Foreign Affairs Regime Change Means More Migrants for the West President Trump should negotiate a deal with Tehran and promote peace in the Middle East. Credit: Nicolas Economou/Shutterstock A number of Republican senators and conservative pundits want regime change in Iran. “I think it is very much in the interest of America to see regime change,” Sen. Ted Cruz told Fox News on Sunday. “I don’t think there’s any redeeming the ayatollah.” Most pushing for regime change know they can’t go full neocon to sell the idea. The public is repelled by anything resembling the warmongering against Saddam Hussein, particularly talk about nation building.  So advocates for regime change in Iran have settled on a new formula: regime change, but without the nation building. Supposedly, this is completely different from what we’ve done before, but that’s unlikely to be the case. In fact, we already tried this strategy out in Libya 14 years ago. It did not make the world a better place. Instead, it resulted in a failed state in the Mediterranean that has allowed millions of Africans to pour into Europe. The Libyan disaster shows what the West gets out of regime change: more migrants flooding into our countries. It’s a factor no one beating the war drum considers. It’s assumed that the new Iranian government will mean peace and harmony throughout the region. Recent history paints a very different picture. Israel would be the only clear beneficiary from regime change in Iran. The primary funder and arms supplier of their enemies would disappear. Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis would be greatly weakened without Iran, if not completely finished. Israel would no longer have a state enemy to worry about. Assad is gone from Syria and Israel has normalized relations with many of its neighbors. Chaos in Iran would be no issue for the Israelis, as a migrant crisis wouldn’t affect them. It may even prove beneficial to their interests. More fighting-age Muslims heading elsewhere means fewer potential enemy soldiers. The civil war in Syria destabilized and depopulated one of Israel’s chief enemies. The same thing happening to Iran would be a dream come true for Israel.  But it’s not clear how the West will benefit. The Islamic Republic is no friend to the U.S. and has committed many outrages against America and our allies. But it’s often better to stick with the devil you know rather than the one you don’t. Those pushing for regime change seem to think the mullahs will be replaced by America-loving liberal democrats who will thank Israel for bombing their land. All the Islamists will magically disappear and Tehran will finally welcome a Chappell Roan concert. Not a single regime change has turned out this way. Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya are far from model democracies. They all experienced violent civil wars that killed tens of thousands and created unstable governments. There’s a high likelihood the same would happen in Iran. Like these other countries, it’s not homogeneous and holds the seeds for ethnic conflict. Persians are only a bare majority of the population. Kurds and Azeris may fight for independence rather than stay in a decapitated Iran. That would further destabilize the region, as it would obviously cause conflict with neighboring states. The Islamists will still be around and fighting for their cause. It’s unclear what serious alternative to the mullahs exists, especially one that could keep the country together. A power vacuum is far more likely to lead to violence than to a harmonious resolution in favor of liberal democracy. Just look at what happened to post-Saddam Iraq. If violence breaks out, prepare for another migrant wave. Over two million Iraqis left their homeland after America “liberated” it. Over six million Syrians fled their country during their civil war. The fall of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya made the North African country a gateway for millions of African migrants to go to Europe. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans left their nation in the wake of failed nation building.  It’s extremely likely there will be another migrant crisis if the mullahs fall. This could even be the biggest one of all if it results in a regional war involving multiple state actors. Iran is more populous than the previous states that experienced regime change, meaning more potential migrants. The instability could also revive the fortunes of ISIS and other Sunni extremists. Another Middle Eastern country falling to chaos and anarchy would serve as the perfect launch pad for another caliphate, just like it did in Syria. The migration waves caused by civil war in Libya and Syria forever changed Europe. The whole matter of boat crossings became a grave concern after America helped topple Gaddafi. The Libyan strongman had made deals with European leaders to keep a lid on migrant sea crossings. With him out of the picture, there was no longer anyone around to block the waves of African migrants. In 2011, there were around 28,500 migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea to Italy. By 2016, that number had shot up to 163,000.  The Syrian migration wave made this problem even worse. Then-German chancellor Angela Merkel famously welcomed hundreds of thousands of Syrians in 2015, with other European states following her lead. Hailed as the dawn of a new, more wonderful Europe, the Syrian migrants proved more of a curse than a blessing. Many Europeans now see these migrants as having brought only crime, cultural change, and welfare dependence. Immigration is now a central issue for Europeans and has roiled continental politics.  America backed regime change in Syria by funding rebel groups. ISIS and Europe’s migrant woes were the sole returns on this investment.  Taking in migrants is a choice, of course. But Europe struggles mightily to control its borders already. Governments that try to enforce basic immigration law often find their actions blocked by courts and the European Union. Some leaders, such as Italian interior minister Matteo Salvini, have faced criminal charges for trying to block migrant boats. Greece may face sanctions over its efforts to keep migrants out of Europe. European nations even struggle to deport convicted child rapists and murderers. Keeping out migrants is easier said than done. Another migrant wave on the scale of what Europe witnessed in 2015 would push the continent to the breaking point.  America could manage this situation better thanks to being across an ocean and being more effective at enforcing immigration law. But this would still cause problems for us and create demands for us to solve this problem. The Syrian migrant crisis also affected the U.S. It’s foolish to think we can break something as big and complicated as Iran and expect it will fix itself. Every single recent example proves otherwise. Those demanding regime change have learned nothing from our mistakes.  It would be much wiser to negotiate a deal with the current Iranian government and promote peace in the region. If we want to get a handle on mass migration, the last thing we need to do is to create another chaotic failed state in the region that pushes Middle Easterners our way. The post Regime Change Means More Migrants for the West appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs Trump Makes the Right Choice for Now The president has decided to give diplomacy a chance. (BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images) President Donald Trump has received an enormous amount of pressure over the last week to join Israel’s war against Iran. The conservative radio host Mark Levin has used his show, as well as a private lunch with Trump, to highlight the dire threat a nuclear-armed Iran poses to Israel, the United States, and world civilization. