Despite an academic consensus that regime change is usually counterproductive, many policymakers continue to favor forcible ousting of foreign governments. Cognitive biases lead them to focus on the desirability of the goals and to neglect the fact that such missions inevitably spiral into extended, expensive military operations. In addition, they tend to neglect the complexities of post-regime change nation building. As a result, they risk making matters worse by driving a wedge between external patrons and their domestic proteges or between allied states and the local populations they claim to want to protect.
Scholars have a long history of documenting the many ways that regime change policies go wrong. Regardless of the strategy employed, they are often unsuccessful and frequently produce unintended consequences, including destabilization and humanitarian crises. Moreover, they are usually more costly than the initial policymakers anticipated and require more resources than they can realistically afford to commit.
When a government implements policies that other nations find objectionable, they may wish to replace it with one that will pursue different policies. In a highly interconnected world, these wishes are likely to generate tensions between nations that otherwise might be close allies.
Using armed force to replace an odious regime with another that implements more congenial policies is an extremely dangerous approach to take. The historical record, as illustrated by the popular book Bitter Fruit and the more scholarly The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention, shows that such initiatives rarely succeed, and they wreak havoc on other countries’ relationships with the United States.
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