As the crisis in Venezuela continues, the question of what America should do to change the regime has become a hotly debated topic. But the conventional wisdom that armed intervention is the best tool for supplanting odious governments and advancing American interests is flawed. The empirical record reveals that regime-change operations rarely succeed, even when they are successful as intended. Instead of bringing democracy and prosperity, they tend to produce unintended consequences.
One of the most common arguments for a regime change policy is that existing leaders do not have the best interests of their people at heart. The idea is that if the people could vote for a government with their best interest at heart, it would create a more stable, peaceful, and prosperous state. This is the premise behind the CIA’s coup in 1954 against Guatemala’s Jacobo Arbenz or its covert campaign to overthrow Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953, and it is the logic that led the United States to support revolutionaries to oust Fidel Castro in Cuba in 1961 or Evo Morales in Bolivia in 2019.
In fact, though, there is no evidence that democratic elections alone are enough to ensure that a new government will have the best interests of the people at heart. In the most successful cases, such as South Africa’s transition from apartheid, a detestable regime was pressured to resign by economic and diplomatic means backed by an international consensus that it violated international law. It was then replaced by a government that proved to be legitimate and trustworthy. This is the kind of case that defenders of regime change often point to, but it is the exception rather than the rule.
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