As the crisis in Venezuela deepens, many American officials have voiced support for regime change. They argue that the country needs a new leadership with more benevolent policies toward its people. While these claims might have some merit, regime change is a dangerous and misguided policy that undermines democracy and harms America’s long-term security and economic interests.
Regime change is the practice of forcibly overthrowing a foreign government to replace it with one that better serves foreign powers’ political or economic goals. Usually, these goals are related to spreading democracy, advancing humanitarian interests or promoting national security. The history of armed regime-change missions shows that they rarely succeed as intended. Instead, they produce unintended consequences, like civil war and human rights violations, that further aggravate the original problem and can turn the target country into an international trouble spot that threatens America’s interests.
In fact, the academic literature demonstrates that covert regime-change efforts fail in their basic purposes more than sixty percent of the time. Furthermore, these operations are likely to spark civil wars, increase repression, and draw the foreign intervener into lengthy nation-building projects. The failure of a host of regime-change operations has created an important insight: Forcibly displacing antagonistic foreign governments often drives a wedge between the new leaders and their domestic audience. The result is a protracted struggle that weakens the foreign regime and undermines its ability to advance its goals.
The overuse of armed regime-change tactics undercuts other foreign policy tools that are more effective at promoting democracy, improving human rights and bolstering America’s economic and security interests abroad. American officials should focus on promoting liberal democracy and addressing human suffering without resorting to risky covert military interventions that are more likely to create problems than to solve them.