The idea that foreign nations should forcibly supplant odious regimes and promote democratic institutions around the world is a long-held orthodoxy among many policymakers. But a growing body of academic research shows that armed regime-change missions rarely succeed and are often followed by prolonged instability, human rights crises, and weaker domestic security. The failure of regime-change efforts is the result of a combination of a poor track record, the paucity of successful examples, and the difficulty of establishing robust institutions in a new regime. It is also a reflection of the fact that the process often fosters domestic conflict, which undermines the stability and legitimacy of the resulting government.
This is because a dictatorship’s ruthless international behavior usually extends to its internal politics: it is violent, totalitarian, arbitrary, and run by a small group of people. Removing these governments, even when their policies are abysmal, undercuts the “sinews” — however evil — that keep the state functioning and triggers resistance. That insurgency undermines reconstruction and state building physically and politically, and makes it hard to definitively defeat a retaliatory regime.
A further complicating factor is that imposed leaders face a domestic audience in addition to their patrons, and the two typically want different things. This creates a dilemma for imposed leaders, and leads to the observed temporal clustering of regime change (Treisman, 2019).