Regime Change

“As you’ve heard us say, repeatedly, we do not have a strategy of regime change in Russia or anywhere else,” Antony Blinken told reporters on Sunday, while visiting Israel.

It’s wasn’t the first time a US Secretary of State was compelled to tell the world a US president didn’t say what everyone heard him say, and it surely won’t be the last. Blinken found himself pulling damage control duty after Joe Biden punctuated an aggressive speech in Warsaw with this line: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

“This man” was, of course, Vladimir Putin. Biden’s address conjured the Cold War. He described the current geopolitical conjuncture as a struggle of democracies versus autocracies. “The forces of autocracy have revived all across the globe,” he said, citing “hallmarks” including “contempt for the rule of law, contempt for democratic freedom [and] contempt for the truth itself,” references not just to Putin’s Russia and other autocratic regimes, but to his predecessor in the US.

Biden is correct, of course. Electorates around the world have developed a fascination with autocrats that goes beyond watching documentaries about the rise and fall of historical dictators. The last US election suggested tens of millions of Americans and dozens of US lawmakers are fully prepared to accept a soft version of autocratic rule as long as it doesn’t entail encroachments on everyday life. That’s a slippery slope. Some of the world’s most successful autocrats consolidated power over time, chipping away at press freedom, commandeering key institutions and slowly smothering dissent, until they made themselves synonymous with the countries over which they preside. By time the public realizes what’s happened, it’s often too late, and even if it isn’t, people who’ve spent the majority of their lives under one-man rule understandably fear change, not because they don’t think there’s a better way, but because they fear chaos. Such fears aren’t unfounded. Far from it. You’d have a difficult time making the case that post-Gaddafi Libya is preferable to one-man rule, for example.

To be sure, democracy isn’t a perfect form of government. Like capitalism, it’s flawed and also like capitalism, it can destroy itself under certain conditions. I’d again cite the 2020 US election. Americans very nearly voted away their democracy, a paradoxical scenario that raised an equally paradoxical question: If it becomes obvious that holding a democratic election will empower an executive who, with a complicit majority of lawmakers, is likely to abolish democracy, should a country’s current leaders somehow preempt that outcome by suspending elections temporarily in order to ensure they aren’t suspended forever? If so, doesn’t that mean democracy is already lost? And what of GOP efforts to tilt the US ballot in their favor with laws transparently aimed at curtailing voting rights? If one party is bent on undermining the fairness of elections, is the other party justified in suspending them in the name of keeping them fair? Either way, democracy is lost.

In America, the problem is fairly straightforward: Most people aren’t very intelligent, and a sizable portion of the electorate isn’t capable of discerning what’s in their own best interest. When you inject identity politics and culture clashes into the debate, you end up with a noxious mix that manifests in the decline of civic mindedness, the death of civil discourse and suboptimal political outcomes. Russians are probably smarter, by and large, than Americans. If you doubt that assessment, spend a day on Twitter or Facebook. The bar for being smarter than the average American is very low. Left to their own devices, Russians may not vote Putin out of office, but it’d probably be a close call, and it’d surely be too close for the Kremlin to risk a free and fair ballot that pits Putin against someone with a chance at garnering meaningful support.

In the wake of Biden’s supposedly “unscripted” remark in Warsaw, both Russia and the West, for different reasons, were compelled to pretend Russians do, in fact, have a choice.

Responding to Biden on Sunday, Dmitry Peskov said “the president of Russia is elected by Russians.” Plainly, that’s absurd. It might very well be the case that Putin would be elected by Russians, but he isn’t currently. It’s not an election when nobody else is allowed to make a serious run. Putin doesn’t countenance real competition and as such, Russians aren’t presented with alternative campaign platforms. In the strictest sense of the word, Russia’s elections aren’t as “rigged” as some of the more farcical examples of sham ballots around the world, but a one-horse race is no race at all.

In case it’s somehow unclear, let me condense my view. I’m fully willing to entertain the notion that Putin would likely be Russia’s democratically elected leader. All I’m saying is that he isn’t currently. I think that’s about as unbiased and fair an assessment as it’s possible to deliver under the circumstances.

Western officials were likewise compelled to pretend Russians have a choice following Biden’s remark. There are two issues. First, US-led efforts to bring about regime change have a very poor track record, to put it mildly. A less generous assessment would be to simply say such efforts never work. Talking about regime change is perilous.

Second, it’s possible Putin can leverage Biden’s remark to bolster the Kremlin’s domestic propaganda campaign, which was floundering. Between insisting Putin can’t remain in power and calling him a “butcher,” Biden may have handed the Kremlin the soundbites it needs to validate dubious claims that NATO does pose a threat to Russia and that the military campaign in Ukraine is about more than the paranoid delusions of an aging autocrat.

I’d say a few things in closing. America’s abysmal regime change track record isn’t relevant here. Biden was calling for regime change, but not in the same way that George W. Bush demanded Saddam, Uday and Qusay leave Iraq. Obviously, the US can’t invade Russia and there’s no group of SEALs elite enough to make it out of Moscow alive. There are places in the world where forced regime change is possible in practice even if the long-term results are likely to be poor (e.g., Iraq and Afghanistan), places where it’s possible in theory, but at a cost too great to risk (e.g., Iran), places where it’s possible in theory, but at a cost so great that theory is irrelevant (e.g., North Korea) and places where it’s not possible in practice or in theory (e.g., Russia and China).

Perhaps most importantly, there’s a risk for Putin of leveraging Biden’s remarks for a domestic audience. The US can’t use military force to bring about regime change in Moscow, but if economic conditions deteriorate such that everyday Russians are destitute, Putin could face a groundswell of popular discontent.

Efforts to brainwash the public have clearly been successful, but Russians aren’t North Koreans — they do know what’s going on outside of Russia, even if they’re conditioned to interpret events through Putin’s lens. At a time when inflation is likely to soar to 20% (or higher) and the domestic economy is all but guaranteed to suffer a prolonged downturn, bombarding the public with looped videos of an American president essentially suggesting the Russian people overthrow their government might not be the best idea for the Kremlin. In that context, Biden’s remark may have been intentional.

Finally, I’m not sure it’s worth worrying about whether Putin might view Biden’s remarks as an excuse to attack Poland or nuke London, as some media outlets appeared to tacitly suggest on Sunday. As they say in market circles, such risks are impossible to hedge. Besides, if Putin was seriously entertaining those kinds of suicidal thoughts, it only underscores Biden’s contention that he can’t stay in power.