‘Regime change” has in the last twenty years become the policy both the Republicans and the Democrats deride. The Neo-Conservatives, “Neo-Cons” for short, under president George W. Bush, made the idea, once part of theoretical political science, the driving force of American foreign policy, of the only superpower, in every corner of the world. There is quite a bit of irony in that turn of events.
Many, if not most, Neo-Cons began their engagement in American politics on the Left flank of the Democratic Party. Their later reassessment of their beliefs led them to embrace conservatism.
Yet not every item in their earlier political baggage ended up in the dustbin of history. Some ideas were carried over. The most consequential of them all was the view America should play on the world stage.
Their original, very internationalist view, Wilsonian in the American political parlor, of the American role became the approach of the Republican administration, under George W. Bush. The GOP, historically Hamiltonian in its foreign policy or, as one may describe it, realpolitik, has suddenly become an active leader of the world’s democratic revolution.
Disasters, Afghanistan, and Iraq followed, and regime change turned into the scary crow of any meaningful international engagement. Any administration finds confronting Russia to be a very difficult task as any real push back against the Kremlin brings fierce criticism and accusations, both from the Democrats and the Republicans, of a planned “regime change.”
This knee-jerk reaction makes American foreign policy completely ineffective because Russia needs change, and because America must influence Russia. Yet the solution will not come from regime change, but from a change of a different kind.
All dictatorial regimes rest on the personalities of their leaders and change as leaders come and go. Russia is the best example of that axiom. Under the czars, starting with Peter the Great, Russia’s politics, domestic as well as foreign, had been a reflection of the monarch in St. Petersburg. The regime, until the February Revolution of 1917, did not change, but its policies did.
From one czar to another, policies would undergo one hundred degrees turns: From ultra-conservative Nicholas II to the liberal liberator of the serfs, his son, Alexander II. Even one czar, like Alexander I, could promulgate opposite policies during different periods of his reign. The regime, the Russian Monarchy, did not change, but its policies, specifically its relationship with the rest of the world, were a kaleidoscope ever ready to change its colors and shapes with the death of the ruler.
THE SOVIET regime that replaced the Russian Monarchy followed the same pattern. Even the rigidity of the Soviet administrative state did not prevent the personality of the ruler, the general secretary, from determining and changing the political course of the country. Joseph Stalin, though claiming to be Vladimir Lenin’s disciple, had policies his spiritual father would find abhorrent, and warned about that possibility in his secret letter to the party.
Nikita Khrushchev denounced his predecessor and “opened” the USSR to the outside world. Leonid Brezhnev tried, though unsuccessfully, to reclaim Stalin’s mantle. Mikhail Gorbachev tried reforms and ultimately dissolved the country. The regime did not change, but anyone claiming that dealing with Stalin or Khrushchev had no differences missed half a century of history.
Russia's leadership throughout history confirms Russian policies can change without regime change
Russia’s leadership record of the past few centuries unequivocally confirms that Russia’s policies can change without regime change. The key to that change is the one person presiding on the throne then in St. Petersburg and now in Moscow.
This is what the US policy on Russia should be aiming for: a change of the leadership without threatening the existing regime, no matter how detestable and unacceptable it may be. Removing President Vladimir Putin from power is a must. Can that be accomplished and at what cost? The answer to that question lies not only in the military aspect of American policy, but also, and primarily, in its economic component.
The modern Russian state is not an ideological construct, as it was under the Bolsheviks, nor is it a religious imperial entity, as it was under the czars. It is an extreme form of state capitalism, it is an economic pyramid scheme where a few possess almost everything. Those few are driven only by their economic interests, both expansion and preservation of the capital.
They do depend on the “power vertical” with Putin at its head to maintain the stability and order. Yet they can accept someone else in his place if that is the only condition for the system to stay alive. The army is in a similar situation. As the war in Ukraine has clearly shown, it is primarily a business to “distribute” huge financial resources across the military leadership.
The US and its allies must create an economic condition via the most stringent economic blockade across all available financial avenues to cut Russia off from most of the world (the total blockage is impossible without China and India). Yet even that would be enough to force the elites surrounding and supporting Putin to think about the future and the preservation of their capital.
If the answer is not regime change, because it is a change that would unquestionably endanger the elites, then a “persona change” as an answer is not unacceptable. With certain guarantees from the West, it may even become an easy solution.
What if the autocrat taking Putin’s place is even worse? It is a valid concern. However, every policy has a risk, and after all, doing nothing has gifted us Putin. In the multipolar world in which the US finds itself in today, it cannot choose the regimes it has to deal with and who it makes its allies, but it can influence the choice of the countries’ leaders. Russia should be the first test of this daring and rational approach.
The writer lives and works in Silicon Valley, California. He is a founding member of San Francisco Voice for Israel.