Regime Change Is Not Conservative
"If a country is ruled by dictators, that is not something that can be quickly fixed with missiles."
By Jereth Kok
Almost as soon as the 2026 Iran War broke out, I noticed that Peter Hitchens was busy making his mind known about it. This pleased me immensely, because while I have long found Hitchens to be a source of great insight about many topics, I have found him especially valuable on matters of war and statecraft.
For those who don’t know, Hitchens is a British commentator and columnist. He is the brother of the late Christopher Hitchens, who was a well-known atheist. Peter is a Christian and a political and social conservative who is not afraid to say things that are unpopular. He is firmly opposed to the Iran War, a position that was easy to predict based on his past opposition to the Iraq War (2003), and his outspokenness about the Ukraine war being a foolish and unnecessary enterprise.
I was fascinated when I noticed Hitchens asserting something that I myself strongly believe—that messing with foreign countries, and in particular doing regime change, is antithetical to conservative thinking.
Peter is absolutely right. Violently overthrowing the government of a foreign country has got to be one of the least conservative things that someone can do.
Let’s work this through. What does it mean to be “conservative”?
To be “conservative” means to prefer stability. To act with caution. To take things slowly. To be wary of quick fixes. To distrust shiny new objects. To reject radical change.
Russell Kirk (1918 – 1994) was a noted American conservative thinker who wrote a piece called Ten Conservative Principles. I think this is a pretty useful summary of what it means to be politically “conservative”.
Kirk argued that “conservatives are champions of custom, convention and continuity because they prefer the devil they know to the devil they don’t know.” “The continuity, the lifeblood, of a society must not be interrupted.” If things must change in a society, this change “ought to be gradual and discriminatory, never unfixing old interests at once.”
In other words, don’t go upsetting the apple cart. A system may be flawed; it may even have very serious, deeply embedded injustices. But rushing in and trying to fix everything at once in a society is almost guaranteed to make things even worse. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know—a new devil that you will create in your grand attempt to kill the old devil. Flawed systems should be worked on gradually and with great care; it is reckless to dive in with a jackhammer and blowtorch.
Kirk criticises “liberals and radicals” as “imprudent” men who “dash at their objectives without giving much heed to the risk of new abuses worse than the evils they hope to sweep away … Providence moves slowly, but the devil always hurries. Human society being complex, remedies cannot be simple if they are to be efficacious. The conservative declares that he acts only after sufficient reflection, having weighed the consequences. Sudden and slashing reforms are as perilous as sudden and slashing surgery.”
Social and political systems that serve millions of people aren’t created overnight; they cannot be created overnight. They are not like Ikea flatpack furniture that you can put together in an afternoon with an Allen key. According to Kirk, establishing working institutions is a process that is invariably “painful and slow”.
The polar opposite of conservatism is revolution. Revolution is the complete overthrow of a governing system, with the aim of replacing it with something wholly different. The problem with revolution is that it seeks to achieve the impossible—creating a healthy, functioning polity and society in an instant.
We have plenty of history to prove this. The revolution that everybody knows about is the French Revolution (1789-1799). Now, the French monarchs were autocratic rulers, and there were undoubtedly significant injustices in pre-revolutionary France. But what did the revolution achieve? At first, ten years of turmoil, large massacres, and tens of thousands of deaths. The revolution was followed by a long period of turmoil in which France transitioned through six different political systems (two republics, two monarchies, two empires). This period included the reign of Napoleon and his bloody wars, which consumed the entire European continent. There was a second revolution in 1830 and a third in 1848, each causing the system to change again. It wasn’t until 1870, eight decades after the start of the (first) French Revolution, that the second French Empire, ruled by Napoleon’s nephew, was overthrown in yet another “revolution” and France finally settled down into a stable political system.
If the original French revolutionaries had known they would unleash eight decades of violence and chaos upon their nation, do you think they would have gone ahead with the revolution, or would they have chosen to deal with the problems in their system in a less drastic way?
The Russian Revolution of 1917 gives a similar story. In the middle of a World War, revolutionaries rose up and overthrew the Tsar, murdered the entire royal family, and established a new order. Again, the Tsars were autocratic rulers, and the Russian Empire was not known for Western-style freedom and human rights. But we all know what followed the revolution: famines, immense suffering, Joseph Stalin’s three-decade-long tyranny, tens of millions of human corpses.
We could continue around the world, and through the pages of history, listing example after example where people revolted against cruel regimes, and successfully overthrew them, but what followed was scarcely any better, if not worse. Revolution—another word for regime change, or wholesale overthrow of a system—is simply not a pathway to stability, peace and freedom.
