Friends, Foes, and Foreign-Imposed Regime Change

To the Editors (Michael Poznansky writes):

In “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” Alexander Downes and Lindsey O’Rourke investigate whether foreign-imposed regime change (FIRC) improves interstate relations.¹ With some exceptions, their answer is a resounding no. Not only does regime change rarely enhance relations between the intervening state and the target state, but it may make matters worse by exacerbating conflict. Downes and O’Rourke’s study marks a significant contribution to analysts’ understanding of foreign-imposed regime change and its utility as a tool of statecraft. One problem, however, is that Downes and O’Rourke do not adequately define success or failure independently of their empirical measures. This, in turn, makes it difficult to truly know whether regime change improves or worsens relations between intervener and target. The remainder of this letter attempts to explain why this is so.

The first step in knowing whether Downes and O’Rourke are correct that “you can’t always get what you want” in the world of regime change is to specify what it is that leaders are hoping to accomplish by toppling a foreign leader. While Downes and O’Rourke note that “[a]n intervener’s primary reason for installing a new leader in another state is to get that state to behave in the intervener’s interest,” they do little to specify what this would look like (p. 85). Does behaving in the intervener’s interest simply mean that the foreign-imposed regime will be less likely to engage in militarized disputes (MIDs) with the state that put it there? This, at least, is what Downes and O’Rourke’s quantitative analysis, which uses MIDs as the core dependent variable, implicitly suggests. In this view, regime change improves interstate relations to the extent that it reduces the probability of a MID.

What if, however, the aim of intervention has less to do with reducing the odds of direct conflict with a target state and more to do with denying a rival power the opportunity to bring an ideological protégé into its camp? Indeed, intervening to topple ideologically threatening regimes or preventing a hostile ideological alliance from forming in the first place has been one of the key causes of regime change over the last several centuries.² When intervention is undertaken for these purposes and successfully prevents such an outcome, one might reasonably conclude that regime change worked even if the intervener and the target experienced some form of a militarized dispute afterward.³ None of this is meant to deny the value of knowing whether or not FIRC reduces the odds that a given dyad will experience militarized disputes. My point is simply that one cannot say for certain whether FIRC improves state relations without first understanding what it would mean for the target to act in accordance with, or contrary to, the intervener’s interests. In some cases, a reduction in the likelihood of MIDs may qualify as the primary purpose of an intervention and thus would represent a fitting outcome to investigate. When FIRC is undertaken to achieve other ends, it will be less appropriate.

Downes and O’Rourke’s failure to explicitly define what interveners are hoping to accomplish by conducting regime change not only creates problems for adjudicating the success or failure of an operation on its own terms; it also creates problems when it comes to specifying what the appropriate counterfactual should be in a given case. To say with any confidence whether FIRC improved or worsened relations between intervener and target, one would need to know whether relations would have been better or worse had regime change never transpired (which, of course, has a lot to do with the specific goals of an intervention). To illustrate this point, consider the U.S.-sponsored intervention against Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, which Downes and O’Rourke describe as a failure (ibid.). Their rationale is that regime change against Mossadegh was a contributing factor to the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the virulent anti-Americanism that...