The Dangers of Romanticizing Regime Change

Jerrod A. Laber

Security, Americas

Lindsay A. O’Rourke's book looks at the destructive outcome of regime change gone wrong.

Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War, Lindsay A. O’Rourke, Cornell University Press, December 2018, 330 pages.

Former Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol made waves in November 2018 when he suggested on Twitter that regime change in China should be an important goal of U.S. foreign policy in the coming decades. This provocative statement caused the internet to do its usual thing, with scores of people jumping into the conversation, both on Twitter and elsewhere, to offer their two cents.

Noticing the reaction, Kristol went on to elaborate and clarify what he meant in a longer tweet thread, saying that the “case for regime change shouldn't really be controversial. The United States at its best has always stood for the proposition that all people everywhere deserve to be free.” He went on to say that “[we] rarely use and should  rarely use military force . . . I do think a relatively open embrace of freedom as our goal, and a relatively candid debate over means, would serve the nation well.”

Any debate over the relative merits and demerits of regime change as a legitimate tool of foreign-policy needs to begin with Lindsay A. O’Rourke’s fantastic new book, Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War. O’Rourke is an assistant professor of political science at Boston College, and her book is the perfect start to the debate that Kristol called for in his online manifesto. O’Rourke both develops a theory of regime change and meticulously details the history of America’s covert regime change efforts during the Cold War. Her findings throw cold water on any regime change enthusiast’s belief that it should be an “uncontroversial” idea.