While the United States has downgraded regime change to democracy promotion in its foreign policy, it is still a viable option, and the debate continues over how best to achieve it. The conventional wisdom is that covert armed intervention to supplant unfriendly regimes is a sound strategy for spreading democracy and advancing American economic interests. However, the historical record demonstrates that regime change rarely achieves these goals and typically provokes unintended consequences, including civil war, human rights violations, and regional instability.
Several explanations have been offered for the failure of regime change. Some posit that different types of regimes represent distinct equilibria that reflect exogenous parameters, such as the vulnerability of elites to wealth expropriation and the likelihood of a country developing into a democracy (Boix 2003; Miller 2016; Abramson and Montero 2020). Other scholars have found evidence for the notion that domestic preferences drive regime change. Imposed leaders face a domestic audience and an external one, and taking actions that please the latter alienates the former.
Whatever the underlying causes, the record shows that covert armed regime-change operations fail in their basic purposes about sixty percent of the time and, even when successful in the short term, often spark blowback in unanticipated ways. As a result, they are more likely to generate regional instability and to worsen relations with the intervener than would otherwise be the case. Furthermore, they undermine the presumption of Westphalian sovereignty that makes what happens within a country the business of its own citizens.