The abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro by U.S. forces and subsequent threats by the U.S. government to intervene in Iran during the recent unrest has sparked a wave of enthusiasm among pro-Ukrainian hawks in the West. The simplistic logic is that if Moscow’s allies weaken, so will Russia.
US President Donald Trump has criticized US interventionism in the past, but he is newly infected with the regime-change fever spread by his Democratic predecessors.
What it most reminds us of is Soviet Russia’s short-lived policy of exporting revolution, led by Leon Trotsky, the father of the Red Army. As a result, several pro-Bolshevik governments were established across Europe, including Hungary, Bavaria, and Latvia. None of them lasted long.
One of the Bolsheviks’ lesser-known revolutionary projects was the Persian Soviet Socialist Republic, which existed in Iran’s Gilan province on the Caspian Sea in 1920-21. The idea was to spread the proletarian revolution to India, but the Red Army was eventually forced to retreat and its local allies were quickly overthrown.
Fast forward a century, and Iran is once again an export destination for revolution, but now, for the first time, American and Israeli hawks are behind any attempt to promote something along the lines of Ukraine’s Maidan. Although Iran’s theocracy is never a good thing and resistance to it is systematic, the constant threat of US and Israeli intervention appears to be Iran’s strongest pillar and source of impunity for domestic unrest. Iranians would be wiser to risk turning their country into a second Syria or Libya.
Iran’s entire 20th century history has been one of constant resistance to conquest by outside powers, including Russia and the Soviet Union. Iran was also a place where Soviet and Western interests often converged, including the 1953 coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, common opposition to the Iranian revolution in 1979, and support for Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War.
Tehran and Moscow only formed a tentative alliance late in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s reign, and the alliance grew even closer when Iran supported Russia with critical drone technology in the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
There are important similarities in the historical trajectories of Iran, Russia, and China. These three are among the few long-standing nations that Western countries have unsuccessfully attempted to colonize at various stages in their history. All three authoritarian instincts can be fairly explained by the constant need to mobilize against Western threats.
However, Russia’s role in this triad is the most ambiguous, given that it was also one of the European powers that sought to colonize parts of both Iran and China, despite its conflicts with the West.
This explains the Russian government’s extremely Eurocentric attitude towards Iran’s current predicament. Putin’s government is single-mindedly focused on one project: winning the war in Ukraine, which it views as a proxy conflict with the West. For Putin, Russian military expeditions to the Middle East and Africa are important only in that they extend Western resources and create more leverage and trade-offs for the Kremlin. Russia’s circumstantial alliances with the regimes of Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea also fall into the same category.
Regime ideologues in Moscow like to repeat the false phrase of Tsar Alexander III: “Russia has only two allies: the army and the navy.” In this worldview, Russia’s allies and client regimes are nothing more than disposable chess pieces in a global game of nuclear powers.
All of Putin’s military adventures outside the former Soviet territory began after the outbreak of the Ukraine war in 2014 and as a reaction to Western support for the Ukrainian authorities, as we speak of the Maidan revolution. The Ukrainian authorities are considered a puppet government set up in a “coup.”
Russia intervened not only in Libya but also in Syria, and continued to expand its influence in Central and West Africa, mainly at the expense of France.
Did it help Russia establish a global new empire? No, the first few successes are often accompanied by setbacks, most notably when the regime of Bashar al-Assad, Moscow’s Syrian ally, collapsed in 2024. But world empire was never the goal. Importantly, President Putin is very close to ending the Ukraine war on his own terms, and his efforts elsewhere have helped deliver what most Russians consider a complete victory in the conflict with the West’s powerful war machine.
Russia’s brutal and inhumane air strikes against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure are gradually making populated areas like Kiev uninhabitable in the dead of winter. Ukraine’s European allies appear powerless to change its predicament.
But while President Putin is completely focused on a single chessboard, President Trump is playing against a large number of players simultaneously, including, oddly enough, America’s traditional European NATO allies.
The Trump administration’s obsession with regime change in Iran, Venezuela, and especially Greenland does nothing to undermine Putin; it is a godsend. The situation is ideal for Russia, where the United States is trying to play a quasi-neutral peacemaker in the Russia-Ukraine conflict while being bogged down in some absurd and dangerous geopolitical projects.
But despite its surface absurdity, there may be logic behind Trump’s actions. It’s about the natural human tendency to choose the easier path. The arduous chess match with Putin, certainly not initiated by Trump himself, is infinitely more difficult and fraught with embarrassing defeat. Both Venezuela and Iran are easy targets.
But as recent events have shown, even in these countries the goal of proper regime change may seem a little too difficult for current U.S. leaders to accomplish. Trump is only interested in an immediate, low-cost PR boost, so he needs the softest targets to achieve that. Maduro has proven to be one, but who will be next?
Interventions by Iran and Greenland are dangerous, but not so much by Cuba. But as far as regime change efforts are concerned, there is one leader who troubles President Trump to no end, who can be removed from office without military intervention, and who stands in the way of the US president’s goal of being seen as the world’s greatest peacekeeper: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
No wonder President Trump suddenly returned to weakening Ukraine on Wednesday, saying the main obstacle to peace is its leader, not Putin.
Zelenskiy, embroiled in a major corruption scandal and mired in political and military turmoil, is the most moderate of the potential targets and the opposite of his arch-rival, Putin. It’s not difficult to predict how the U.S. president’s political instincts will play out.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
