In recent years there has been a growing scholarly consensus that regime change, a foreign policy tool intended to promote democracy and other American values, rarely succeeds as envisioned and often produces harmful side effects. Even when covert regime-change operations do not fail in their basic purposes, they typically spark civil wars, erode human rights, lead to lower levels of democracy, increase repression, and draw the intervening power into lengthy nation-building projects.
In the past, scholars have debated whether regime-change policies should be explained by structural factors or agency and have often pitted these explanations against each other in statistical contests. More recently, they have also been examining the possibility that a connection exists between political regimes and economic performance. Some scholars argue that the persistence of authoritarian states is related to poor economic performance, while others have argued that incumbent regimes adjust their policies in response to the economic performance of neighboring democracies.
Despite the scholarly evidence against them, many American officials still support the use of armed force to replace odious regimes and achieve national security or humanitarian goals. The overuse of regime change threatens to undermine the effectiveness of other tools more effective at promoting democracy and human rights around the world and may ultimately harm America’s national security and humanitarian interests.