written by alexander downs of george washington university and published by cornell university, press i have my own copyright here dog eared and highlighted as much as i could. we do have a link to the books website on the cato event page and you can get a 30% discount off the book using the code 09 flyer. that's zero. nine f l y e r all one word and all caps. my name is eric gomez. i am the director of defense policy studies here at the cato institute. the united states has been

especially active in this space during the global war on terror. since 9/11 the united states successfully toppled regimes in afghanistan iraq and libya. there's also some hints in syria that the united states might be interested in pursuing regime change there. but all the assad regime still remains in power. since 1909 per alex's book and the data set in it. the united states has toppled 33 liters making it the world leader in regime change. and as i am sure many of you are aware western intelligence agencies recently sounded the alarm bell. about a possible regime change operation by russia against ukraine. should the current crisis escalate to armed conflict. as you may be able to guess from the list of regime changes successes. i mentioned earlier changing a government doesn't always lead to stability in the long run in fact a majority of states that experience regime change also experience increased level of

civil and international conflict following a quote unquote successful operation. downs's book asks why regime change often goes wrong? we are delighted to have him here at the cato institute to discuss his book's core argument and findings. joining alex today on the panel are ben dennison and melissa willard foster. ben is a non-resident fellow at defense priorities and the author of a 2020 cato institute policy analysis on this topic the more things change the more they stayed the same the failure of regime change operations. melissa is an associate professor at the university of vermont and author of the book toppling foreign governments the logic of regime change. each of our speakers will give a short presentation followed by a q&a period for those of you watching on the cato institute website. there should be a bar on your screen where you can submit questions to to me the moderator and i will be reading them or in

some cases grouping questions for the author or for the panelists for those of you watching on social media platforms such as facebook youtube and twitter. you can submit a question by typing in the chat and using the hashtag cato fp capital c lowercase ato and then capital fp and with that alex, please start us off. thank you. thank you very much. it's a real pleasure to be here today. i want to thank eric gomez for and the cato institute for making this all possible. i'd like to thank my fellow travelers in regime change ben denison and melissa willard foster for for being here and engaging with the book and then thanks to all of you listening or watching out there in cyberspace for taking time to come and hear about regime change. so this book like many books has its origins in the iraq war. i remember as a phd student watching the initial airstrikes and the invasion of iraq in

2003. i'm thinking hmm. i want to know more about this and how it's going to go and that got me interested in the subject and i wanted to know sort of how regime changes turned out over the long day of course of history. and so the book asked two questions. the first one is is what eric said, which is why so i'm going

to use the word the term regime change because it's sort of in the public parlance and it's easier to say than for an imposed regime change and what i mean by it is the forest or coerced removal of the effective for de facto government that's in power the leader of one state. the targeted leader or regime? there's really three ways they can do that one is to invade the country. the second is to make course a

threats to threaten to use force to scare the regime amount of power in the third is to work in tandem with domestic forces inside the target country to help bring about regime change either overtly or covertly and this is something that melissa's book touches on. um, so how is regime change supposed to work? how do people policymakers think it works. well, it seems like a simple idea right that the idea is you have some kind of disagreement or with another state with another leader. they're not doing what you want. maybe they present a threat and you think you can get rid of this troublesome person or threatening person by replacing them with another leader who shares your own preference, right who is shares your interest and is willing to do more what you would like to do rather than what they they would like to do. so it's there's a preference divergence you do regime change to eliminate that preferences converge and get peaceful

relations afterwards. um, so there's several and really important assumptions that are baked into the simple idea one is that you can do this without breaking the state and sort of having it fall apart on you second. is that you choose leaders who actually share your preferences and they don't always the third is that you can get the leader to implement your preferences without pushback from the domestic population in some way inside the target state. and then last that if you try to build institutions to support your leader that those that that instrument institutional transformation is successful. of course, we know that isn't always the case. so where can things go wrong these lead directly to my to my arguments one. is that regime change sometimes requires an invasion and invasion sometimes weakens the state so much that the leader you throw out may be able to rally forces to try and come

