The US-Israeli war with Iran has revived an important debate about “regime change” in foreign-military affairs and whether it’s advisable, avoidable, or terrible. We might better understand this war, past wars, and the debate more broadly if first we recognize that a regime entails a form of governance and second that governance can be either structural or superficial, public or private, permanent or temporary. Governance also pertains to a wide variety of fields. Below I discuss only a few applications – to politics, money, and schooling.
Public and Private Governance
“Government” to most people is synonymous with politics, even though politics is but one of several ways we govern ourselves and our institutions. Instead of conflating the terms, we should be careful to unpack them. In “Tripartite Governance: A Guidepost for Proper Policymaking” I argued that governance is the broad concept and how politics is best understood as public governance, in contrast to private governance. The latter occurs at the group level or personally-individually and is voluntary. Politics instead entails coercion, whether prohibitions or mandates; the state is defined as the sole institution with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force in a specific territory. Private group governance entails by-laws, mission statements, and leaders, whether in businesses, colleges, sports leagues, or book clubs. Although members can’t do whatever they wish, they’re also free to leave. As to personal governance, my essay refers to “the daily routines, regimens, plans, and schedules that most individuals adopt and try to obey, to varying degrees, pertaining to diet, nutrition, hygiene, health, work, finances, home and car maintenance, travel, exercise, romance, family, friends, religion, and charity.” Here we’re neither in a private group nor a public prison, so we aren’t obliged or compelled to obtain permissions or obey dicta.
Of crucial importance for the status of any free (or unfree) society is the balance or overlap that exists between public and private governance. With too little (or no) public rule there’s anarchy. With too little (or no) private rule, there is tyranny (aka, “totalitarian” government). In America since WWI the public sphere has grown relative to the private, albeit more so in the economic realm than the civil, a reversal of the liberal trend that developed after 1790.
Structural vs. Superficial Regime Change Throughout History
The etymology of “regime” is interesting and clarifying for this discussion. It’s “a system of government or rule, a mode of management” rooted in the Latin term regimen, meaning “guidance, government, and means of guidance.” The term is traceable also to regere, meaning “to direct, guide, lead, rule.” When we regulate things or behaviors we manage, govern, or guide them. A military regiment adheres to uniform procedures and formations. Those following a strict dietary regimen preclude certain foods. An interregnum is a period between rulers or regimes. Regicide is the killing of a king (ruler). French revolutionaries in 1789 vanquished what they called the ancient (old) regime. Tragically, they next failed utterly to erect a liberal and viable political regime, unlike the successful aftermath of the American Revolution. Those two regime changes were deep and structural, but although they occurred in close proximity (1787, 1789) and during the Enlightenment, they yielded very different results: constitutionalism, Washington, and liberty for one versus terrorism, Napoleon, and despotism for the other. The difference was attributable to differing political philosophies (Locke in America, Rousseau in France) but also to the fact that the Americans, unlike the French, had spent roughly a century practicing a high degree of political self-governance.
If change in “public (political) governance” is revolutionary or truly transformative, regime change is deep and structural, not merely superficial. We’ve already recounted the case of thirteen American colonies in 1787 forming a union of states with republican governance independent of the British monarchy and France in 1789 shifting from monarchy to anarchy, Consider also Bolshevist communism replacing monarchy in 1917 Russia, or the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. and the end of the Cold War (1990-91), when Russia became less powerful (or threatening) and a dozen Eastern European states, former colonies (“satellites”) of the Soviet Union, became independent and politically self-governing. Another case of major structural change is modern political governance in Iran, which shifted from stratocracy (rule by the military) of the Pahlavi dynasty (1925-1953-1979) to theocracy (under the Islamic Ayatollahs).
In contrast to deep and structural regime change, superficial or shallow change occurs within the normative-legal confines of the underlying structure or constitution. For example, Britain’s monarchical system was ruled for a time by a succession of monarchs from a particular “house” (e.g., the Windsors). For some decades in the 20th Century, America’s political system was dominated by a particular party (e.g., the Democrats) or family (e.g., the Kennedys or Bush’s). When in 1924 Stalin replaced a dead Lenin and his seven years of despotic rule, the U.S.S.R. remained no less a despotic regime under Stalin’s reign through 1953. Iran had two successive Pahlavis ruling militarily from 1925 to 1979 then two Ayatollahs ruling theocratically since 1979, but each case involved surface, not structural regime change.
