The Return of the “Our Son of a Bitch” Doctrine

By Allen Gindler

For several decades after the Cold War, American foreign policy presented itself as a moral project. The United States, it was said, would no longer merely defend its interests abroad; it would help build democracy. Dictatorships would be replaced by representative governments, institutions would be strengthened, and societies would gradually move toward liberal norms. As Natan Sharansky argued in his book The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror (2004), liberal democracies are less likely to go to war with one another, thus warranting prolonged peace. The policy sounded morally attractive. Unfortunately, it also proved enormously expensive and rarely successful.

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was supposed to transform the country after the removal of Saddam Hussein. Democratic institutions were introduced, elections were organized, and an entirely new political system was built. But the cost was staggering, amounting to trillions of dollars and years of military involvement during the Iraq War. The country remains politically fragile and not an undisputed friend of the United States. We can describe it as a failed democracy. The long conflict imposed heavy costs on American taxpayers, the most unfortunate being many American casualties.

Afghanistan proved even more sobering. After the 2001 intervention, the United States and its allies spent two decades attempting to construct democratic institutions and security forces. Elections were held and governments were formed. Yet when American forces withdrew in 2021, the state collapsed with surprising speed, and the Taliban returned to power. The project had consumed enormous financial and military resources with little lasting institutional success.

These examples reveal the uncomfortable truth: the democracy-promotion doctrine promised far more than it could reliably deliver. Building democratic institutions is a slow and complex process rooted in local history and culture. External powers can encourage or support it, but they rarely control it. Attempts to accelerate the process through military intervention have often produced instability rather than liberal democracy.

Recent developments suggest that the United States may be drifting back toward an older and far less idealistic doctrine that famously summarized in a remark attributed to Franklin D. Roosevelt about the Nicaraguan strongman Anastasio Somoza García: “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.” The phrase captured a blunt reality of Cold War strategy. Washington often supported authoritarian leaders so long as they aligned with American geopolitical interests.

This policy was morally uncomfortable. But it was also comparatively inexpensive and pragmatic. For decades, the United States backed the Somoza dynasty as a reliable anti-communist ally. The regime was corrupt and authoritarian, and its rule ended dramatically during the Nicaraguan Revolution when the Sandinista National Liberation Front seized power. From a moral perspective, supporting the dictatorship was difficult to defend. Yet the American commitment to the regime was limited. Washington did not attempt to redesign Nicaraguan society, build new institutions, or keep tens of thousands of troops on the ground for decades. The arrangement was simple: political backing in exchange for strategic alignment. Notably, the socialist rule that followed under the Sandinistas was not better but much worse than the authoritarian regime it replaced, marked by economic mismanagement, political repression, and prolonged civil conflict.

A similar pattern appeared in Iran during the Cold War. After the 1953 Iranian coup d’état removed Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, the United States supported the rule of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The Shah modernized parts of the country and maintained a strongly pro-Western orientation. His government was authoritarian, and the secret police were notorious. Yet American involvement was relatively limited compared with the enormous nation-building projects that would follow in later decades. When the Iranian Revolution removed the monarchy, Washington had invested far less money and manpower than it would later spend in Iraq or Afghanistan. Here too, the theocratic rule that emerged under the Islamic Republic proved not better but much worse than the Shah’s authoritarian regime, characterized by severe human rights abuses, sponsorship of international terrorism, and internal suppression far exceeding the flaws of the prior system.

Chile provides another revealing example. In 1973, the military coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power ended the socialist presidency of Salvador Allende. The dictatorship committed serious human-rights abuses, which continue to shape debates about the period. Yet Chile eventually transitioned back to democracy in 1990, and the economic reforms implemented during the dictatorship helped transform the country into one of the most stable economies in Latin America. Again, the United States did not attempt to rebuild Chilean institutions from scratch. It supported a friendly regime and left the rest largely to local dynamics.

Perhaps the most durable example of a pragmatic alliance is the American relationship with Saudi Arabia. The partnership dates back to a wartime meeting between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ibn Saud in 1945. Saudi Arabia has never been a democracy, but it has remained a stable strategic partner for decades. The arrangement is straightforward: security cooperation and energy interests in exchange for political alignment.

The same pattern has prevailed in many Middle Eastern and African countries. None of these cases presents an uplifting moral story. Supporting authoritarian partners rarely looks admirable in retrospect. It hardly looks good in speeches about human rights. Yet the policy had one undeniable feature: it was inexpensive, pragmatic, and often very beneficial compared with the vast nation-building efforts that followed the Cold War.

Undoubtedly, the older realist approach was less ambitious and less inspiring, and President Trump explicitly and pragmatically leaned to the realpolitik “Our Son of a Bitch” doctrine. The recent U.S. operation that resulted in Maduro’s capture did not aim at rebuilding the Venezuelan state or launching a massive occupation. Instead, it was a limited strike designed to remove the leader while leaving the country’s institutions largely intact. Whether the strategy succeeds remains uncertain, but its scope is unmistakably smaller than the grand nation-building projects of the past two decades.

A similar pattern appears in the evolving American approach toward Iran. For some time, discussions in Washington revolved around the possibility of regime change in Tehran. But recent rhetoric, which sometimes sounds improvised, has increasingly settled on more limited goals: containing nuclear ambitions, deterring regional aggression, or striking specific military capabilities. The aim is not necessarily to redesign Iran’s political system but to manage the strategic threat it poses.

Seen from this perspective, American foreign policy may be returning to a more modest form of realism. Instead of attempting to create democratic states abroad, Washington may increasingly focus on narrower goals: weakening hostile regimes, removing specific leaders, or supporting partners whose interests align with its own. It simply seeks workable arrangements with governments willing to cooperate. These measures may be morally ambiguous or even appear cynical, but they require far fewer resources and far less long-term commitment.

Both doctrines are imperfect, but nation-building, like any social engineering, has been an undisputed bust. The bust result can be explained by invoking Stephen Wolfram’s concept of computational irreducibility. The concept asserts that certain complex systems cannot be reduced or simplified, and their outcomes cannot be predicted without observing each step of their evolution. Societies, much like complex computational systems, cannot be simplified or forced through shortcuts without destabilizing the underlying processes. Every stage of societal development is necessary, and while some of these stages may appear inefficient or morally flawed in hindsight, each contributes to the eventual complexity and functionality of the system.

Nation-building is a process that is thought to leap or skip the evolutionary stages by outside forces. This form of engineering works against the natural developmental path that a society follows at its own pace. This approach violates the principle of computational irreducibility, has never succeeded, and will continue to fail in the future. In contrast, the “Our Son of a Bitch” doctrine, while ethically compromised, respects this irreducibility by limiting interventions to pragmatic alignments that allow local systems to evolve organically, albeit under imperfect regimes. As the United States navigates an increasingly multipolar world, this return to realism may prove not only cost-effective but essential for preserving American influence without overextension. Ultimately, foreign policy must balance moral aspirations with practical constraints; embracing computational irreducibility as a guiding principle could prevent future quagmires and foster a more sustainable global order where democracies emerge endogenously rather than through forcible imposition.