back you get an immediate insurgency. second is as i hinted the leader may not share your preferences that you put in. between the preferences of the intervener and the target for reasons of domestic politics usually within the target state. and then lastly of course leaders want to survive in office. so once you put them in they want to stay there and that means they need to respond to whichever influencer intervener or their own domestic public which sort of poses the most important threat to their political survival. so my theory posits are two mechanisms that flow directly from these issues. the first is what i call military disintegration and this is just what it sounds like you the intervener invade the target country to impose a new regime and the army the military that

you're fighting rather than surrender in an organized fashion and get disarmed and reintegrated collapses as we saw in iraq or afghanistan and fleas to various areas to the mountains to remote areas to forests across the international border where they are immediate ingredients for an insurgency and if the leader gets away that you're trying to pursue they like paul pott did in cambodia or omar and afghanistan they can rally those people or other leaders similar leaders can rally those folks to to resist the occupation and or the regime change so you can get an immediate post regime change insurgency of civil war. the second mechanism is a is a kind of principle agent problem. and so this foreign imposed regime change you can think of as a principle agent problem.

so these are simple ideas right? so if i want my roof repaired, it's got a hole in it. i'm not very good at that. so i'm gonna hire someone who has expertise in that. i would love them to come quickly before the next rain storm patch the roof very effectively and do it all for not very much money. they would like to take their time get paid a lot and not do a lot of work. so there's an divergence just built into these principal agent problems and i'll highlight a couple of them that plague these relationships one is adverse selection right when you choose a leader that you think will be good and they turn out to be not very good or don't share your ideas the second which i'll focus on the most here is interest asymmetry right this idea that the interests of the two actors that the intervener and their agent in the country that they impose diverge over time, even if they were in sync before so the sort of logic of

this argument works like this interveners overthrow foreign rulers in pursuit of their own interests, whatever. those may be they impose a ruler they think will be friendly to safeguard those interests, but the intervener is not the only actor that's trying to control this particular agent right there. are there's another actor in particular the domestic population within the targeted state that has a say now both these actors the outside actor and the domestic population have the ability to remove the leader in some form whether it's through elections or whether it's through violent rebellion or coup. and so the leader finds themselves kind of like gumby being pulled into opposite directions. if they respond to the intervener's wishes too closely. they alienate the some subset of the domestic population, which can use take up arms against

them and the other hand of face sympathized too greatly with their own population against the intervener the intervener can then possibly come after them in some way. so they're kind of -- if they do in -- if they don't this is one of my favorite far side commercials, excuse me cartoons from way back in the day. there's a the devil is standing behind a guy facing two doors one says -- if you do -- if you don't on the other door and says, come on just pick one and that's sort of the situation that these leaders face so the implications of this argument are that regime change can increased the likelihood of civil war in the target. it can increase the likelihood that the leader is overthrown by their own people violently. and it means that the relations between the two states can not be as good as you would have hoped for when you did it. so those are the three. outcomes or things that i'm trying to look at in the book? and the rest of the book is

tries to test these arguments about these three outcomes civil war imposed leader political survival and intervene or target relationships and each of the the chapters has a sort of numbers component and a case study component. i try to show that across a large number of cases. these regime changes correlated with certain outcomes and then to show that it's actually happening for the reasons that i say by doing the cases, so there's three chapters on each of these things or excuse me one chapter on each of these things one is on civil war in the bay. the basic bottom line here. is that for an imposed regime changes increase the likelihood of civil war in target states over the ensuing decade by actually quite a bit and i'm not gonna talk about the cases. there are a bunch of case studies here, and i'm happy to talk about them. i'm sure you'll have questions about them in the q&a.