What level of understanding exists today about the nature of “regime change” in the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, whether by those seeking it or those wishing to avoid or ignore it? The debate is befogged in part because the regime concept itself is obscured. This can make for vague strategies, dashed expectations, and mission failures. Iran’s administrative-political regime was surely changed on February 28th with the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and top officials, but it wasn’t deep change on the level of ending or seriously altering the basic structure of Iran’s public and private (totalitarian) governance: its Islamic theocracy and constitution, the much deeper regime that enshrines and mandates Quran-based Sharia principles, laws, and terms. If this underlying, more permanent regime is the underlying source of danger perceived by the U.S., Israel, and other nations, it won’t matter much who in Iran next occupies top seats in the administrative regime.
For decades most world leaders have said Iran mustn’t have nuclear weapons not because the weapons per se pose a threat (other states wield them but aren’t expected to use them offensively) but because fearful, skeptical leaders haven’t trusted how a West-hating Iranian regime might use them. Nor can it be said that fear and danger emanate merely from the fact of Iran’s Muslim-heavy populace, for such exist also in heavily populated Indonesia, Turkey, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, where administrative and constitutional regimes alike are more secular. It’s possible but unlikely that Iran reverts to its pre-1979 regime of stratocracy (rule by the military), but roughly a tenth of the million-man army (and Iran’s economy) is controlled by the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps), which is religiously devout and indeed, as its name indicates, pledges to defend the 1979 Islamic revolution. It seems an unlikely group to willingly or fundamentally alter the basic system, even if it still ruled it.
Lessons can be learned also from the many significant regime changes that occurred during and after WWII, the most notable being Germany and Japan. In the post-war period especially, those nations’ constitutions (deep level regimes) and administrations (shallow level regimes) were demilitarized and made more liberal-democratic, for the most part jointly with victorious Allies and sympathetic locals. Regime change optimists today prefer to cite these cases rather than those which have gone awry (because illiberal) in this century alone (Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria), but unlike many nations in today’s Middle East, Germany and Japan had previous history and experience with liberal-democratic-constitutional governance. They were also, pre-war, more developed economically than most other nations.
Regime Change in the United States
Although shallow regime changes are distinguishable from deep ones, they can accumulate to large and longer-term change that transforms a nation but seems noticeable only with hindsight. The U.S. Constitution, the underlying political regime governing America since 1787, has been amended seventeen times since 1792. That’s surely “regime change” at the margin, but some changes have been material and consequential. The post-Civil War amendments banished slavery and gave black men voting rights. The 1913 changes permitted a federal income tax and direct election of Senators. The 1920 change granted women the right to vote in federal elections. More than a few serious scholars have reinterpreted such seemingly superficial alterations as effectively structural in nature and effect. Arthur Ekirch, late professor of intellectual history, argued in The Decline of American Liberalism (1955) that American liberty had eroded so much after two world wars and the New Deal that the nation had become different in kind (and for the worse) not merely in degree.
Other scholars have contended that radically different interpretations of the U.S. Constitution, even in the absence of formal amendment, should be designated as structural regime change. The U.S. Supreme Court in the 1930s, bowing to pressure from New Dealers (their initial schemes were ruled illegal) and FDR (recall his “court packing” plan), chose to permanently reduce the Constitution’s original protections for economic rights and liberties. That was structural regime change, according to law professor Bernard Seigen in Economic Liberties and the Constitution (1980). The Court’s seemingly superficial surrender of certain duties led to a vast new regimentation of previously free behavior, a proliferation of regulatory agencies and regulations, and subsequent, near-perpetual growth in what some now decry as a “deep state” of unelected, unaccountable, entrenched bureaucrats operating without separated powers. Georgetown law professor Jonathan Turley deems this the “fourth branch of government,” which simultaneously writes rules, judges them, and enforces them, qua legislator, jurist, and executive. By definition, it’s not a legitimate branch designated in the U.S. Constitution. It’s as though this grand charter of liberty magically got a brand new Article, but without a debate or a convention, and one, oddly, which mocks and contradicts the principle of the other articles.