Going back to Kirk—he observed, based on the same record of history, that “order and justice and freedom … are the artificial products of a long social experience, the result of centuries of trial and reflection and sacrifice.” Building a free, just, orderly political system is a long and laborious process; well-functioning institutions do not spring up magically as soon as you knock over a harsh regime.
I think that most people who identified as “conservative” had a decent understanding of all this in the year 2000. They would have strongly objected to any political movement that sought to sweep in and abruptly transform the governing systems in, say, America, Britain or Australia. What is rather curious is that many of these same people thought that revolutionary political transformation would work in other countries.
In the 2000s and 2010s, we witnessed Western powers adopt regime change as official policy, mostly targeted at the Middle East. Starting with Iraq and Afghanistan, and then moving on to Libya and Syria, the USA forcefully tore down established political systems, predicting that these autocratic governments would be swiftly replaced by healthy, fair and just systems that would provide enduring freedom and happiness to their people.
This was exactly the same kind of dream that motivated the French and Russian Revolutions. And bizarrely, the loudest proponents of such ideas, the most enthusiastic supporters of regime overthrow, were self-identifying “conservatives”. People who would have nodded along with Russell Kirk’s warning about imposing “sudden and slashing” political change on a country.
Not once did it work out as advertised. In every case, the result was prolonged chaos, violence, and civil strife. Not one of those Middle-Eastern countries today enjoys the promised freedoms; not a single one has become a stable, healthy democracy. US-led regime change in Iraq produced hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, collapse of the society and its institutions, the catastrophic destruction of ancient Christian communities, floods of refugees, and the rise of ISIS. A quarter of a century later, Iraq remains unstable, violent and internally divided, lacking in human rights, plagued by corruption, and afflicted by extremist militias.
In 2026, there really should be no excuse for thinking that revolutionary change, either in your own country or someone else’s, is a good idea, let alone a “conservative” idea. It is the very opposite of conservative. Overthrowing a system, even a harsh authoritarian system, is a recipe for disorder, dysfunction and death, the very things that conservatives normally recoil from. Knowing that revolution has such a poor track record—even in our own lifetime—conservatives of all people should agree with Kirk that political change should be measured, gradual, “never unfixing old interests at once”.
If it is “imprudent” to ignite a revolution in your own country, how much worse to do so in a foreign country! The physical and cultural distance all but guarantees that you will not be able to manage the forces that will be unleashed, and that things will rapidly spin out of control. Exactly as happened in Iraq, Syria and other places.
And yet here we are again. In the lead-up to America’s unprovoked attack on Iran, self-styled “conservatives” like Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham brought out the 2003 playbook once more. They urged on the military overthrow of the Iranian regime, claiming that we would then see the dawn of a bright new era of happiness and liberty for Iran’s 90 million people. Donald Trump and many of his “conservative” supporters even threw around the phrase “Make Iran Great Again”.
The saddest thing is that many adults appear to sincerely believe this fairy tale. They truly think that Iran’s current political structures can be demolished with bombs, and by Christmas, the country will be a stable democracy with a free press. As can be seen from the interactions that Peter Hitchens has had on X, they even have the gall to claim the mantle of conservatism and to accuse men like Peter, who oppose regime change wars, of being revolutionary Marxists.
This despite the fact that the very thing these men are urging—the violent overthrow of a political system—is revolution. Despite virtually every revolution in history leading to prolonged chaos and bloodshed. Despite all the US-led regime change operations in recent times failing to produce a good outcome for the countries involved. Despite the most credible military and geopolitical experts warning that Iran is an extremely difficult country to conquer, its forces will fight long and hard, and there is no politically viable opposition ready to govern the country even if the current regime can be driven out (and thus a real prospect exists of prolonged power struggles, or even a Syria-like civil war). Despite it being a matter of conservative dogma, as articulated by Russell Kirk, attempting to rapidly transform a whole country is perilous and imprudent.
Regime change is not conservative. Not in Iran, not anywhere else. As per Peter Hitchens, it is neoconservatism—a late 20th century movement which grew out of 1960s liberalism—which promotes foreign wars and regime change. Neoconservatism shares with its liberal forebears the belief that political problems can be fixed by imposing rapid, radical, wholesale change. Thus, its advocacy for bombing foreign autocracies into liberal democracies.
True, traditional conservatism—in the vein of Russell Kirk—understands that such ideas are not only fanciful, they are destructive. If a country is ruled by dictators, that is not something that can be quickly fixed with missiles. Much less if the country is a very foreign one, thousands of miles away! Attempting to do this will only create an even bigger mess and more human suffering.
Tragically, unless mercy intervenes, it seems mess and suffering are what we will see as the war continues in Iran.