Powell’s 14th rule

are we paying attention?

The late Secretary of State and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin L. Powell was a remarkable figure. An African-American son of Jamaican immigrants who raised him in the Bronx, Powell served in the Army during the upheavals of the Vietnam War before becoming National Security Advisor, then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He concluded his public service as Secretary of State during George W. Bush’s term—and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I learned that he was a riveting speaker, able to reach his audience with seeming ease as he disarmed them by taking off his Army “blouse” (a lightweight jacket to civilians) when he began a lecture during his time as Chairman.

Powell’s “rules of leadership” appeared (and perhaps still do) on many officers’ desks as they sought to capture his pithy wisdom to apply on their own.

The Department of State edited his statements from his 2012 memoir, It Worked for Me, into a list published on “Share-America” during his tenure at Foggy Bottom between 2001 and 2005.

1. It ain’t as bad as you think. It will look better in the morning. Leaving the office at night with a winning attitude affects you more than you alone; it also conveys that attitude to your followers.

2. Get mad, then get over it. Everyone gets mad. It’s a natural and healthy emotion. My experience is that staying angry isn’t useful.

3. Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it. Accept that your position was faulty, not your ego.

4. It can be done. Have a positive and enthusiastic approach to every task. Don’t surround yourself with instant skeptics.

5. Be careful what you choose: You may get it. You will have to live with your choices. Some bad choices can be corrected. Some you’ll be stuck with.

6. Don’t let adverse facts stand in the way of a good decision. Superior leadership is often a matter of superb instinct. When faced with a tough decision, use the time available to gather information that will inform your instinct.

7. You can’t make someone else’s choices. You shouldn’t let someone else make yours. Make sure the choice is yours, and you are not responding to the pressure and desire of others.

8. Check small things. Leaders have to have a feel for small things — a feel for what is going on in the depths of an organization where small things reside.

9. Share credit. People need recognition and a sense of worth as much as they need food and water.

10. Remain calm. Be kind. Few people make sound or sustainable decisions in an atmosphere of chaos.

11. Have a vision. Be demanding. Followers need to know where their leaders are taking them and for what purpose. Good leaders set vision, mission, and goals.

12. Don’t take counsel of your fears or naysayers. Those who do risk wasting their time and energy.

13. Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier. If you believe in the likelihood of success, your followers will too.

Powell is at least as well known for advising President George W. Bush to approach regime change in Iraq with the greatest caution, citing the “Pottery Barn” rule: you break it, you own it. It’s his 14th rule, of course.

Let’s explore the implications he raised because one might wonder why ousting what I described Monday as “an odious”regime could be worse than the bloody mullahs.

Americans often think of regime change as a means to oust a single individual, almost invariably fixating on a single person as if that were how all bad governments operate, without considering the myriad consequences, truly exemplifying actions that create consequences.

We are masterful at identifying who we don’t want, but not as strong on the next step: what government do we think would be better for our national interests? It turns out that this is tres tres tres difficult for outsiders, much less in a place as polarized as the United States these days.

I suspect that most of us unconsciously assume we can replace the bad guys with a more equitable, just, or participatory government, but that is rarely the case. In the pre-MAGA days, our mantra was that we wanted “democracy,” except whole swaths of the past decade focused on eliminating participatory governance in favor of a selected few. We sometimes no longer even add the phrase “provide a better standard of living” because Americans seem less concerned about others, focusing instead on their conditions.

Yet, once a repressive regime relinquishes power, we repeatedly forget there is no magical replacement easy to pull off the shelf to replace it.

And regime change is expensive for someone. At Pottery Barn, when your kid breaks the $2500 vase, you are on the hook to pay for it. Powell cautioned that paying for a country’s government replacement is not optional; it can be expensive in many ways.

The changes in our government over the past five months are relevant and likely hobbling. In 2025, our government systematically degraded or eliminated several key instruments of statecraft essential for these activities because they were deemed wasteful. To recap a couple of examples, the State Department is downgrading much of its overseas presence by professionals trained to appreciate conditions on the ground by speaking the relevant languages and understanding the cultures of other nations (particularly in Africa). USAID provided not only infusions of advice and aid but branded what we were doing. We also eliminated foreign assistance, one of the most fundamental building blocks of a post-regime change strategy anywhere, because providing aid—even when it’s technical assistance rather than cash—is too expensive. Both of those decisions alone significantly hamper our ability to influence what goes on elsewhere, much less actively remake a government (which I am not advocating for reasons below).