Regime Change in Money and Education
In two other crucial institutions – money and schools – we can also differentiate between deep and shallow regime change, which helps us identify real problems and valid solutions.
As to money, America during her first 125 years, from the U.S. founding in 1789 until 1914, was on the classical gold standard operated by a (relatively) free banking system (with few, brief exceptions during the Civil War). That was predominantly a capitalistic system, neither socialistic nor fascistic. The radically opposite system we know today as central banking and fiat money is different in kind, not merely in degree, from the pre-1914 system – a structurally different monetary regime geared not primarily to the financial needs of a free economy but to the fiscal neediness of perpetually profligate public governance. Being incompatible with objective, market-based money, the state-centric regime first diluted then eliminated gold from the system in three phases (1914, 1933, 1971). Not gold but public governance failed us.
Ample evidence shows that the performance of money, banking, and the economy was better under the market-centric regime. Less important to results in the private, market-centric monetary regime was whether it was operated by J.P. Morgan, Andrew Mellon, or their successors, just as it’s been less important for the public, state-centric regime whether it’s been run by Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan, or successors. In the latter case, there may be an array of “monetary rules” debated and adopted, or not, but the deeper, structural regime of fiat money issuance remains unchanged and undoubted. These latter changes, under gold and fiat money alike, are regime changes, to be sure, but of the shallow sort. Thus one can make too much of whether Kevin Warsh will be the next Fed head or not (he’s been nominated), or an “inflation fighter” (or not), because he won’t be ending the Fed, adopting a gold price rule, or re-instituting the gold standard. Absent deep regime change, we can expect no big change.
As to schooling, America during her first 125 years had largely private, a-political, market-based primary and secondary schools, vocational schools, apprenticeships, colleges, and universities, funded substantially by user fees and philanthropists (plus occasional land grants from government). Payers had a solid self-interest in monitoring school performance and obtaining decent results for their money and their students. Like the monetary system of the period, schooling was predominantly capitalistic, not socialistic. Quality was high and opportunity wide for those of sufficient aptitude and potential. Few people, including even rich kids, attended college merely “for the sake of it,” or because everyone from parents to politicians told them it was the only path to true success in life, or because it was state-subsidized. Like money, the radically opposite system we know today – public (government) schools and publicly-funded universities – is different in kind, not merely degree, from the pre-1914 system. It’s a structurally distinct regime geared not to the needs of students or graduates in a free economy but to the needs of a burgeoning state that prizes conformity and obedience, perhaps even to the point of preferring less-informed, more manipulable voters.
The evidence is abundant by now, after a century, that public schools – which entail public ownership and control of the means of instruction – undervalue and degrade human capital, just as public ownership and control of the means of production undervalues and degrades business capital. Less important to results in the private, market-centric regime was whether it was operated by Harvard, Horace Mann, or the Little Red School House, just as it’s been less important for the public, state-centric regime of the past century whether it’s been influenced by teachers’ unions, U.S. Department of Education, vouchers, charter schools, or Hillsdale College (which eschews government funding and control).
Regime change per se isn’t a bad thing, although if it’s too facile, fickle, or frequent it can make private life itself chaotic and ungovernable. America’s Declaration of Independence demanded radical political change but also reminded rebels that the virtue of “prudence will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.” That a political constitution can be occasionally (though not easily) amended makes it a less brittle, more durable governing regime. What some classical liberals rightly herald as the wonders of “spontaneous order” – Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” – aren’t possible amid anarchy, absent a wider, deliberately designed legal context. It’s hopeless to expect markets to arise, survive, or flourish absent law and order (both public and private governance), but the hope should be that the design is rational, not foolish. Alexander Hamilton got it right in Federalist #1, when he said the Framers and ratifiers were to “decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” The U.S Constitution was a rare, rational, logical act of social engineering – sound political architecture. Like an expansive, well-designed bridge, it could do great good, help millions go where they freely chose, and stand the test of time.
