As the world watches and wonders if Russian forces will roll into Ukraine, the British government recently released intelligence indicating that Russian President Vladimir Putin is contemplating regime change in Ukraine.
Recent research suggests Putin might want to think again. The costs of regime change frequently outweigh the benefits — often by a large margin. Political scientist Lindsey A. O’Rourke’s book on covert regime changes conducted by the United States during the Cold War and my recent book on regime changes worldwide over the past two centuries both find that these operations generally don’t improve relations between interveners and their targets. Moreover, regime change tends to provoke violent resistance against foreign occupiers or their puppets, leading to civil war, violent removal of imposed leaders and mass killings of civilians.
If regime change so frequently fails to advance the interests of the intervening nation, and leads to further violence, why do countries keep doing it?
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Short-term thinking shapes these decisions
One important reason is that interveners tend to focus on the short-term goal — achieving regime change — but neglect to plan for the aftermath. Months of careful planning and preparation, for example, went into the U.S. invasion of Iraq, but the United States was largely unprepared for what came after Saddam Hussein’s demise. Bush administration officials instead offered rosy predictions that Iraqis would welcome Americans as liberators and rejected any suggestion that prolonged occupation by large forces would be necessary.
Countries have a long history of making optimistic assumptions about their interventions. Consider the 1839 British invasion of Afghanistan, which aimed to replace that country’s leader. Despite knowing little about the country, London’s viceroy Lord Auckland wrote that he “confidently hopes that the Shah will be speedily replaced on his throne by his own subjects and adherents; and once he shall be secured in power, the British Army will be withdrawn.”
When countries engage in regime change, the most important thing they fail to anticipate is that the leader they install may not be able to accomplish what they want. Rather, interveners assume that the leader or government they empower will dutifully follow their preferences.
This view, however, ignores the target’s domestic population, which typically does not share the intervener’s preferences. This means that a foreign-installed leader can easily get caught in a tug-of-war between the foreign patrons and the domestic public — both of which can remove them from power violently. This interest asymmetry is what leads imposed leaders to either break with their patrons or face domestic unrest.
In short, trouble is baked into regime change from the start. But regime changers, focused myopically on getting the job done, don’t see it coming.
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The intervening country may lack critical information
A second reason that regime change persists despite poor outcomes is that interveners often have little — or biased — intelligence about the situation inside the target country. In some cases, interveners’ only sources of information are individuals with vested interests in seeing regime change happen, such as the regime’s opposition or exiles who haven’t been in the country for years.
One example that leaps to mind is exiled Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi, who worked assiduously to promote regime change in Iraq and hoped to place himself in power. Again, however, this is not solely a recent phenomenon.
In the 1860s, Mexican conservatives hoped to persuade France’s Napoleon III to get rid of Benito Juarez’s Liberal Party government. They assured him that “upon the landing of European troops, their compatriots would rise as one and support the establishment of a monarchy.” Needless to say, that didn’t happen; Mexico’s new emperor ruled for a mere three years before he was overthrown and executed by Juarez’s army.
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Do leaders consider past outcomes?
A third reason that policymakers keep trying regime change despite the dismal record is that leaders aren’t adept learners — they typically fail to give full weight to the experiences of others. U.S. leaders learned from the Soviet experience in Afghanistan that going in “heavy” would backfire, for example. In 2001, they relied instead on CIA operatives and Special Operations forces to defeat the Taliban — but at the cost of letting Osama bin Laden slip away along with Taliban leader Mohammad Omar and many Taliban fighters. The Taliban would later return to resist the NATO-supported Afghan government.
Governments may have better luck learning from their own experiences, but often are loath to admit that something they want to do won’t work. As political scientist Melissa Willard-Foster puts it, “previous failed attempts at regime change may simply prompt policymakers to adopt a different approach to regime change rather than to abandon it altogether.”
One “lesson” of Iraq, for example, was to avoid a lengthy occupation and nation-building effort. The U.S. government thus hailed the reliance on air power in Libya as a clever way to effect regime change on the cheap — until it blew up in everyone’s faces.
Finally, in the U.S. case, leaders tend to focus on highly idiosyncratic successes, such as the democratic transformations of West Germany and Japan after World War II, without understanding how different the circumstances in those cases were from other regime changes, including Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.
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Putin’s choice
Given all the pervasive illusions surrounding regime change, it becomes more obvious why Putin might be drawn to this strategy in Ukraine. Regime change appears to promise control at low cost. But is the Kremlin thinking through all of the potential pitfalls — particularly whether ordinary Ukrainians would support a pro-Russian leader?
Russia probably has ample sources of intelligence in Ukraine, but it’s less clear whether Putin has considered what might come after regime change. The Soviet Union, of course, had its own disastrous experience in Afghanistan, where regime change spawned an unbeatable insurgency that drove out the Red Army. Ukraine is a bigger country with a larger population and, just as was the case in Afghanistan, other countries would be eager to support Ukrainian resistance. What could possibly go wrong?
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Alexander B. Downes is associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University. He is the author of the recently published “Catastrophic Success: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Goes Wrong” (Cornell University Press).