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Aside from quarreling over who "lost" Iran and Nicaragua, many in the Carter Administration would agree with Kissinger that there are great risks in pulling the rug out from under a longtime client without a plausible, acceptable successor well positioned to take over. "It's an unhappy fact of life," observes a White House policymaker, "that destabilizing our friends is a hell of a lot easier than destabilizing our enemies, and undoing a friendly regime that we have lost patience with is a lot easier than putting it back together again." So some of the men around John F. Kennedy learned in 1963 when they decided to authorize covert U.S. backing for an army coup against South Viet Nam's President Ngo Dinh Diem, whose anti-Buddhist repressions, they felt, were contributing to the political turmoil of the country and hampering the war effort. Diem was killed in the coup. What followed was a series of military Presidents who were unable to stem the deterioration of the situation.
Its recent traumatic experiences in Iran and Nicaragua have plunged the Carter Administration into an overdue reappraisal of the way the U.S. deals with dictators. The President has put the intelligence community, the State Department and the National Security Council on notice that never again must the decline and fall of a friendly government catch the U.S. so much by surprise. That means identifying and assessing the opposition to the existing powers sooner and more accurately, without the ideological typecasting ("Reds," Communists," "terrorists," even "radicals") that has tended to weaken and distort analysis in the past.
The U.S. has rationalized its support for right-wing regimes on the time-honored principle that the enemies of our Communist enemies are our friends. But the converse is not necessarily true: the domestic enemies of right-wing friends may not be Communists or even Communist-backed. They may be motivated by grievances and aspirations that Karl Marx never dreamed of—and certainly would not have approved of—although they may be fiercely anti-American. They may be Shi'ite mullahs in Iran or Catholic nuns in the Philippines.
Moreover, fast industrialization and a vast influx of wealth may not bring stability and democracy in a developing country, as Americans have been inclined to believe, but may lead to instability and chaos. On this point, Kissinger candidly admits to lingering uncertainty about Iran: "In retrospect, it probably would have been wiser for us, in the period 1972-75, not to rely on the conviction that the rapid economic progress of Iran would produce greater stability of the Shah's government. It would have been wiser to recognize that in a society like that, economic development produces new classes and new groups that somehow have to be fitted into the political process. Thinking back to how I would have acted on that insight as Secretary of State, I confess I am still somewhat puzzled."
When Kissinger says that, even with the benefit of hindsight, he is not sure what he should have done seven years ago, the Carter Administration can be forgiven for some puzzlement about how to proceed now, as it tries to deal prudently with undemocratic, potentially unstable regimes.