As the crisis in Venezuela deepens, many are asking what America should do. While the Trump administration has not formally sought regime change, the discussion is taking on the shape of whether to support the aspirations of Juan Guaidó, the head of an alternative legislature in Caracas, to become president and lead the country away from Maduro’s authoritarian grip.
The idea that a foreign government should be supplanted by another is an idea with a long history in the United States and elsewhere. It is rooted in the notion that what happens inside a nation’s borders is the responsibility of the state, and that there are times when other nations can step in to prevent harm. It is a policy mechanism that fundamentally contradicts the principle of Westphalian sovereignty.
Yet a policy of regime change persists, even as scholarly evidence suggests that it is often counterproductive and produces deleterious side effects. For example, the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan succeeded in ousting one regime but set off a decade of guerrilla warfare and state collapse. Likewise, the removal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq shattered that state, unleashed the rise of al-Qaeda and ISIS, and launched an ill-conceived regional war.
Academic studies find that covert regime-change efforts fail to achieve their basic purposes about sixty percent of the time, and that even when they do succeed, they often sparked civil war or provoked other kinds of blowback. They also tend to draw the intervening power into lengthy nation-building projects that often undermine democracy and promote repression.
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