Even after high-profile failures such as the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, many in the policy community continue to promote regime change as a viable tool for promoting democracy, human rights, and American security interests. Yet there is a growing scholarly consensus that foreign regime-change operations are often ineffective and produce deleterious side effects. These covert campaigns usually fail to meet their predetermined goals, tend to spark civil wars, and frequently draw the intervener into lengthy nation-building projects. They also tend to stoke anti-American sentiment and make it more difficult for the United States to advance its own interests in the future.
The reason for these failures is that regime-change operations rarely succeed as envisioned. They typically generate domestic blowback that undermines the goals of the operation, such as the rise of militant Islamists in Iraq and Syria or the empowerment of revolutionary factions in Venezuela and Iran. Moreover, the very act of overthrowing a regime drives a wedge between external patrons and their domestic proteges or between proteges themselves. Domestic audiences demand more benefits for their efforts than the leaders of imposed governments can provide, so their support is likely to be fickle.
As a result, imposing a new government on an unwilling audience is a recipe for instability. In a recent study, we analyze this dynamic using a novel global game model of regime change. We find that the best way to destabilize a regime is to erode its legitimacy and not invade it directly. The only time that occupation, regime change, and reconstruction from outside should occur is when normal means (such as limited military action or sanctions) are no longer effective, which typically emerges only with totalitarian leaders or with malfeasant states that challenge world order in a dramatic manner.