Toppling Foreign Governments
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In 2011, the United States launched its third regime-change attempt in a decade. Like earlier targets, Libya's Muammar Qaddafi had little hope of defeating the forces stacked against him. He seemed to recognize this when calling for a cease-fire just after the intervention began. But by then, the United States had determined it was better to oust him than negotiate and thus backed his opposition. The history of foreign-imposed regime change is replete with leaders like Qaddafi, overthrown after wars they seemed unlikely to win. From the British ouster of Afghanistan's Sher Ali in 1878 to the Soviet overthrow of Hungary's Imre Nagy in 1956, regime change has been imposed on the weak and the friendless. In Toppling Foreign Governments , Melissa Willard-Foster explores the question of why stronger nations overthrow governments when they could attain their aims at the bargaining table. She identifies a central cause—the targeted leader's domestic political vulnerability—that not only gives the leader motive to resist a stronger nation's demands, making a bargain more difficult to attain, but also gives the stronger nation reason to believe that regime change will be comparatively cheap. As long as the targeted leader's domestic opposition is willing to collaborate with the foreign power, the latter is likely to conclude that ousting the leader is more cost effective than negotiating. Willard-Foster analyzes 133 instances of regime change, ranging from covert operations to major military invasions, and spanning over two hundred years. She also conducts three in-depth case studies that support her contention that domestically and militarily weak leaders appear more costly to coerce than overthrow and, as long as they remain ubiquitous, foreign-imposed regime change is likely to endure.
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Toppling Foreign Governments
The Logic of Regime Change
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States may also demand regime change as part of a negotiated settlement, as the Clinton administration did in Haiti. Although states employ coercive bargaining tactics to attain these settlements, these cases qualify as FIRC. The foreign power is determined to oust the leader rather than accept an agreement that would let the leader remain in power. To exclude these cases would be to eliminate from the data instances in which the foreign power shares the same goal as other states seeking regime change but adopts different methods. I distinguish instances of coerced regime change by looking for evidence that the imposing state explicitly demanded that the targeted leader step down. The settlement ending the Franco-Prussian War, for example, obligated France to hold new elections. In contrast, Germany’s 1940 invasion of France, which coincided with a change in French leadership, is not included because France’s Vichy regime assumed power before seeking an armistice.34
In addition to the methods used to impose regime change, the extent of political change can vary as well. States may either remove the target state’s top leaders, or they may transform its political institutions. Some studies exclude leadership change from the definition of regime change because the target state’s institutions are left intact and, therefore, its regime, traditionally defined as a set of political institutions, does not change. However, this distinction conflates how regime change ends with how it is pursued. Foreign powers sometimes depose leaders to produce institutional change. The United States, for example, helped facilitate Iran’s transition from a constitutional monarchy to an authoritarian state through leadership change in 1953. By removing that country’s popular prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq, and supporting the Shah, the United States obtained institutional change, but it did not impose institutions. In Chapter 2, I discuss the various ways in which states effect regime change, including what level of force they use and whether they transform the target state’s institutions or simply depose its leaders. The data used in Chapter 3 include both types of FIRC.
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