Yesterday (June 12), Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell rejected the notion of making regime change in China a U.S. foreign policy priority. This was in response to a question at a think tank event about an article by former Congressman Mike Gallagher and former National Security Council official Matt Pottinger in Foreign Affairs entitled “No Substitute for Victory: America’s Competition With China Must Be Won, Not Managed.”
Overthrowing the Communist Party of China (CCP) has long had currency in American political circles, dating back early days of the “China lobby.” It got high level endorsement by then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s August 2020 speech on “Communist China and the Free World’s Future.” Basically, it’s the intellectual position of anyone, then and now, who uses the word “ChiComs” in conversation.
According to Nikkei Asia:
“[Campbell] gave two reasons. First, America's allies and partners have witnessed previous attempts by Washington at regime change in other parts of the world and know that they have been unsuccessful. Second, the U.S. has for years overestimated its ability to influence the direction of Chinese foreign policy.”
I agree. Let’s expand on this:
Regime change: not a good track record. Campbell used the word “unsuccessful” in his criticism. But I would argue that the biggest failures of U.S.-led regime change are when it succeeded. The post-WWII ones that come to mind are Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973 and Iraq in 2003, but there are plenty of ignominious cases from the 19th and early 20th century. The invasion of Iraq, sold on a false premise, cost dearly in America and Iraqi lives and directly led to the ISIS calamity. Twenty years later, both public and expert opinion consider the invasion a mistake.
Reputational damage. Adventures in regime change, including the examples above, have done lasting damage to the United States’ reputation in those countries and around the world. They have given credibility to those who portray America as an imperialist bully. This severely undercuts our high-minded rhetoric about standing up for democracy and human rights, much less the efforts by those of us who genuinely want a foreign policy based on these principles. Even the realists will say that such reputational damage hurts our ability to advance our “interests.”
How do you accomplish regime change in China? An invasion by American armed forces, as in 2003? CIA ops as in 1954, 1954 and 1973? Armed infiltration like Cuba in 1961? The “how” is something the regime changers disingenuously don’t discuss. They refuse to be honest with the American public about the lives and resources they would be asked to sacrifice.
What would come next? Likewise, this is something the regime changers conveniently leave out of their homily. The lesson of Iraq after 2003 is right there for all to see, something the CCP topplers choose to ignore or deny. And it’s folly to think that a post-CCP China would be as peaceful and democratic as Dick Cheney told us a liberated Iraq would be. And let’s remember that the last non-Communist Chinese rulers were a brutal military dictatorship who imposed the “White Terror” on the last piece of territory they had control of.
Denying agency to the people of China. It is the height of arrogance to presume that it is the United States that knows best about whether and how the people of China need to be liberated. Make no mistake, I am not some relativist tankie. I want the people of China to have democracy, the form of government in which people are best able to exercise their human rights. And the U.S. should be active in demanding that the government of China allow people to enjoy their universally-recognized rights. We can shout about how much the CCP sucks, and how it denies the people their democratic right to change their government. But it is not up to us to make that change. That’s up to the people of China. We should not deny them that agency.
But what bothers me most about the regime change argument is how lazy it is. It’s just an empty sugar rush for people who want to make themselves sound virtuous, but don’t want to put in any of the hard work exploring and explaining the difficult trade-offs and costs associated with their policy approach.
The regime change scheme is also lazy because it doesn’t even bother with analysis. It’s just words. It’s nothing more than a transplant of the Cold War paradigm to today. But don’t believe me; read Gallagher and Pottinger, who are very explicit in their Cold War nostalgia if not fetishism.
Yes, the world would be a better place if the Communist Party of China disappeared tomorrow. But that in itself doesn’t mean that the people of China would be liberated into a world of freedom. Just ask the people of Iran how things went after the U.S. toppled their government. Or ask the people of Taiwan how much freedom they got in the decades after the anti-Communists took over their island.
So let’s remind the people of China that they have the right to enjoy their fundamental human rights and demand that their government respect them as provided by international law. Let us empower, not domineer, them.