Regime change describes the effort to replace a nation’s leadership through policy mechanisms, overt or covert. This may involve backing a coup, providing support to a rebel group, or outright military intervention. It does not include purely internal changes in a state’s government such as elections, peaceful transfers of power, or constitutional changes (see below for definitions of those terms).
Since the United States stepped into the world stage as a global hegemone, there has been a growing scholarly consensus that regime change policies do not work as intended. Indeed, they often spark civil wars, reduce levels of democracy, increase repression, and draw foreign interveners into lengthy nation-building projects that far exceed their original objectives.
Advocates of regime change claim that it is morally right to oust a detestable foreign regime because such regimes systematically harm their people. While there is much truth to this argument, it ignores the fact that the same characteristics that render foreign governments odious to outsiders also characterize their domestic governance: they are violent, totalitarian, unpredictable and arbitrary, and run by a small circle of elites.
Furthermore, a key rule for regime change is that the external patron must be prepared to invest in the country’s future and must ensure that their domestic protege has the capacity to maintain control. Otherwise, insurgency will inevitably drive the two apart, with the resulting chasm between an imposed leader and their people undermining both the legitimacy of the foreign patron and the imposer’s best intentions.