{"id":528946,"date":"2025-09-05T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-09-05T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/leregardlibre.com\/?p=528946"},"modified":"2025-09-18T09:02:28","modified_gmt":"2025-09-18T07:02:28","slug":"change-of-plans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/leregardlibre.com\/en\/policy\/change-of-plans\/","title":{"rendered":"Regimes come and go, countries stay"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Iran-Israel crisis has revived an old Western temptation: regime change. The illusion of immediate political transformation, however, runs up against the fact that regimes come and go, while peoples, their history and culture remain.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The Iran-Israel conflict heated up to an unprecedented degree between June 12 and 24. During the acute phase of the conflict, which lasted twelve days, the United States intervened (on June 22) to bomb strategic sites linked to Iran's nuclear program. During this crisis, a notion reappeared in the media: that of \u00abregime change\u00bb.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The question has been raised as to whether the Israeli and, to some extent, American strategy is aimed at bringing about regime change in Iran. Some political leaders have asserted as much, including US President Donald Trump, who has explicitly communicated to this effect. In any case, the idea has once again animated public debate, as it did during the Libyan crisis and the Arab Spring in 2011, or the invasion of Iraq by a Western coalition in 2003.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The idea of bringing about regime change in a third country has deep roots in the West. It was at the heart of the foreign policy of George W. Bush, President of the United States from 2001 to 2009, but its roots go back much further. The French Revolution, the founding event of the modern West, bears witness to this to some extent: many of its advocates made it their mission to export the Revolution around the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even today, the idea that we could, indeed should, continue to \u00abexport democracy\u00bb, whatever that means, continues to haunt the Western political imagination. This theme has the merit of illustrating a crucial point that we sometimes tend to forget: the political regime is not the whole of a country. The case of Iran illustrates this perfectly: today, this state is a Shiite Islamic republic. But it hasn't always been, and probably won't always be. Even if Iran were to become a democracy one day, it would still be the heir to thousand-year-old Persia, to its language and culture, which far transcends the political ups and downs of its history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n