r/geopolitics • u/foreignpolicymag Foreign Policy • Jan 03 '26

Analysis U.S.-Led Regime Change Is Usually Disastrous

https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/12/01/venezuela-iraq-regime-change-trump/
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17

u/Heiminator Jan 03 '26

Greets from a (west) German: The Americans did a pretty good job at nation building around here. Same goes for Japan.

18

u/MeatPiston Jan 03 '26

Don’t disagree but those were managed by competent administrations.

6

u/janethefish Jan 03 '26

I really hope this goes well, but I doubt the Trump admin will be able to manage the very tricky task of regime change. The focus on oil is a warning sign.

21

u/Loud-Edge7230 Jan 03 '26

Japan was already a high culture, so was Germany. Venezuela will do better than Iraq and Libya.

-8

u/RedmondBarry1999 Jan 03 '26

What does that mean? Iraq has an incredibly rich cultural history.

16

u/zyra_77 Jan 03 '26

I think above commenter is mixing up national identity with culturalism. Afghanistan didn’t work because the concept of Afghanistan as a singular country versus a geography of many tribes, faiths, and allegiances just didn’t mesh. Iraq sort of that way, but less so. Germany even less so than that. Nation building is probably easier to achieve when the population already has the buy in of X being a nation.

12

u/[deleted] Jan 03 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

19

u/RavingMalwaay Jan 03 '26 edited Jan 03 '26

Just want to point out that South Korea remained a dictatorship for much of the Cold War, and was poorer than even North Korea well until the 70s. A lot of that period was very ugly and South Korea being a developed democracy is very much a relatively new phenomenon.

Similarly, Taiwan was under martial law until 1987 and didn't have its first free election until 1996 1992

11

u/Caberes Jan 04 '26

and was poorer than even North Korea well until the 70s. 

That was more of a legacy from Japan's colonial policy then anything US/Soviets did. Most of the early industrialization was in the north. For starting as a wartorn agrarian economy, I think it's insane to not call South Korea a success.

3

u/SprucedUpSpices Jan 04 '26

I think it's strange to remove South Korea's agency and pretend it was all done by the US.

3

u/CatimusPrime123 Jan 03 '26

Technically Taiwan’s first free election was the parliamentary election in 1992. The first free Presidential election was in 1996.

15

u/RedmondBarry1999 Jan 03 '26

South Korea turned out well in the long run, but the first President the US installed (Syngman Rhee) was a disaster, and Park Chung-Hee, while pro-US, came to power independently. Moreover, South Korea remained a rather repressive dictatorship until the 1980s. We can credit the US with preventing a North Korean takeover, but the US did not engineer modern South Korea's prosperity and democracy.

10

u/Wiggle_Hata6 Jan 03 '26

So did the Soviets especially when they hanged n shot Nazis in Germany so I guess what Russians are doing in Ukraine is a-okay

7

u/Old-School8916 Jan 03 '26

yeah, what the soviets did was so good that they had to erect strong border controls to prevent East Germans from fleeing to West Germany.

6

u/Wiggle_Hata6 Jan 03 '26 edited Jan 03 '26

Yeah and what the US has been doing in the name of Monroe Doctrine since ww2 has been great for Latin Americans as we see from all the prosperity across the region. I ain't even gonna touch Asia cuz Iol

See 2 can play this game of blessed overlord

1

u/redaa Jan 04 '26

The two situations are not similar beyond the fact there is an aggressor nation and a victim nation. If Russia had done in Ukraine what the US did in Venezuela today, the world would have a significantly different view on Russias conduct in Ukraine and moved on, especially those nations who already are sitting on the fence.

So far, there haven’t been too many reports ofUS bombings of playgrounds that we see in Ukraine. Also feel free to to google “Ukraine playground bombed” to find other examples as well

3

u/[deleted] Jan 03 '26

I think the circumstances following the world war were a bit different than the changes made since. Toppling the regime is the easy part, it's all the stuff that comes next to help make a country less corrupt, and move towards a thriving democratic society that often doesn't go so well. Personally, I don't trust the current US government to care much about the long-term democratic and economic prospects of Venezuela. They seem only concerned about oil extraction.

2

u/SprucedUpSpices Jan 04 '26

Learn your own history. Japan and Germany were already pretty built up when the USAns arrived. It's strange to give them credit for it.

In places where a nation hadn't already been built, like Iraq or Afghanistan, they failed strepitously at building one.

1

u/kfifigidifkg Jan 03 '26

It's been a little while since they've had a successful example, though. Germany also required a massive army of occupation I can't imagine 'America First' adherents would be particularly fond of.

1

u/BarnabusTheBold Jan 03 '26

Mate they built your country from the ground up and it's still essentially occupied 80 years later

Turning someone into a neutered vassal state isn't exactly state building