In 1953, the U.S. overthrew the popular Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, orchestrating a coup and making way for a Western-friendly autocratic regime. We all know how that worked out. Iran has been our adversary since the 1979 revolution overthrew our shah. We made an enemy for nothing. An overlooked book published in 2021, called Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East makes the case that many of our anti-democratic interventions have similarly been lose-losers for us. On the one hand, they make a mockery of our ostensible democratic values. But on the other hand, they don’t even work out from the perspective of realpolitik, ultimately leading to regimes and populations hostile to us and our interests. (The author of that book, Phil Gordon, is now Kamala Harris’s top foreign policy adviser. Let’s see how that goes.)…..more
