On the temptation of regime change

Reason reports that, with the Hormuz conflict dragging on, the administration has revived its pursuit of regime change in Iran — a course it tried at the war's beginning and abandoned, presumably because it failed. I am told this is the same strategy, applied again under the same pressures that defeated it before. I know nothing of the particulars of modern military circumstance, but I know the shape of this mistake as well as I know my own name.

No principle of statecraft is more reliable than this: a great power that sets out to determine who shall govern another nation rarely controls what emerges when the old order falls. It may shatter a regime and find itself the unwilling custodian of the wreckage. It may spend treasure and lives without limit, and discover at the end that it has traded one adversary for several. The friends of liberty are not served by the overthrow of governments abroad when no plan exists to secure what follows.

I was known to counsel against entangling our young Republic in the permanent quarrels of Europe. That counsel was not born of timidity — I commanded an army through eight years of desperate war — but of a clear-eyed reading of interest. We ought to trade with all nations, quarrel as little as possible with any, and reserve our strength for the defense of our own compact. Regime change inverts every part of that posture. It entangles us maximally, quarrels us permanently, and exhausts the very strength we need at home.

There is, too, the matter of precedent. A republic that makes the removal of foreign governments a routine instrument of policy teaches its own citizens — and the world — that power, not law, is the true currency of nations. If we hold that principle abroad, we will find it difficult to resist at home. The habits of unaccountable force do not stay neatly confined to distant theaters.

As for the renaming of the Strait of Hormuz — which CNBC reports the administration has also floated — I will say only this: geography does not change its character because a man attaches his name to it. The straits will carry what they carry; the oil will flow or it will not; and posterity will judge the statesman by whether he secured his country's interests, not by whether he engraved his name upon the map.

My counsel is this: let those who govern ask not what this war does for the administration's legacy, but what a durable peace requires. Consult interest in every season. Engage adversaries with firmness and without permanent enmity. And resist, above all, the vanity of believing that the Republic's greatness is measured by the governments it has unmade rather than by the character it has kept.