While American officials should be committed to promoting democracy and humanitarianism abroad, they must find other tools than armed regime change to achieve those goals. The academic literature reveals that regime change missions rarely succeed, and even when successful they produce unintended consequences such as humanitarian crises and weakened internal security. Continuing to rely on these policies will undermine the effectiveness of other foreign policy instruments and hinder the achievement of America’s core strategic interests.
Regime change policies, such as backing military coups or covertly supporting a political party, aim to replace an existing government with one that benefits the intervening country’s economic and/or security interests. The prevailing wisdom in Washington is that the spread of democracy is beneficial to American security and that a more democratic world makes the United States safer. However, the actual record of armed regime-change missions is starkly different. Since the United States stepped onto the global stage as the “world’s policeman,” the majority of regime-change operations have failed, despite the fact that American leaders often cite only the few exceptions such as the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the removal of Muammar Gaddafi.
Many advocates of regime change policies sell their policies as a quick fix, promising that they can create substantial change with relatively few resources and minimal involvement from local citizens. But the reality is that the overthrow of a regime is only the beginning of a long state-building project, and those projects rarely meet their predetermined objectives. In addition, the use of a militarized approach to a regime change mission inevitably drives wedges between the external patron and the domestic protege, or between imposed leaders and their own citizens.