Ambassador Dan Kurtzer

My pleasure, Lynn.

It's good to be back.

There's no one size fits all for discussion of regime change because revolutions or coup d'etat are different in every situation.

In the area that I study and used to work in, the Middle East, regime change has almost never resulted in either better governance or a more equitable distribution of economic benefits to the people in that country.

The last big opportunity for that change occurred during what was called the Arab Spring, which started in 2011 with the ouster of the Tunisian president and then the ouster of President Mubarak in Egypt.

Tunis offered an interesting moment of opportunity because the government that emerged after President Ben Ali ran away, and he did, he ran to Saudi Arabia,

That government included a wide array of different factions within the society, including the Islamists, who did not dominate the government, but it was important that they participated in the government.

The problem is that over time, that model proved unsustainable, and Tunisia has largely slipped back into at least a quasi-authoritarian state.

It's not as deeply entrenched authoritarianism as existed under Ben Ali.

But it certainly isn't what we would call on the road to open democracy.

There are other examples in the Middle East, which is one of the areas in the world where you have the most authoritarian governance.

There are eight monarchies of varying shades of authoritarianism.

There are a number of republics, but they're not open society republics.

There's no evidence that regime change brings about positive economic change.

Well, there are many different scenarios about not only the way this war will end.

It could end at any moment.

But what happens in the period after?

And almost all of it will revolve around the degree of stability of the regime on the day after the war ends.

It's highly unlikely that I could be proved wrong even during this conversation.

It's highly unlikely that this regime will collapse permanently.