We are definitely amidst a federal debt crisis, but the State Department responsible for both examples is one of the smallest cabinet department by workforce and budget. Ignorance and memes don’t alter the reality that we no longer occupy a central role as advocates for good or representative governance, as we did for decades. We don’t think this matters, it seems, so others will fill the void of offering a post-regime change vision.

Powell’s analogy had other implications, however, forgotten in the aftermath of the debacle in Afghanistan. Regime changes essentially by Afghans themselves, with some external support, in the 1990s ousted the reactionary and brutal Taliban, but the country devolved into its more traditional regional enclaves and tribal governance. (I am not a sociologist, so I am not going to argue whether it was tribe or warlord or sect; it was not a country under a functioning national government).

However, Afghanistan remained a distinct entity on the map despite its poor governance. Kabul remained the capital of a loosely linked population of 19.5 million at the turn of the millennium, but no government provided coherence to the place. No security forces protected the place for outside intervention, leaving instead vast areas we later labeled “ungoverned spaces” where Islamic radicals brought nefarious ambitions as they took refuge from their nations of origin. The zeal they imported facilitated the 9/11 attacks on us, thousands of miles away.

Understandable U.S. retaliation in the weeks following the attacks helped remake the remnants of this old society into a more modern and like-minded country, prepared to serve as a shining example of our benevolence in the new era. Instead, the truly breathtaking infusions of assistance, military force, technological upgrades, and other steps deemed modernizing failed to prevent the same harsh Islamic Taliban from retaking the country a quarter century after their demise.

Countless words cover the explanations for why this occurred. Debates persist regarding who or what was to blame or what tweaks would have ensured success, but we failed miserably in the post-regime change mission despite spending trillions of dollars and thousands of lives. The failure involved not only Afghan governance but also the reputation of the United States, which had misunderstood the context within which it had operated for twenty years.

Iraq, of course, is the most recent painful exposure. The initial April 2003 glow of success in ousting the long-ruling and brutal dictator Saddam Hussein revised the history of the Middle East (contributing to today’s conflict, of course) while destabilizing Iraq itself. The United States found our massive military power was unable to rebuild an Iraqi government in our image nor to quell the divisions within a multi-variable society, despite billions of dollars and many lives invested in response.

No matter the amount of cash we infused, Iraqis had their own cultures (sic), their hierarchies, and their allies and partners who did not want a new Iraq under the watchful eye of Americans seeking to restructure the region. It took us less time to recognize this along the Tigris and Euphrates, but it was no less painful or expensive a lesson. Additionally, in attempting to replace the dictatorship with a democracy empowered the election winners of those elections to befriend whomever they wanted. The Shi’ite majority, it turned out, liked their Iranian brethren far more than we did, expanding the Islamic Republic’s role in the Arab world in a menacing, if unforeseen, way.

Iraq today has the trappings of a representative system, but it hardly ranks as one of the world’s most respected governments. Shi’ia and Sunni alike still oppose one another within the country. At the same time, the neighborhood watches them with the same low-level anxiety it had during most of Saddam Hussein’s wretched regime over twenty-five years.

Lest we think this problem is limited to the Middle East, we need look no further than Haiti as an example of how every evil regime can lead to another. The Duvalier family exploited the western half of the island it shares with the Dominican Republic for decades until Baby Doc’s rule proved so loathsome in the 1980s that pressure forced him to flee. The subsequent five decades had a few points of brightness, such as occasional elections that garnered apparent popular support, but without the structural changes to society that would allow them to persist. Instead, the Republic of Haiti remains the site of nearly constant upheaval, whether because of earthquakes, hurricanes, gangs, or one element of the military seeking to oust another.

Iran is much larger, wealthier, and more cohesive as a nation than Afghanistan, but that may provide comfort, as these conditions offer different challenges. Is it impossible that regime change could go well in Iran? No, of course not but the implications could have wide effects over decades.

I refer you back to Powell rules 5-Be careful what you ask for as you may get it (and not like it, of course), and 7-You can’t make someone else’s choices (as they don’t respond well much of the time). He was thinking of history he had witnessed.

None of this endorses poor or repressive governments like Teheran, Khartoum, or Caracas. It is, however, the long-term grit and persistence of those within a society that lead to improvements following regime change rather than outsiders walking in with a script to improve conditions. The occasional successes, such as the Philippines since Ferdinand Marcos’ fall under U.S. pressure in 1986, primarily result from domestic forces rather than foreigners “solving” the problem, and societal transformations require decades rather than a few months or years.

