As the crisis in Venezuela continues, many Americans wonder whether regime change is warranted. While most believe that a non-democratic regime, like that of Venezuelan President Maduro, should be removed from power for humanitarian reasons, a few think the United States should seek a coup on moral or ideological grounds. Others point to the US overthrow of Japan and Germany after World War II, or to books such as Bitter Fruit and The CIA in Guatemala that detail how the United States engineered a coup in 1954 in order to protect the interests of the United Fruit Company, as proof that the regime-change doctrine is justifiable.
This conventional wisdom is flawed. A growing scholarly consensus finds that regime-change policies are rarely successful, regardless of the strategy utilized. Indeed, they can trigger civil wars, produce deleterious side effects, and draw the intervener into lengthy nation-building projects. Despite these flaws, many policymakers continue to favor regime-change policies, due to cognitive biases that lead them to focus on the desirability of their goals and to underestimate what it will take to achieve them.
The fundamental problem with this approach is that it is a radical departure from the principle of Westphalian sovereignty. It makes what happens inside another nation’s borders the business of foreign powers and gives them the ability to change government leaders without obtaining a popular vote or any sort of consent from the people whose lives are affected. This is not the way nations should operate. Rather, they should pursue their policy objectives through the use of the tools available to them, such as sanctioning odious regimes and engaging in covert efforts to help opposition forces organize.
About the Author
