Books
Catastrophic Success: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Goes Wrong. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2021. Cornell Studies in Security Affairs.
When a state confronts an obstinate or dangerous adversary, the lure of toppling its government and establishing a friendly administration is strong. The historical record, however, indicates that foreign-imposed regime change is not, in the long term, cheap, easy, or consistently successful. The strategic impulse to forcibly oust antagonistic or noncompliant regimes overlooks two key facts. First, the act of overthrowing a foreign government sometimes causes its military to disintegrate, sending thousands of armed men into the countryside where they often wage an insurgency against the intervener. Second, externally imposed leaders face a domestic audience in addition to an external one, and the two typically want different things. These divergent preferences place imposed leaders in a quandary: taking actions that please one invariably alienates the other. Regime change thus drives a wedge between external patrons and their domestic proteges or between proteges and their people. Drawing on a compilation of all instances of regime change around the world over the past two centuries, the book shows that regime change increases the likelihood of civil war and violent leader removal in target states and fails to reduce the probability of conflict between intervening states and their targets. Available at Cornell University Press (enter code 09FLYER for a 30% discount) and Amazon. Online Supplemental Materials:
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