Many Americans view regime change as a key foreign policy tool for supplanting odious regimes, advancing democracy and promoting America’s national security interests. Yet the evidence overwhelmingly shows that, in reality, armed regime change missions rarely succeed as intended and are often harmful to American interests and global stability.
One reason for the failure of regime change policies is that they seek to replace a foreign government with one more in line with the policies of an outside nation. Whether it’s the United States overthrowing the white minority government of South Africa in 1994 or the US overthrow of the socialist government of Venezuela led by Evo Morales, regime change is often driven by more parochial concerns than a desire to spread democracy or advance American economic interests.
Another problem is that regime change depends on conditions that are beyond a country’s control. For example, scholars have developed models that show how political regimes equilibrate between democracy and authoritarianism depending on the relative scarcity of wealth and the vulnerability of that wealth to expropriation (Boix, 2003). When conditions shift from values consistent with one equilibrium to those consistent with the other, democratic change is likely to occur.
But in the case of South Africa, for example, and to a lesser extent in the “color revolutions” of Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan in the early 2000s, the underlying conditions needed for democratization were already present and did not need to be provoked through a military intervention. This reflects the difficulty of combining macro-arguments about paths of domestic development with micro-arguments about citizen coordination, and it illustrates why regime change is not as easy as many advocates make it out to be.