Catastrophic Success

Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Goes Wrong

Alexander B. Downes

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781501761140
  9781501761140
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501761157
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In Catastrophic Success, Alexander B. Downes compiles all instances of regime change around the world over the past two centuries. Drawing on this impressive data set, Downes 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. As Downes demonstrates, 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, shows that foreign-imposed regime change is, in the long term, neither cheap, easy, nor consistently successful. The strategic impulse to forcibly oust antagonistic or non-compliant 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 protégés or between protégés and their people. Catastrophic Success provides sober counsel for leaders and diplomats. Regime change may appear an expeditious solution, but states are usually better off relying on other tools of influence, such as diplomacy. Regime change, Downes urges, should be reserved for exceptional cases. Interveners must recognize that, absent a rare set of promising preconditions, regime change often instigates a new period of uncertainty and conflict that impedes their interests from being realized.

CHAPTER 1

Defining Foreign-Imposed Regime Change

This chapter introduces the phenomenon that lies at the heart of this book: foreign-imposed regime change. I begin by laying out my definition of regime change, differentiating it from related concepts such as the imposition of regimes in new states emerging from colonialism (often referred to as imposed polities); military occupation; annexation; and state death. I discuss the three principal ways in which regime change is carried out: compellent threats demanding leader change; invasion; and overt or covert interventions in which external forces work with domestic factions located inside the target or in a nearby state. I provide a list of the 120 leaders who were removed in foreign-imposed regime changes from 1816 to 2008 and offer some basic descriptive statistics about the most common interveners and targets as well as the spatial and temporal distribution of regime changes.

Foreign-Imposed Regime Change: A Definition

Foreign-imposed regime change is the forcible or coerced removal of the effective, or de facto, leader of one state—which remains formally sovereign afterward—by the government of another state.¹ It should be immediately obvious that the word “regime” in the term “foreign-imposed regime change” is a misnomer. A political regime is rarely coterminous with an individual leader; it typically consists of a set of institutions through which the state is governed and an ideology, such as liberalism, monarchism, communism, or fascism. For example, the US “regime” consists not only of the president, but the rest of the executive branch, Congress, the courts, and the rules and procedures governing relations among those institutions as well as for how leaders are selected. Changing a president is not usually thought of as a change of regime, but rather as a change of leadership within the same regime.² Technically, therefore, the term regime change is inappropriate for the subject of this study, since the key factor identifying cases for inclusion is the forcible removal of the top political leader by an external actor. A more apt term would be “foreign-imposed leader removal” or “foreign-imposed leader change.” In addition to being not very snappy acronyms, introducing a new term would be swimming against the tide of existing scholarship that applies the moniker of regime change to changes of leadership. In this book, I thus adopt the term regime change even though the minimum thing being changed is not the regime but rather the leader.

As should be evident from the focus on leaders, interveners need not promote new governing institutions in the target for a case to qualify as regime change. The degree to which interveners promote institutions in targets is a variable. Sometimes interveners take extensive measures to determine the governing arrangements that prevail after regime change, whereas in other cases they exert hardly any effort at all. As I explore below, these differences matter for the effects that regime change has on the likelihood of conflict both within target states and between interveners and targets.

Unlike interventions that change the “hardware” of a state either by annexing some or all of its territory or otherwise wrecking the state’s power potential, changing the governing elites or institutions of a foreign state is akin to installing new software: the machine remains more or less the same, but the operating system is different. In other words, the power of the state targeted for regime change is redirected and put to different uses. This point is exemplified by Britain’s demand for an end to “Prussian militarism” in Germany as a condition for ending World War I. Britain’s policy did nothing to alter German capabilities. Rather, the idea was that these capabilities would be rendered less threatening if Germany were transformed into a democracy.³ Just as those who adopt coercive strategies in wartime hope to achieve victory “on the cheap,” states that employ regime change aim to neutralize threats and empower friendly governments without paying the costs of conquering and annexing the target or permanently garrisoning it.

Five specific elements of this definition merit elaboration.⁴

EFFECTIVE LEADER IS REMOVED

For a case to qualify as regime change, the individual removed through foreign intervention must be the actual, de facto, leader of the government, not a lower-ranking official, a ceremonial head of state that lacks any decision-making authority, or an individual considered to be the legal or de jure leader but who does not exercise actual power in the country. The Archigos project on leaders, which I rely on (with a few modifications) to make these determinations, refers to such individuals as “effective” leaders, “the person that de facto exercised power in a country.”⁵ In many cases, the head of state and leader of the government are one and the same person; this is true in presidential systems, for example. In parliamentary systems, by contrast, the head of state and head of government are separate offices held by different people, the former being a largely ceremonial post (as in the office of the president in Israel) whereas the latter wields the real decision-making authority. In constitutional monarchies, such as Britain, the role of head of state is filled by a hereditary monarch; the head of government is the prime minister, a member of Parliament who commands majority support in that chamber (typically the leader of the largest political party).⁶ In some authoritarian systems, such as single-party regimes, there is no formal head of state; the leader of the government is often the leader of the dominant party.⁷ To be considered an instance of regime change, however, an operation must remove the effective head of the target state’s government.

