regime change in other countries: Azerbaijan, Cuba, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela, for example. Each country’s population has suffered under decades of dictatorship, and each deserves better. None wants external intervention, but that is a straw man. Opposing intervention does not mandate supporting an authoritarian status quo. To prepare for a post-dictatorial future in these countries is to prevent diplomats from losing sight that freedom is the goal and that liberty will always be an asset to U.S. national security.
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Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
