As the crisis in Venezuela deepened, debate over regime change resurfaced in Washington. Despite the fact that forcibly overthrowing foreign governments has a poor track record, many policymakers still endorse this strategy as a tool to advance their country’s goals abroad. They do so despite a litany of failures and because they suffer from cognitive biases that lead them to focus on the desirability of the goal and ignore the cost of getting there.
These policies are often driven by a desire to spread democracy and advance economic interests, but they are usually counterproductive. They tend to backfire, associating the United States with the repression of national aspirations and independence movements, tying the U.S. to dictators who are more hostile to American power than the regimes they overthrew, and fostering blowback that undermines America’s own security.
What makes matters worse is that regime change is hard to execute well. It requires planning, multilateral support, a population in the target country ready to embrace change, and serious attention to what happens next. Without such a plan, covert regime-change operations fail about six times out of ten and may spark blowback in unanticipated ways.
The overuse of regime change also undercuts the effectiveness of other tools that are more successful at advancing America’s goals and promotes mistrust of US intentions. Ultimately, it undermines the ability of other countries to achieve their own goals and increases the probability that the United States will face more challenges in the future.