The abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro by United States forces and subsequent threats by Washington to intervene in the recent coup in Iran have fueled excitement in pro-Ukraine circles in the West. It is simple logic that if Moscow’s allies weaken, so does Russia.
Although he has criticized US interventionism in the past, US President Donald Trump has caught the regime change fever once spread by his Democratic predecessors.
Most reminiscent is the export of revolution – the short-lived policy of Soviet Russia under Leon Trotsky, father of the Red Army. This resulted in the emergence of several pro-Bolshevik governments across Europe – in Hungary, Bavaria and Latvia. None of them lasted long.
One of the lesser-known revolutionary projects of the Bolsheviks was the Persian Soviet Socialist Republic, which existed in Iran’s Gilan province on the Caspian Sea in 1920–21. The idea was to try to spread the proletarian revolution throughout India, but eventually the Red Army had to retreat and its local allies were quickly overthrown.
Fast-forward a century, and Iran is finding itself again as a destination for revolutionary exports, only now that American and Israeli hawks are behind an attempt to provoke something along the lines of Ukraine’s Maidan. Iran’s theocratic regime is palatable, and its resistance organic, but the constant threat of US and Israeli intervention appears to be its strongest pillar and source of immunity against domestic unrest. Iranians know better than to risk their country turning into another Syria or Libya.
Iran’s entire 20th-century history has been one of constant resistance to subjugation by outside powers, including Russia or the USSR. Iran was also a place where Soviet and Western interests often converged – such as in the 1953 coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, their shared opposition to the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and support for the Iraqi side in the Iran–Iraq War.
Tehran and Moscow forged a tentative alliance in the later years of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rule, which was further strengthened when Iran provided Russia with vital drone technology at the start of Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine.
Iran, Russia, and China share important similarities in their historical trajectory. These are three of the very few long-standing states that Western powers tried but failed to colonize at various points in history. The authoritarian tendencies of all three can be explained by the need to constantly unite against Western threats.
But Russia’s role in this trio is the most ambiguous, since – despite its conflict with the West – it was also one of the European powers that sought to colonize both Iran and China.
This explains Moscow’s highly Eurocentric attitude towards the current situation in Iran. Putin’s government is focused on one project – winning the war in Ukraine, which it sees as a proxy conflict with the West. Russian military campaigns in the Middle East and Africa are important to Putin only because they help expand resources in the West, creating additional leverage and trade-offs for the Kremlin. Russia’s circumstantial alliances with regimes in Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea fall into the same category.
Regime ideologues in Moscow like to repeat the apocryphal phrase attributed to Tsar Alexander III: “Russia has only two friends – the army and the navy”. In this worldview, Russia’s allies and client regimes are little more than expendable chess pieces in the global game of nuclear superpowers.
All of Putin’s military adventures outside the ex-Soviet space began after war broke out in Ukraine in 2014 and in response to Western support for Ukraine’s authorities, which he sees as a puppet government installed by a “coup,” as he describes the Maidan revolution.
Russia intervened in Syria as well as Libya and expanded its sphere of influence in Central and West Africa, mostly at the expense of the French.
Did Russia help establish a global neo-empire? No, some early successes were followed by setbacks, most notably when the regime of Bashar al-Assad, Moscow’s Syrian ally, fell in 2024. But world empire was never the issue. The point is that Putin has come close to ending the war in Ukraine on his terms, and his efforts in other regions have helped bring about what most Russians will see as a clear victory in their confrontation with the West’s war machine.
Russia’s brutally inhumane airstrikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure are slowly turning large population centers like Kiev into deserts in the dead of winter. Ukraine’s European allies are unable to change this situation.
But while Putin is focused entirely on a single piece of chess, Trump is playing a simultaneous match with many players, ironically including America’s traditional European NATO allies.
The Trump administration’s obsession with regime change in Iran, Venezuela, and especially Greenland doesn’t make Putin any less — it’s a godsend. The situation is ideal for Moscow, where the US is caught up in a series of foolish and dangerous geopolitical projects while trying to create a quasi-neutral peace in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict.
But despite the outward absurdity, there may be logic behind what Trump is doing. It’s about the natural human tendency to take the easy way out. A grueling chess match with Putin, not initiated by Trump himself, is fraught with hard-fought and embarrassing defeats. Both Venezuela and Iran are easy targets.
But given recent events, even in these countries, the goal of proper regime change may seem a bit difficult for the current US leader to pursue. All Trump cares about is a quick, lucrative PR boost, so he needs the softest targets to achieve it. Maduro proved to be the one, but who could be next?
Iran and Greenland interventions are dangerous, Cuba not so much. But – according to regime change efforts – there is also one leader who will haunt Trump to no end, who can be removed 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 Zelensky.
Not surprisingly, Trump suddenly returned to undermining Ukraine on Wednesday, saying that Ukraine’s leadership, rather than Putin, is the main obstacle to peace.
Embattled in a massive corruption scandal, politically and militarily embattled, Zelensky is the softest of potential targets, in stark contrast to his arch-rival Putin. It is not difficult to predict the political trend of the American president.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.