the fourth chapter is about imposed leader survival in the bottom line there. is that leaders who are placed in power by outsiders? are much more likely to lose power violently. than other leaders so leaders can lose office and sort of regular peaceful means elections and so forth hereditary succession, or they can get overthrown through force and what this shows is that leaders placed in power by outsiders tend to leave office at the point of a gun. which is obviously contrary to what the intervener would like. and i just point out one of the case studies. i look at in this chapter is the one that's on the cover of the book, which is the imposition of maximilian and austrian archduke as the emperor of mexico by france. which is resisted by the liberals within mexico and

eventually he faces the firing squad when his army is defeated a few years later. and that's sort of a cautionary tale about what can happen. the last chapter is about intervenor target relations. and the bottom line here is that regime changes don't really move the needle much on improving these relations in fact. some kinds of regime changes can increase the likelihood of militarized conflict between the intervener and the target state and i'm sure we'll get into later the different types of regime changes that i talk about one is about installing a leader by him him or herself without really much in the way of supporting institutions. the second is to put a new leader in and try to build institutions to support them whether those are democratic or an autocratic or repressive.

and the outcomes that tend to be associated with these three types or that doing the one that's easiest and most common has the worst outcomes and that's the leadership type which is simply imposing new individuals. intravenors like this because it's cheapest. and seemingly easy, but it has the worst. outcomes you can talk more about that as we go along. thanks, alex, and as a reminder, i'm seeing a lot of questions coming in. thank you so much to the audience for being very engaged with that for those of you watching on twitter or facebook or other forms of social media if you could if you want to submit the question, make sure you use the hashtag cato fp to indicate that you want to submit the question if you if you just do a comment, i will not see every single comment. so just wanted to say that we'll

move on to ben dennison next. great. thank you so much eric and the cato institute for inviting me to this fantastic event today and more importantly. thank you alex for writing this amazing book that i've been looking forward to read for a while and it's great to see all the conversation that it's sparking and the important takeaways that you just outlined in your remarks just to kind of got off alex's remarks about his own origins and interesting regime change. i was a high school student when the iraq war started and that got me interested in political science overall and then in college, we had the surge the drawdown in iraq and people were mentioning that oh, we've finally learned our lesson that this regime change business probably isn't a good idea and then right as i was thinking about applying for my phd program. there was now a attempt to overthrow the government in libya that followed right along after being told that we were not gonna be doing these types

of missions anymore and lots of political science research at the time. that was actually saying this is the right to do regime change and staying out of syria shows us, you know, we should not do that kind of regime change in syria, but in libya, it's actually the proper way to do it. it turned out those predictions were false things went disastrously bad and luckily at the time. alex had written a conference paper basically predicting why libya not specifically talking about libya but showing a lot of these findings about why it would go bad and it's kind of pushed me along my own journey of studying machine change and so it's fantastic to see this book come out as he noted in the end of his remarks one of the key findings that alex has put in this book and also lots of his other research has focused on the differences between the types of strategies that regime changers or states that want to engage in regime change actually carry out looking at kind of differences between institutional and the leadership strategies that he discusses and in my own research. i've been motivated to look at

given these vast differences. we see between leadership and institutional strategies. why would states ever choose to do one versus the other giving the disparate effects that you see in the track record of these types of strategies? that's the kind of the question that his work is really motivated me to explore and looking at all the downsides and costs you see with institutional strategies and how costly nation building as we call it or imposing new institutions on states might be why do we see states ever think that would be a good idea to invest all these resources in these faraway lands to build new institutions and if you were going to do regime change, why don't we only see these leadership change missions given you know, how how much lower costs they actually are in my own research. what i found is i went and looked at all the cases since 1900. so a smaller subset of cases than alex and in majority of those cases what i found is that

very few started off thinking they wanted to do an institutional strategy in most cases those who want to engage in regime change talk themselves into that. we can just replace the leader but install them very quickly and then leave and get out without spending too many resources and they'd largely start these missions off thinking they can do a leadership strategy and alex is parlance and it makes sense because as alex mentioned, it's much cheaper. it's much easier the amount of resources that you have to invest in the mission, even if it goes wrong you're not in theory wasting that much resources on this territory. it's just the install leader that has to pay the price but in a lot of the cases that i looked at do we see?

