Some in the policy community continue to claim that regime change is a useful tool for supplanting odious regimes, strengthening democratic institutions, and advancing American security and humanitarian interests. But academic research reveals that regime-change operations, whether undertaken covertly or overtly, rarely succeed as intended. They also have deleterious side effects, including a greater risk of civil war, increased human rights abuses, and an intractable armed conflict.
In short, there is a strong scholarly consensus that regime-change policies are usually ineffective and produce serious side effects for American interests. This should give pause to anyone considering a covert military campaign.
Unlike a popular revolution, a regime change operation is a process of coercive diplomacy aimed at forcibly overthrowing an existing government and replacing it with one that favors foreign interests. In the case of Saddam Hussein, it failed to create a safer, more democratic Middle East, but it did foster an al-Qaeda franchise that has become more deadly than the dictatorship it replaced.
A similar dynamic has shaped other covert regime-change operations — from backing military coups to facilitating protest movements and infiltrating the governing elites of targeted states. Each strategy aims to elicit the support of a faction of a country’s population and encourage that faction to rebel against the regime’s leadership. Ultimately, this approach fails to realize its goals because the imposed leaders often lack popular legitimacy and face a dual audience – an external patron and their domestic proteges whose preferences diverge from each other.