After high-profile failures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, the policy community remains divided over whether regime change is a viable tool. Advocates argue that it can achieve policy objectives more cheaply and quickly than sustained engagement and diplomatic pressure. They also assert that such operations will not escalate into broader military action. Yet the empirical record reveals that overthrowing foreign governments is far more difficult than most policymakers imagine. In fact, most such operations are ill-conceived, rely on ignorance of local societies and often back the wrong winners in political competition. They can also lead to unintended consequences that make the resulting state worse than it would have been without intervention.
The problem is that the bar for evaluating whether a foreign government should be removed from power is too low. Many politicians, particularly in the United States, seem to believe that any foreign government that does not agree with their ideological orientation is illegitimate and deserves to be overthrown. This view has led to some spectacular failures, from the CIA’s efforts in Guatemala to overthrow a democratically elected government to the current attempts to remove a Venezuelan president who is viewed by the international community as illegitimate.
In reality, the majority of foreign governments do not fit the definition of a “regime.” They hold regular elections and have well-established constitutional mechanisms for addressing disagreements. The US has an array of policy tools that can be used to encourage democracy and human rights in the world, including sanctions, aid and diplomacy. But resorting to regime change undermines these other tools and damages America’s ability to advance its own national security goals in the long run.