these leaders have to engage in institutional strategies. i largely look at the local political context in the countries themselves. so how strong are the local bureaucrats and local institutions that if you can take off the top leadership can the tax collectors can the

education infrastructure can basically all these kind of lower level of bureaucracies. keep ticking along in the country that the leader the new leader can just hop in and keep going but in many cases just the mere act of taking out that leader at the top ends up breaking a lot of the institutions and oftentimes the regime change the regime change of themselves didn't realize how weak institutions were before they actually arrived in the country. my two favorite examples of this first the dominican republic in 1916 a country that unfortunately faced a lot of attempts at american regime change over the years. through a variety of different reasons the united states sent a few marines. to try to stabilize the government and reinstall a leader that had been deposed in santo domingo after arising arriving. we tried to make sure that leader could pass through a few different constitutional reforms that way once they change the constitution we can then leave

the country very quickly and just leave them installed and we can get into the details later, but it turns out that the leader wasn't able to pass those reforms realized basically in passing those reforms he would have an internal revolt on his hand. so they just essentially withdrawal and step down from office leaving the united states marine corps to the country for eight years after that. so the united states with this a few hundred marines never intending to really do much except put someone back in power ends up essentially running and building an entire new state in the dominican republic for eight years even in the canonical cases of world war two which are often championed as the successful cases of regime change even there the initial plans oftentimes. we're just all leaders after the war and then try to leave as quick as possible. for instance. italy the plan was to essentially reinstall the king after he deposed mussolini in the fascist state in world war two and eventually the american and british regime change

intervenors. i guess realized that a much more broader institutional strategy would have to be implemented if they were ever going to have a stable and democratic italy coming out of the war. they're planned initially just to reinstall the king was not going to be sufficient. um, so my future kind of builds on alex's to look at kind of why you get those two different patterns emerging but the important question to there is if if these states know that, you know, they don't want to engage in institutional strategies. why don't they just look at the local institutions beforehand look at the state how strong it is and make these assessments before they actually decide to engage in regime change in the first place and i think kind of one of the takeaways from alex's book in some of the other research in this area. is that great powers or really any state in general is just very bad at knowing about the domestic politics and other countries. we kind of know maybe who some of the top players are but for

instance, you know, it's just very hard to know how the individual bureaucracies are happening and getting good solid information about what those conditions on the ground will look like actually actually overthrow the there's lots of uncertainty before regime change mission itself and this leads to a lot of over-optimistic thinking among regime change planners thinking that oh, you know, i think i have a good sense of how the domestic system works. i think we can just take off the top layer use a leadership strategy and get out quickly and not really have to think much more deeply about how would we actually deal with this institutional class? so you might be facing in the case of iraq for instance, there was real discussion before the war about using the liberation of france as a model to overthrow the bath estate and just put somebody new in power and then leave very quickly where they wouldn't have to invest their resources. like they had like the us had invested in germany. so that's kind of one way. i think that this plays out is

that there's because there's so much uncertainty pre regime change about what local institutions will look like on the ground. that's what permits individuals advocating for regime change to think it will always be a leadership strategy rather than the costlier institutional strategy. so because of this, unfortunately, i think this makes regime change sometimes seem like a viable policy tool because it seems like it at worst case it might not work, but it's gonna be such so low cost why not try it, but they never price into those decisions kind of the longer term effects that institution building might require afterwards. and so my own views is that maybe one policy implication from this is for everyone who's advocating for regime change. they should price in at the beginning how much a 10 20 year occupation to reinstall institutions or what actually cost because if you don't think it will cost that much if you don't think it's worth the 20 year investment of rebuilding a state after you engaging regime

change, that should tell you that maybe it's not worth engaging in regime change in the first place, but just from looking at alex's book itself. you should already be questioning to not whether or not you should be gauging and routine change even if you could avoid the institution voting mission, so in general that's kind of the main takeaways from my research that i've taken and build off alex's work. unfortunately, there are lots of reasons why policy makers end up thinking that even if they were required to use leadership strategies that it can work this time, and i think we need to do a lot more work on figuring out how we can break that habit of thinking that leadership strategies and regime change overall could be successful if we do it correctly in the future. great. thanks a lot, ben and melissa last but not least. i'm interested to hear your perspectives and then we'll go into q&a afterwards. all right. thanks so much eric, and thank

