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A golden missed Western opportunity for a good regime change war over a century ago [1]
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Date: 2025-02-06
While regime change wars often get a bad rap, and in a lot of cases they do a lot of bad stuff and thus aren’t worth doing, it’s not a hard and fast unequivocal rule. Sometimes, regime change wars can actually improve things for the better. In this article, I will discuss an example of a missed Western opportunity for a regime change war that could have extraordinarily and massively improved the world for the better had it actually been implemented on a serious scale. Specifically Russia in 1918-1921.
In the 1917 Russian Constituent Assembly elections, the Socialist Revolutionaries along with their Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary allies won a majority of the popular vote, with the Bolsheviks only winning around a quarter of the popular vote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1917_Russian_Constituent_Assembly_election
In spite of this, the Bolsheviks, together with their Left Socialist Revolutionary allies (who later soured on the Bolsheviks as a result of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and thus rebelled against the Bolsheviks and gave the Bolsheviks an excuse to decisively and totally crush them) dissolved this assembly after it met for just a single day. Imagine what would have happened had the US, after helping win WWI for the Entente and securing the Treaty of Versailles, would have decided (had the political will for this actually existed in the US back then, of course) to send one million of its own troops from France to Russia in order to help the Whites win the Russian Civil War, conditional upon the restoration of democracy in Russia afterwards, which would have almost certainly resulted in a Socialist Revolutionary-led government in Russia. While many Russians might not have liked a US military intervention into Russia, the Bolsheviks’ rule would have also likely displeased many of them and if the US would have made it clear that it was only interested in restoring democracy in Russia, then I suspect that it would have gotten many Russians to cooperate with the US sooner or later. I mean, even in Iraq, the US was able to find some collaborators, in spite of huge initial headaches. In Russia, the US could have similarly banned the Bolshevik Party—and perhaps the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party as well—after its victory and instead only allowed the Mensheviks, Right Socialist Revolutionary Party, Kadets, and other Russian parties who actually believed in freedom, liberalism, and democracy to participate in Russian elections.
Given just how extraordinarily screwed up Russia ended up becoming in the 20th century, it’s just extraordinarily hard to see this course of action being worse for Russians relative to real life. Sure, Americans might need to fight urban battles against Bolsheviks, but would Bolsheviks really stand a chance against Americans?
Anyway, what do you think? Frankly, this seems like a case of a neglected and missed regime change opportunity on the part of the US that could have done astronomically more good relative to the harm that various real-life US-led regime change operations have caused in real life.
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/2/6/2302047/-A-golden-missed-Western-opportunity-for-a-good-regime-change-war-over-a-century-ago?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web
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