LITMIR.BIZ

      Introduction

      On March 19, 2011, eight years to the day after the start of the Iraq War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) began launching airstrikes at Libya in the third American-led attempt in a decade to topple a foreign leader. After two costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, few would have predicted President Barack Obama would lead the United States into another attempt at regime change. As a senator, he had opposed doing so in Iraq, insisting Saddam Hussein posed no imminent threat and could be contained given the weakened Iraqi economy and military.¹ Like Saddam, Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi posed no threat to the United States. He had weakened his own military in order to coup-proof his regime. He also no longer had the allies or the chemical weapons he had once possessed to protect himself. Qaddafi’s military vulnerability should have given him the incentive to seek a settlement and avoid a war that he could not win. But if Qaddafi, like Saddam, could have been coerced and contained, why was the United States pursuing regime change again?

      The failure to establish stable, friendly regimes in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya has led scholars and politicians alike to question the wisdom of foreign-imposed regime change (FIRC), and perhaps for good reason. Studies show FIRC (or simply “regime change,” as I will also refer to it) increases the risk of civil war in the target state and rarely creates democratic regimes. In addition, studies examining whether FIRC improves relations with the target state show mixed results.² But despite FIRC’s dubious record, regime change has been a persistent feature of the international system for centuries. It has taken many forms throughout this history—from foreign-instigated coups to large-scale military invasions, but whatever the form, the goal has been the same: to change the policies of other states by changing their policymakers.

      Regime change, however, is but one arrow in the quiver from which states can draw to achieve their foreign-policy objectives. And, as recent American experience suggests, it can be a costly one. Rather than replacing the opposing side’s leaders, states could bargain with them instead. The state seeking change could use coercion and/or inducement to obtain a favorable deal, formal or otherwise. It could also soften some of its demands to attain its most central policy aims. It could even give up on those aims altogether and accept the status quo—in essence, accepting a deal on the target’s terms. Conflicts between states can be resolved in a variety of ways. Why do states take on the costs and risks associated with regime change to resolve their conflicts, instead of pursuing these other options?

      Standard accounts in the historical and intervention literature suggest a seemingly straightforward answer to this question. States depose foreign leaders because they expect they can install like-minded ones with whom they will not have to bargain. Accordingly, much of this scholarship focuses on the policy objectives underlying FIRC, rather than on why states use it to obtain their objectives.³ What remains unclear is why a state would risk blood and treasure to install a more pliant leader when it could use presumably less costly means, such as coercion and/or inducement, to change the preferences of the current leader. Even when a state must apply limited military force to coerce a foreign leader into a settlement, it could still avoid the potentially heftier costs of installing a new leader by bargaining instead.

      The question of why states forsake bargaining for regime change becomes all the more puzzling when we consider that leaders typically targeted with regime change should be relatively easy to coerce into settlements.⁴ The history of FIRC is replete with militarily weak and friendless heads of state, like Saddam and Qaddafi, toppled after wars they could not win.⁵ I define FIRC as the decision by one state to abandon bargaining with another and to remove that state’s leaders or political institutions with the intention of restoring the target state’s sovereignty. Of the 133 cases in this study, 75 percent (see the lightly shaded regions in Figure 1) involve major powers attacking minor ones.⁶ Regional powers also frequently undertake regime change as well, but they too target weak states. In fact, on average, regimes targeted for change have a mere 11 percent of the imposing state’s military capabilities.⁷ Although states also target the equally powerful, that parity disappears by the time they achieve the military victory necessary to impose regime change. Hence, unequal power is a near-universal feature of FIRC. Though this asymmetry of power makes an imposed change feasible, it should also make that change unnecessary. To avoid being overthrown, militarily weak leaders who are bereft

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