Existing Regimes

Principle 15:

Perpetuation of Existing Regimes

Many nations of the world suffer from domestic civil unrest. This unrest usually takes the form of a revolutionary challenge to the existing governments of those nations and to the current regime in control of those governments. Many developing nations lack a functioning mechanism for the peaceful transfer of power from the current governmental regime to its successor regime, or for replacing one form of government with another, or replacing one constitution with another. Civil unrest leads to civil disturbance and ultimately to a coup d'état or civil war. In both coup d'état and civil wars, the United States tends to support the status quo; the status quo is the existing regime. Only after the challengers successfully replace the existing regime or government, and demonstrate an ability to control the entire nation, will the United States recognize the challengers as the legitimate government of the nation. Since the U.S. is seen by the new government as a supporter of the old regime, the new regime often initially rejects American overtures of friendship, recognition and support.

The tradition for cautious recognition of new regimes goes back to President James Monroe and his caution recognizing the new liberal revolutionary governments of most Latin American nations in the early 1800s. In the 1900s, the United States gives active support to the Nationalist Chinese against their Communist Chinese replacement, to the governments of South Korea and South Vietnam against legitimacy claims by their sister nations to the north, to existing regimes in Iran, Nicaragua, Congo, Cuba, Philippines, Greece and a host of other nations against their rival domestic replacement regimes. In most cases, the rivals eventually lay successful claim to the government of these nations. Until the claims are successful, and control of the nation consolidated under the new regime, the U.S. continues to support the previously existing government. In some cases that U. S. support continues even after the leadership of the supported regime is forced into exile.

Over the past three centuries, American support of existing regimes takes a variety of forms. In Haiti, the United States intervenes to prevent European powers from seizing the nation for failure to repay national foreign debts; the United States takes control on the nation's finances until the nation can be returned to solvency. In Mexico, the United States sends troops to "help" the Mexican government restore order when Mexico-- and the American Southwest-- is threatened with revolutionaries and banditry. The U. S. launches a similar intervention in Colombia to "help" that nation's leaders suppress the activities of drug warlords. In Granada, the U.S. "helps" free that nation from the threat of Cuban civil engineers alledged to be plotting to seize that small Caribbean island. The United States rarely intervenes to support opposition elements, but intervention to bolster the existing regime is more commonplace, although still relatively rare compared to the interventionism of colonial and communist powers of the past three centuries.

This support for the existing regime grows out of America's liberal tradition. The United States has no right to intervene; the people must choose their government for themselves, and the government must choose its policies for itself. This is called self-determination. This bias toward non-intervention is a major constraint on American foreign policy, especially when dealing with the emerging, underdeveloped nations.

"(T)he United States must deal with officialdom. Even when the United States believes that officialdom is corrupt, digs its own grave, and endangers the West's position by throwing reformers into the arms of the Communists, it is officialdom that the United States must convince.... To say that the United States must deal with officialdom does not mean that the United States cannot keep in touch with opposition parties, or encourage reformers, or frown on gravediggers in power. Indeed, it may well be that the United States has been much too shy in all these respects. But even if the United States became a virtuoso in the difficult art of combining diplomatic correctness with subdiplomatic manipulation, there would still remain sharp limits to what a non-totalitarian power can achieve. There is more than a difference of degree between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Communist International." (Hoffman, in Ikenberry, 47)

In a few cases, the United States breaks with its tradition of supporting existing regimes. In the case of some Latin American "banana republics" in the early 1900s, American concern for promoting commerce, protecting Western values, protecting American interests and furthering American manifest destiny leads the United States to actively engineer the overthrow of existing regimes and engineer their replacement with more desirable regimes or governments. During the "Cold War", American fear of communism leads to American covert operations intended to replace pro-communist regimes, or inadequately anti-communist regimes, with strongly anti-communist regimes in the Middle East, South-East Asia, and Central America. For example, the United States Central Intelligence Agency assassination of South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem in the early 1960s is intended to lead to a replacement regime which could deal more effectively with the South Vietnamese communist rebels. And, United States covert support for the Contra opposition in Nicaragua in the 1980s is intended to destabilize the elected communist government in that nation.

The United States also traditionally opposes the division of existing nation-states into smaller self-governing nation-states, even when civil strife within the nation appears to remand such a division. The United States not only supports the existing government and regime, but the existing boundaries of the nation. Ethnic minorities within many nations make demands for ethnic self-determination and self-rule; the U.S. rarely supports these demands. The rejection of these demands may be a consequence of America's "melting pot" ethnic and racial history. If people of several nationalities, races and cultural traditions can cooperate to found, develop and govern the United States, peoples should also be able to do the same in other nations of the world.

In some cases, national boundaries are created as an arbitrary consequence of colonialism or international diplomacy rather than created by any logic based on natural geography, ethnic or religious or cultural inclusion (or exclusion), ancient empires, or natural or manmade barriers. The U.S. supports maintaining existing boundaries even when those boundaries fail the test of rationality and common sense. The U.S. opposes Katanga independence in the Congo, ethnic separatism throughout Africa and Asia, the breakup of Yugoslavia into its constituent republics and further fragmentation of the Soviet Union beyond that of the initial collapse. In some cases, American national interests may be furthered by a division of a nation-state. For example, the establishment of an independent Kurdish nation in the Middle East would work to the detriment of America's enemy, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, and the establishment of an aboriginal homeland in Brazil would help protect the equatorial rain forests essential to maintaining American weather patterns, yet the United States gives little support to either initiative.

Perhaps, if the organic analogy is correct, nation-states, including the United States, realize, in order for each to survive, they must support the survival of all others. If citizens in one nation-state can freely replace regimes and governments and successfully demand the fragmentation of existing national boundaries to allow for self-determination and self-government of constituent minorities in one nation-state, a similar fragmentation can happen in all nation-states. The United States federal government fights a costly Civil War in 1861-65 to prevent that fragmentation from happening in the United States; the United States government certainly does not want to encourage Americans to think in secessionist and separatist terms again by encouraging independence, secession, revolution, and separatism in other nation-states around the world.

Principle 15:

Perpetuation of Existing Regimes

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