REMOVAL, BUT NOT NECESSARILY REPLACEMENT, OF LEADERS

My definition requires only that an intervener remove the current leader from power, not that it also replace the deposed leader with someone else—although most interveners typically do both. In the modal case of regime change, the intervener not only wants to dispose of the current leader but it also has a preferred replacement it would like to install—an individual who is selected because he or she is viewed as friendlier to the intervener’s interests than the current leader. According to Steven Hood, for example, when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia on Christmas Day, 1978, their “intent was to strike a quick and fatal blow to the Khmer Rouge leadership … and place their man, Heng Samrin, at the head of a puppet government.”⁸ Yet this need not be true for a case to count as regime change. When British forces invaded Afghanistan for the second time—to depose Amir Sher Ali in 1878—they did not bring along a preselected replacement as they had in 1839.⁹ After the initial target of regime change fled and placed his son, Yakub Khan, on the throne, British General Frederick Roberts deposed him but could not “find a puppet for the Afghan throne,” which remained vacant for nine months.¹⁰ The British eventually agreed to allow Abdur Rahman, a grandson of former Afghan emir Dost Mohammed, to take power. I code all three types of cases—foreign removal and immediate foreign replacement (Pol Pot to Heng Samrin in Cambodia), foreign removal and domestic replacement (Sher Ali to Yakub Khan in Afghanistan), and foreign removal and eventual foreign replacement (Yakub Khan to Abdur Rahman in Afghanistan)—as instances of foreign-imposed regime change.

This stipulation highlights the fact that the decision to depose a leader is separate from the decision to install a new leader.¹¹ Obviously the two decisions are closely linked and interveners typically make both before they act. Indeed, some scholars argue that the availability of a suitable replacement—in the form of a particular individual or at least a strong domestic political opposition—is a prerequisite for states to undertake regime change.¹² Yet interveners may not always make both decisions—or be able to implement both decisions—simultaneously for at least four reasons.

First, as discussed below, interveners sometimes use threats of military force to coerce targeted leaders to step down without a fight. In such cases, the intervener—not being present on the ground in the target state—may be unable to influence directly who succeeds the deposed leader.¹³ Second, this condition is also true when leaders are assassinated or targeted by the airpower strategy known as decapitation.¹⁴ When these methods are employed, the intervener cannot easily install a replacement leader because it lacks control over the target state.¹⁵ Third, the need to act speedily in a crisis may preclude careful deliberation regarding a successor to the targeted leader. Consider, for example, that a mere twenty-six days passed between the 9/11 attacks and the US initiation of hostilities against Afghanistan on October 7. This condensed time frame meant that the Bush administration did not go to war with a preselected replacement for Taliban leader Mullah Omar.

Finally, regime changes that promote democracy may not be undertaken with the intention to empower a particular individual, and even if the intervener had a preferred candidate, he would still have to navigate the electoral process successfully to gain power. This is not to say that promoting democracy and obtaining a particular leader are incompatible objectives. Although foreign powers in these cases may not have intervened in support of a specific candidate, they often play a determining role in who eventually accedes to high office.¹⁶ Despite going to war in 2001 without a predetermined candidate to govern Afghanistan, when a suitable individual—Hamid Karzai—emerged during the war, Washington was able to engineer his selection as interim leader, a status made official by elections in 2004. Similarly, some in the Bush administration aspired to replace Saddam Hussein with the exiled Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi, a favorite in neoconservative circles. When it became clear that placing Chalabi in office was not in the cards, however, the United States first took power into its own hands by installing Ambassador L. Paul Bremer as the head of a one-year US occupation, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). US officials then pressured UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi to select Ayad Allawi, another US favorite with close ties to the CIA, as interim prime minister. As the New York Times described Allawi’s selection in May 2004, “Mr. Brahimi was presented with a ‘fait accompli’ after President Bush’s envoy to Iraq, Robert D. Blackwill, ‘railroaded’ the [Iraqi] Governing Council into coalescing around him.”¹⁷ The United States—in the person of US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad—also exerted decisive influence on the selection of Nouri al-Maliki as prime minister two years later.¹⁸ In short, even interveners that topple a leader with...

Table of contents

• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Defining Foreign-Imposed Regime Change
• 2. Theorizing the Effects of Foreign-Imposed Regime Change
• 3. Foreign-Imposed Regime Change and Civil War
• 4. Foreign-Imposed Regime Change and the Survival of Leaders
• 5. Foreign-Imposed Regime Change and Interstate Relations
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index