To the Editor:
May I offer two comments on Michael Mandelbaum's excellent "In Praise of Regime Change" (March), in which he points to the three states that disrupt global peace—Russia, China, and Iran—and calls on changing their regimes?
First, Mr. Mandelbaum calls the invasion of Ukraine, attempts to control the South China Sea, and dominance in four Arab capitals "aggressive nationalism"; but would these not better be called imperialism? More broadly, is not aggressive nationalism always imperialism, that is, ruling foreign peoples? This distinction is important to keep in mind.
Second, Mr. Mandelbaum is too reticent when it comes to what the U.S. government might do to turn these autocracies into democracies, offering the rather insipid trio of containment, weakening them "at the margins," and Americans providing an "attractive counterexample."
What he does not mention is challenging the legitimacy of the tyrannies and perhaps aiding their enemies. China and Russia would have to be handled with great delicacy, but Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin need to be put on notice that they cannot with impunity attack others, that doing so can exact a price in terms of legitimacy and stability.
Iran, in contrast, would be easy to check, due to its unrelenting hostility to the United States (symbolized by the slogan "Death to America"). Imagine what a boost to the mullahs' myriad enemies American political and especially material support would be. Imagine, too, how this would frighten those mullahs. After 40 years of the Islamic Republic of Iran, it is time for Washington to call for a change in regime.
Daniel Pipes
Middle East Forum
Michael Mandelbaum writes:
I thank Daniel Pipes for his two very interesting comments. As to the first, I refer to the foreign policies of Russia, China, and Iran as examples of aggressive nationalism because the three regimes justify these policies to their target audiences—the people they undemocratically govern—by basing them on nationalist sentiment. Evidence of this is the fact that, as I note in my new book, The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth, all three assert (falsely) that the policies in question are defensive in nature, undertaken to protect their countries from the allegedly rapacious designs of the West, led by the United States. They claim, that is, that their nation is in danger. Still, imperial considerations are relevant in all three cases: Each dictatorship also justifies its foreign policies as necessary efforts to restore its country to its rightful dominance of its home region, which, if achieved, would come against the wishes and at the expense of its neighbors. Moreover, China and Iran are multinational states from which the minority nations might well choose to secede if given the opportunity; and Russia was recently the core of the world's largest multinational empire, the Soviet Union, which Vladimir Putin sometimes seems committed to re-creating.
As for more forcefully challenging the legitimacy of the dictatorships, I see two potential difficulties. First, the dictatorial governments would surely portray such efforts as actual attacks on the nation, rather than the regime, and might thereby succeed in bolstering their own power at home. Second, the allies that the United States requires for successful campaigns of this kind might well decline to take part. Alarmed though they are at Russia's and China's aggressive conduct, the Europeans and especially the East Asians are reluctant to do anything to jeopardize their commercial ties with these two countries. That said, the three do have one particular vulnerability that could be more productively exploited than is now the case. The rulers of Russia, China, and Iran are all deeply corrupt. The democracies can and should do more to publicize and spell out the details of this corruption and change the Western policies that inadvertently support it, an issue on which the Washington-based Kleptocracy Initiative is doing important work.
