After high-profile failures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, many in the policy community have continued to call for regime change as a tool for supplanting odious governments and advancing American security and humanitarian interests. However, the evidence from academic research overwhelmingly demonstrates that armed regime-change missions rarely succeed as intended and often have unintended consequences such as humanitarian crises and regional instability.
Policymakers seek regime change for one of two reasons: if they believe that the sitting government is working against American national security interests and replacing it with an opposing government will solve the problem more quickly than sustained military action or diplomatic negotiations. They also may feel that a specific regime’s policies impose externalities on other nations and are not willing to accommodate a different approach from that government, as in the case of the socialist regime of Venezuela.
A second reason for regime change is that it will improve relations with the target nation by installing a pro-American government. However, as Lindsey O’Rourke shows in her study of declassified documents, the results of covert regime-change efforts have been mixed. About sixty percent of those campaigns failed in their basic purposes, and the rest sparked blowback such as mass killings and civil war.
The debate about regime change is complicated by a range of cognitive biases that distort the perception of the risks and benefits of this strategy. These include an overemphasis on the value of democracy, a tendency to overestimate the cost of changing a regime and a reluctance to acknowledge the potential risks of forcible intervention.
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