The successes also almost always have an identifiable widespread opposition rather than merely seeking to rid the country of the bad. Yet, too much of the conversation on Iran still seems stuck on what we don’t want. Powell reminded us that the Pottery Barn owners hand us the broken pieces with which we must make some choices.

The current proclivity for many Americans, especially those in leadership positions, is to say problems “over there” aren’t ours; someone else will have to deal with them as we are only interested in America First.

Support appears to be growing, with Republicans weighing in to endorse the objective. Texas Senator Ted Cruz advocated for advancing our interests, while his South Carolina colleague “would love to see” the mullahs fall.

Really?

Make sure we know the next several evolutions in global politics. Are there possibilities resulting from this regime change that make things less tolerable for us (the Israelis likely would have a different calculation)?

What instruments do we retain for assisting others as they seek to replace the bad with something better? Or would we prefer Russia or China do that? China certainly wants to maintain access to Iranian petroleum since this source provides 80% of Beijing’s imports.

China has maintained a policy of non-intervention in the affairs of other countries for 70 years. That reflects their determination not to justify anyone intervening in their activities and the reality that in the 1950s, the PRC had few resources for outside adventurism; it also served to avoid entanglement in other countries’ problems. Making nice with whoever is in power saves Beijing some effort, as they see us repeatedly focused beyond the bilateral U.S.-PRC competition.

The primary import of the Pottery Barn analogy today is not that we lack the tools or understanding of Iran to remake the society; we don’t have the resources in an era when we are wrestling with our expenditures, theoretically in response to a federal debt of tens of trillions of dollars. The idea of Iranian regime change is folly because it’s a country with tentacles that could affect us, yet we have far more limited financial means to do much than at any point in our history.

We assume that a post-mullah Iran would no longer facilitate terrorism around the world: why are we so sure of that? Do we think a post-Islamic State would turn its back on selling petroleum to the PRC? Why do we assume Persian or Iranian nationalism would subside, particularly after an externally-driven conflict, to make things much easier with the Arab states, Israel, or anyone else? Do we have evidence of any of these things that seem to be hidden assumptions?

The predecessor Pahlavi dynasty in Iran had good relations with the United States, but our interests did not align closely. We sought access to Persian petroleum and intelligence spots to watch the Soviet Union. The Shah sought international prestige, wealth, and personal power; his SAVAK, domestic security goons, pursued Iranian dissidents around the world like several despicable authoritarians. He promoted a secular culture, but Iran, despite forty-five years of religious intolerance, still represents the heart of the Shi’ite sect for tens of millions of adherents. If the Pahlavis could not stamp out Islam, why would we think regime change would accomplish that?

We have ended several programs that could argue to Iranians why our system merits their consideration for a new era. Our societal conditions, however, are not compelling as an alternative, with cross-cutting tensions befuddling much of the world. We don’t bring Iranians here, nor do we send examples of tolerance or hope under shackled programs.

We are, at our heart, optimists who believe we are uniquely able to accomplish more than anyone else. However, in conclusion, the Pottery Barn analogy is more applicable today than it was in 2003 because Iran is a larger and more significant entity, and the United States is poorer and more divided. Perhaps I am too pessimistic on this dreary Wednesday, but I am certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it’s a much bigger task than supporters are conveying.

Actions create consequences, after all. Let’s be sure we do our diligence rather than operating on hopes and erroneous assumptions. We won’t have all of the answers but we would be daft to ignore the obvious questions in this process.

I welcome your criticisms, challenges, historic revisions, or anything else. Please feel free to weigh in. I also encourage you to share this if you find this valuable.

I appreciate your time. I thank the paid subscribers who make this possible. $55 for annual subscriptions or $8 a month make a difference in the work I bring you.

Be well and be safe. FIN

Michael Crowley, “‘Regime Change?’ Questions About Israel’s Iran Goal Pressure Trump”, NewYorkTimes.com, 17 June 2025, retrieved at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/us/politics/regime-change-israel-iran-trump.html

“List of Federal Departments“, federalpay.org, 18 June 2025, retrieved at https://www.federalpay.org/departments

Colin L. Powell, It Worked for Me: In Life and In Leadership. New York: Harper, 2014.

ShareAmerica, “Powell’s 13 Rules for How to Lead”, ShareAmerica.gov, 19 October 2021, retrieved at https://archive-share.america.gov/colin-powell-13-rules-how-to-lead/

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