Many regime change advocates believe that removing authoritarian or adversarial governments promotes regional stability, protects human rights, and safeguards global security. But these efforts are often costly, destabilizing, and prone to blowback, both for intervening powers and their target states. They may succeed in the short term, but they can also undermine domestic legitimacy and foster long-term instability and conflict.
The lessons of history suggest that policymakers should abandon the idea of systematically replacing bad regimes with democratic ones, and instead focus on stabilizing societies and their governance structures. It is possible to achieve these objectives by pursuing a combination of negotiation and targeted military strikes. The Iran strategy pursued by President Trump is one example: Its teetering between nuclear talks and limited, surgical confrontation may be a quagmire, but it is far better than the alternative of trying to topple the regime, which would likely lead to chaos and possibly the rise of a new anti-U.S. government in its place.
Attempts to overthrow regimes by airpower alone, however, have proved to be a fool’s errand. The removal of Hussein, Assad, and Gaddafi, for instance, all ended in political collapse, civil war, and Iranian entrenchment.
The reasons for this seem complex and involve a combination of factors at different levels. One is that incumbents learn from the experience of their neighbors and foreign actors about the link between democracy and economic performance and choose regimes that maximize their likelihood of survival (Miller 2016). Another explanation, based on cognitive biases and learning, involves how individuals assess their risks and make decisions about whether to support democracy.