Trump and anti-regime protests worldwide
Notable protests against ruling regimes are occurring these days in Iraq, Lebanon, Iran, and Hong Kong. Recent months have seen similar protests in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Sudan. These are not your garden variety protests for more jobs or better wages, against police abuse and corruption, or in favor of improvements in education and health care. They are “regime change” protests: cases in which citizens have concluded that the social contract between themselves and their government no longer serves their interests. Rather than asking for reform, the protesters are asking for fundamental changes in the way they are governed.
Most of these protests are against regimes the US doesn’t much like. Washington is happy to see the Islamic Republic targeted not just inside Iran but also–despite good relations with Baghdad and Beirut–in Iraq, where Iranian consulates have been burned, and Lebanon, where Hizbollah is suffering criticism. The Bolivian president demonstrators chased from power, Evo Morales, was no friend of the US. Washington would like the same thing to happen to Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. In Sudan the Americans helped broker the agreement that deposed President Omar al-Bashir, whom the International Criminal Court indicted for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Darfur.
Hong Kong is a case of its own. There the protests are in favor of preserving the justice system’s autonomy and expanding democratic representation. President Trump, engaged in a massive tariff war with China, has been hesitant to criticize Beijing for fear of the cost to his trade agenda. But Congress compelled him to sign a bill providing for the possibility of sanctions against Chinese and Hong Kong officials responsible for repression of protests. The bill passed both Houses with veto-proof majorities. It will be difficult, however, to convince Trump to use the authority provided, unless he feels it will help in some way his trade agenda.
With that exception, the protests seem good to President Trump. But take another look.
These protests are without exception in favor of more liberal democracy and rule of law, not less. In Iran, demonstrators want the fall of a regime that is an anocracy: it mixes democratic forms like elections and a parliament with a dictatorship of the Supreme Leader, backed by security forces loyal to him and not the elected President. In Lebanon and Iraq, the protests have targeted systems that share power on the basis of ethnicity rather than equal rights. Bolivian President Morales’ cardinal sin was tampering with election results, Venezuelan President Maduro has resisted yielding power to a constitutionally elected successor, and Sudanese President al-Bashir was a dictator ousted by the military but in response to popular demand.
Looked at this way, the protests are all antithetical to Trump’s ambitions inside the US:
- he seeks less participation in US elections, not more, and re-election not with the popular vote but with the vote in the Electoral College;
- he is refusing to cooperate with Congress’ constitutionally authorized impeachment proceedings;
- he has sought to enhance presidential power, not limit it;
- he has appealed to his base in blatantly ethnic, white nationalist terms; and
- he is seeking to insulate the US military from accountability and to make it beholden exclusively to him.
The goals of the regime-change demonstrators worldwide point precisely in the opposite directions.
Bottom line: the world the demonstrators want is not Trump’s world. It is the liberal democratic world ruled by law that he is seeking to destroy. You know whom I am rooting for.
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