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has jumped on Fox News at every opportunity to press Washington either to provide the Israeli Air Force with the big, 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) munitions that are required to level Iran’s underground nuclear facility at Fordow or to bomb the site itself. Some of the more delusional thinkers have spouted off about using Israel’s bombing campaign to change the regime in Tehran or to disarm the Islamic Republic. And then there’s Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who despite his assertions to the contrary is no doubt trying to convince the White House to become a belligerent. Trump, however, didn’t get elected to a second term to start new wars—he was elected to end them. He said so himself during his inaugural speech. Trump may talk about killing foreign leaders like the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un (during the first year of his first term) or the Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but his actions are more restrained than his rhetoric suggests. Yes, he inherited an air war against the Houthis in Yemen and chose to accelerate it by widening the scale and pace of strikes, but he also decided to call it quits after less than two months, partly because the operations weren’t doing much of anything to protect freedom of navigation in the Red Sea. When Trump does decide to use force, he has favored quick, theatrical displays—like the 2017 and 2018 U.S. airstrikes on Syrian military assets—instead of the kind of drawn-out wars that epitomized the George W. Bush and Barack Obama presidencies.  Earlier this week, Trump declared that nobody knew what he was going to do on Iran. On June 19, he made his decision: War will be averted, for now. “I have a message directly from the president: ‘Based on the fact that there is a chance for substantial negotiations that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future, I will make my decision on whether or not to go within the next two weeks,’” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt stated on June 19. Trump, it seems, is willing to give the Iranians two more weeks to show up to a serious negotiation and find a diplomatic way out of the crisis.  That’s good news, even if the hawks cry about it on television. Although proponents of the military option have tried to assure the White House that taking out Fordow would be a fairly easy, smooth, and limited U.S. military operation, it would also be an act of war visited upon a country, Iran, that doesn’t shy away from retaliation when its back is against the wall. We saw this play out five years ago, when the U.S. assassination of Iran’s Gen. Qasem Soleimani incited Tehran to launch a couple dozen ballistic missiles at two U.S. bases in Iraq, which injured around 100 U.S. service members. By a stroke of luck, no American was killed in those attacks and Trump was able to deescalate before full-blown war erupted.  But luck is a bad crutch for a policy to lean on. Even a limited U.S. operation against Fordow wouldn’t be clean. The Iranians would respond to such a strike as they have in the past, and while nearly half of its ballistic missile inventory may be used up, they still have hundreds available (if not more) to strike U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan. As the New York Times reported on June 17, “Iran has prepared missiles and other military equipment for strikes on U.S. bases in the Middle East should the United States join Israel’s war against the country.”  Pundits can wave these stories away, but U.S. policymakers, let alone the president of the United States, can’t afford to be so cavalier. It would only take the death of one American for Trump to be under intense pressure, including from within his MAGA base, to escalate further. A limited one-off military action could then snowball into the very kind of conflict Trump doesn’t want to fight.  The long-term impacts of a U.S. military strike wouldn’t be rosy either. The Trump administration has stressed that Iran can never be allowed to acquire a nuclear weapon, a position every successive U.S. administration has taken since the Iranian nuclear issue became a major U.S. foreign-policy concern. The question, however, is: What is the best way to accomplish this objective? The neoconservative and interventionist wings that have long sought the Islamic Republic’s demise have consistently claimed that wiping out Tehran’s nuclear infrastructure is a better way at getting at the problem than sitting down with the mullahs and negotiating an amicable agreement. And with time, the logic goes, U.S. military action could fundamentally weaken the foundations of the Islamic Republic to the point that the bearded ayatollahs are run out of town. Yet if non-proliferation is the U.S. policy goal, then destroying Iran’s uranium enrichment capacity from the air would be an awful way to do it. This is due not only to the risks involved in any high-stakes military operation but also because using force is a great way to push Khamenei into ordering a dash toward a nuclear bomb. Thus far, this is a decision the supreme leader has not taken. Getting clobbered by a superpower, however, tends to have a shocking effect on smaller states that can’t compete at the conventional level and are already living in a tough neighborhood. A nuclear deterrent, whose appeal has already grown among some segments of the Iranian security establishment, becomes even valuable in this scenario. And since the Iranians would likely kick out International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors from their country in retaliation, the world would have a much more difficult time determining when and where Tehran was seeking to reconstitute its program.  Perhaps Trump thought of all of this in his deliberations. Perhaps not. The important thing is more time has been put on the clock. Fortunately, U.S. Envoy Steve Witkoff retains an open line of communication with Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, and European officials are scheduled to meet with their Iranian counterparts on Friday. The Gulf Arab states are offering their services as well to deescalate the situation, so there are multiple opportunities for a diplomatic exit-ramp. Even so, that exit ramp will only be a viable route if Trump is willing to actually negotiate a deal that he and the Iranians can live with. At the moment, he isn’t negotiating so much as giving ultimatums the Iranians are highly unlikely to bow to. This needs to change, and fast, because the current positions of the parties—the White House continues to insist on zero enrichment while Iran continues to insist that enrichment is a red line—make an impasse.  Trump has a choice: He can cede a maximalist position in the service of peace, or he can stick to it and again find himself at the precipice of war in two weeks. The post Trump Makes the Right Choice for Now appeared first on The American Conservative.

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