Regime change has been demonized by critics, who call it reckless adventurism or imperialistic hubris. But to the regimes that threaten America’s existence, such as the Communist Party in China, the theocratic junta in Iran, and the dynastic tyranny of North Korea, it is an indispensable tool. They know that if they cannot be toppled, the United States will turn its attention elsewhere, and that their only hope for survival is to rewrite history in their favor.
Covert regime change campaigns fail about sixty percent of the time, and even those that do succeed are associated with greater civil war, human rights violations, and regional instability. In the long run, they also harm American interests by generating blowback that makes foreign actors more wary of U.S. influence.
What’s more, when American officials engage in regime change, they tend to ignore the full costs of their policy. They falsely believe that they can achieve a quick fix with a low price tag, but in reality the missions almost always spiral into lengthy institution-building projects. Moreover, they fail to understand the extent to which regime-change efforts rely on coercion and incite civil unrest—a risk that increases as the stakes get higher.
In the future, when officials consider forcibly bringing down another government, they should think twice before engaging in this kind of intervention. First, they should ask whether the government in question actually deserves to be toppled. Then they should consider how that effort might be accomplished without triggering a lengthy state-building project—and without inciting civil unrest or violating the bedrock norm of treating rivals as legitimate contenders for power.
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