As the United States debates military strikes against Iran, many are wondering whether the US will seek regime change. If it does, it will be following in the footsteps of a long tradition of US policymakers who sought to overthrow foreign governments for parochial reasons. This is a very dangerous road to go down. The evidence from a broad range of academic studies is clear that covert regime-change operations fail in their basic purposes about sixty percent of the time and that many sparked blowback that outweighed the benefits they may have created in the short term.
A regime change policy involves covert or overtly supporting a foreign government with the goal of replacing it with a different one. This may be a military coup or a campaign to bring about democracy through other means. The United States has tried regime change policies multiple times since it stepped onto the world stage as a global power, often in pursuit of spreading democracy or advancing economic interests. Whether it was backing a revolution to overthrow Napoleon Bonaparte, aiding the Chilean revolution of the late 1950s that brought about a dictatorship, conspiring with anti-colonialist dictator Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, or attempting to install the socialist leader Salvador Allende of Chile and more recently seeking to overthrow Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, US regime change interventions have rarely been successful and almost always had negative impacts on American relations with the world.
The lessons of the past should serve to caution us all. Despite the allure of overthrowing foreign regimes to create more benign ones, US efforts to do so are often counterproductive, associating America with repression of national aspirations and independence movements and with dictators whose cruelty gave rise to revolutionary groups that were far more hostile to American power than the leaders they replaced.