There’s something hypnotic about the power to change entire nations’ destinies with a pen stroke, a war declaration, an embargo that strangles. Regime change has become the West’s ultimate drug—promising immediate relief, total control, the end of all complexity. Instead, it delivers only smoking ruins and millions of shattered lives.
Today, as Trump toys with bombing Iran and the Western establishment dreams of Putin’s fall, as Maduro’s Venezuela resists yet another coup disguised as “democratic liberation,” we must confront this Western obsession for what it truly is: systematic failure masquerading as civilizing mission.
The shock doctrine’s bitter harvest
The facts speak with brutal clarity. Iraq 2003 was supposed to become the Middle East’s democratic beacon. Instead, it transformed into an open-air cemetery where ISIS ghosts and Shia militias prowl. Libya under Gaddafi was problematic? Today it’s a black hole sucking in migrants, traffickers, and mercenaries while militias carve up oil wells like neighborhood gangs.
Afghanistan represents the masterpiece of Western self-delusion: twenty years to restore the same Taliban we’d expelled on day one. Two decades of billions burned, young soldiers dead, promises betrayed. The final scene—helicopters fleeing Kabul like Saigon, carrying away the last crumb of imperial credibility.
Yet the West refuses to learn. Cannot learn. Because regime change isn’t strategy—it’s religion. Blind faith in moral superiority that justifies any violence, as long as it’s “ours.” The arrogance of believing democracy can be imposed through bombs, freedom exported via drones.
The vicious circle of hubris
Every failure generates the need for new intervention. Every destruction gets packaged as necessary progress toward reconstruction. Every war sells itself as the “last necessary war.” It’s the alcoholic’s logic—drinking to forget the damage caused by drinking.
Gene sharp’s nonviolent revolution
Yet an alternative exists, crafted by a man who spent his life studying how regimes actually change. Gene Sharp wasn’t a dreamer—he was a rigorous theorist who mapped 198 methods of nonviolent resistance, proving that real power springs not from terror but from consent.
Sharp grasped what Pentagon strategists refuse to accept: every dictatorship, however fierce, depends on millions of people’s silent complicity. Judges applying unjust laws, bureaucrats following orders, soldiers firing on crowds. The day this chain breaks, the regime collapses without needing a single bomb.
The Rose Revolution in Georgia, Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution, the Arab Springs—all drew from Sharp’s thinking. Many were later betrayed, manipulated, drowned in blood. But this happens when movements lose autonomy, when they become pawns in larger geopolitical games.
The bitter paradox
The cruel irony is that the West funded NGOs spreading Sharp’s ideas, transforming nonviolent resistance into soft power instruments. This betrayed the essence of his thought: change can only come from below, from societies deciding to stop being accomplices to their own oppression.
Iran and the lost art of dialogue
Consider today’s Iran. According to Western narrative, it’s a rogue state led by religious fanatics threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East. Therefore it must be isolated, sanctioned, possibly bombed. End of story.
But Ambassador Mauro Conciatori, who lived years in Tehran, tells another truth: a young, dynamic society crossed by underground currents of change that escape propaganda categories. A nation with three thousand years of history that cannot be reduced to its most extreme leaders’ slogans.
The self-fulfilling prophecy
The problem is that the West chose not to see this complexity. It severed diplomatic channels, preferring sanctions’ language to dialogue’s. It transformed Iran into an ontological enemy, forgetting that even the Islamic Republic is a system of internal balances, generational tensions, contradictory impulses.
The result? A country that radicalizes precisely to respond to external pressures, finding its raison d’être in resistance to the West. A vicious circle feeding itself while possibilities for bottom-up change shrink daily.
Poker vs. Go: two visions of power
Here enters the other superpower, one the West still struggles to decode. The United States plays poker—bluffing, raising stakes, betting everything on a hand they hope is winning. It’s the game of permanent all-in, where victory goes to whoever has more muscle and intimidates better.
China plays go, where victory goes to whoever controls more territory at game’s end. No need to eliminate the opponent—just surround them, occupy empty spaces, build influence stone by stone.
While Washington thinks regime change, Beijing thinks influence building. It doesn’t need to bomb anyone—it builds ports, roads, railways. It doesn’t preach democracy—it offers investments without political conditions. It doesn’t threaten invasions—it creates economic dependencies.
Strategic patience vs. high-stakes gambling
This approach has its dark sides, obviously. Internal authoritarianism, minority repression, censorship. But geopolitically, it’s infinitely more effective than the Western poker table where every crisis becomes an opportunity to raise stakes and risk everything.
The Belt and Road Initiative has done more for Chinese influence than all American wars combined. While the United States spent trillions devastating Afghanistan—the geopolitical equivalent of betting everything on pocket aces and still losing—China patiently built the economic future of Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe.
The price of arrogance
Regime change has become the perfect metaphor for Western decline: inability to imagine a world different from what we know, obsession with direct control instead of indirect influence, confusion between force and power.
The world is changing. The Western monopoly on legitimate violence is crumbling. New actors emerge, new alliances form, new strategies get tested. And the West finds itself increasingly isolated in its bubble of self-justifications and imperial nostalgia.
Growing isolation
But this isolation isn’t just geopolitical—it’s intellectual. When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. When your only language is force, every disagreement becomes a war. When your only solution is regime change, every complexity becomes a simplicity to be destroyed.
Toward complexity
This isn’t about choosing between good and evil, democracy and authoritarianism. It’s about accepting that the world is complex, that every society has its internal dynamics, that real change requires time, patience, understanding.
Regime change is the negation of this complexity. It’s the infantile impulse to break the toy when it doesn’t work as we’d like. It’s the arrogance of believing we possess absolute truth and the right to impose it by force.
The possible alternative
Perhaps it’s time to try something different. To listen instead of bomb. To understand instead of judge. To build instead of destroy.
Perhaps it’s time to admit that the art of changing the world doesn’t pass through destroying the world itself.
The future belongs to those who know how to wait, not those who know how to strike. History has already written this. We just need to read it.
In the end, the most radical act might be the simplest: choosing patience over violence, understanding over ideology, complexity over the brutal simplicity of regime change. The world is waiting for leaders brave enough to make that choice.