As discussions of regime change in Venezuela rage on, policymakers must remember that forcibly ousting foreign leaders rarely succeeds and often backfires. It’s a risky strategy that requires a lot of time, energy and money—and one that typically produces worse outcomes for American interests in both the long and short run.
Despite the ghastly track record of covert regime change, many advocates continue to push it as a tool to achieve foreign policy goals. The most common rationale is that it is cheaper and faster than sustained diplomacy, engagement, and economic pressure. But these arguments overlook a few important points:
First, the attempt to forcibly oust an antagonistic government creates domestic discontent that often morphs into a domestic insurgency against the intervener. This is what happened in France, Italy and Albania after the United States supported coups there to promote democracy. In each case, a new government was ultimately more hostile to U.S. interests than the governments that were overthrown.
Second, the overthrow of a government also creates a power vacuum that can be filled by forces that are hostile to U.S. interests and that may be difficult to dismantle. In each of these cases, the United States has been forced into costly nation-building missions that it did not anticipate.
Finally, the underlying rationale for regime change ignores the fact that different polities have different political priorities. As the Cato Institute’s Trevor Incerti and Devin Incerti have shown, while sudden changes in leadership tend to increase market volatility, investment flows are not always negative. In fact, they sometimes improve—particularly when markets expect the new ruler to offer a more stable or pro-business environment.
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