A regime change is an intervention involving the United States or other foreign powers through a range of policy mechanisms – including diplomatic, economic and informational tools as well as military action – that aims to supplant another government. Ideally, the new regime is both legitimate and able to fulfill its citizens’ needs in ways that can be sustained over time.
The idea that forcibly changing regimes is a good way to promote democracy, human rights and other policy goals has been popular in the United States since Woodrow Wilson’s call for “teaching them to elect good men.” Since then, the US has engaged in regime-change operations around the world, nominally in pursuit of political stability or economic interests. Yet the scholarly literature demonstrates that armed regime-change missions rarely succeed as intended and often produce deleterious side effects.
For example, they can spark civil wars and increase repression within the target state. And they also force the intervening power into lengthy nation-building projects that are difficult to sustain over time. This is an unwise way to pursue America’s policy objectives and violates the principle of Westphalian sovereignty, which establishes that what happens inside a state’s borders is not the business of other nations.
The many decades of low-result regime change should make American officials cautious about this policy tool. Instead, they should embrace the fact that it is much harder to build democratic institutions by means other than armed invasion and work on developing robust alternatives such as robust sanctions and a robust foreign aid program that support more open and plural societies.
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