When American Presidents Tell You To Rise Up

If an American president told you to suck off a dog, would you suck off a dog? I doubt it.
The elite talking point goes like this: Bush was wrong after the first Gulf War to encourage Iraqis to rise up against Hussein, because the rebels got slaughtered without American support, and Trump was wrong to encourage Iranians to rise up in January, for the same reason. But this argument skips over something basic. The people who rose up had agency. They made choices. If Trump encouraged me to do something, I would still weigh it against my own interests and decide for myself. I do not automatically follow advice from someone who does not know me or my situation.
Protesters who acted on rhetoric from American presidents were seizing on an excuse to do what they already wanted to do.
In elite foreign policy circles, a strong norm exists against encouraging uprisings unless the United States stands ready to back them militarily. The 1991 Iraq episode is the case that shaped this norm. After the Gulf War, Bush and American broadcasts urged Iraqis to rise against Saddam. Shiite and Kurdish groups revolted. The U.S. declined to support them militarily. Saddam crushed the rebellion and killed tens of thousands.
That episode left a deep mark on the foreign policy establishment. Many analysts adopted a rule of thumb: do not encourage rebellion unless you are prepared to intervene. From their view, words from an American president carry enormous weight and can shift the risk calculations of people living under dictatorships.
When elites criticize Bush or Trump for encouraging protests in Iran, they apply that same norm. They believe presidential signals create expectations of support that might never come.
But the agency argument holds. People under authoritarian regimes are not puppets. They already live with grievances, repression, and economic pressure that drive protest movements. Most uprisings grow from internal conditions, not from a single foreign statement. When outside observers attribute a protest movement primarily to a speech from Washington, they underestimate the internal motivations that were already there. Protesters make their own calculations about risk, timing, and what they stand to gain or lose.
The real disagreement is about how much causal weight to assign to elite rhetoric. Foreign policy professionals think in terms of signaling theory. They assume that statements from powerful leaders alter perceived probabilities. If a protester believes the United States might intervene, the expected payoff of rebellion rises, and more people take the risk. Critics of this view argue that individuals still evaluate those signals rather than follow them blindly. They weigh local knowledge, the strength of the regime, and their own tolerance for danger.
Foreign policy professionals tend to overestimate the power of signals from Washington because their entire world consists of interpreting signals between governments. People outside that professional world tend to see political behavior as more self-directed and less reactive to statements made thousands of miles away.