you to the cato institute and thanks to alex. it's it's great to see the final product here. this is a topic that's near and dear to my heart and a lot like alex i i came to studying this also because of the iraq war and i came to it at it from a slightly different perspective. well, well alex was thinking gee i wonder how this is all gonna work out. probably not too. well. i was thinking why is this happening in the first place? because a lot of our theories of international relations just didn't seem to offer clear answer. and and the puzzle just became deeper and deeper to me as the years went by and you know there was period there where i thought gosh, you know, maybe regime changed. maybe we're done with that and then 2011 rolled around and and we get intervention in libya and you know what became apparent through to me through my research is that regime change is often that low-hanging fruit. that policymakers get fed up these alternatives of trying to

correct for for what alex calls interest asymmetry this divergence between what the intervening state wants and what the target is doing and and regime change often appears to be this low cost alternative and i'd emphasize the word appears there. and so you often get sort of the new generation of policy makers saying? okay. well, we understand it has a work so well in the past, but but we have other ways of doing it. you know these these this older generation they they messed up because they didn't plan enough or they enacted this policy or they they adopted this tactic and we're gonna do a differently and we're gonna do it better. so i was struck by how often i saw that narrative in my own research and trying to explain why the policy makers opt for regime change instead of other alternatives like coercion or inducement. so alex, this is just a great book and i i highly recommend it you you do such a great job

laying down the logic. it's it's airtight. it's you you marshall an impressive amount of evidence to support your argument and and something that you do so well as you use these clarifying examples, i really illustrate the causal mechanism that you're talking about. but i think one of the the biggest contributions your book makes is it punctures a hole in this this argument that regime change can work if we only do it better. and and you apply this so well to the iraq case by saying, you know, we have as you were saying, you know, we have these people to say. well, you know, if only grammar hadn't done the application or or disbanded the iraqi military or if only we had planned better for this. um, but really what this this these arguments ignore is is this problem that underlies regime change which is trying to correct for this interest, asymmetry and and trying to especially go to a country where they're deep sectarian divisions.

and trying to to construct some sort of stable that can surmount those divisions. so with that said i you know had sort of three ideas that popped into my head as i was reading your book that that i i wanted to sort of get your reaction to if i could and one of these was the the role of outside third party intervention because it does crop up in a lot of the cases that you're talking about, but it doesn't really appear in the theory that you present and that is in a lot of these cases that you you cite. what you do see is there's this of third party. oftentimes it is a geopolitical rival of the intervening state and and that's the reason why there's an insurgency that's capable of challenging this newly installed government, and i think you know if if i were putin and i was reading your book as a sort of a how-to manual or maybe a how not too many all i might say well, yeah, this is obviously gonna be a

mess because if i install a russian-backed government and kev chances aren't going to face at western backed insurgency, and it's going to be disaster so this this arises in a lot of cases now, not all i can certainly think of cases where you don't see this, but it does appear in a lot of cases and i'm curious because you use tanisha fossils buffer state variable, but it doesn't show up as being statistically significant in some of your analysis and and i'm i'm curious as to why that might be and i wonder if part of the reason might be that there is another variable that could be masking the effects of this third party intervention. and that is that you find that in a lot of sectarian societies that have deep sectarian divisions and you use the the ethnolinguistic factionalization variable that chances of some of these outcomes are much higher.

and i wonder if a lot of those countries where those there are those deep sectarian divisions. they're they're often there in part because of a history of foreign meddling of history of outside intervention a history of foreign powers sort of exploiting those divisions for various reasons, whether it's colonial control or to medellin somebody else's sphere of influence. and so those might be the cases actually where you would expect there to be some sort of third party state there that sort of lurking in the shadows waiting to sponsor and insurgency against any government you install so, um, that was one thought that arose in my head another one that that sort of was constantly when i had as i was reading your book. is this question of well, and you address this in the conclusion if not regime change then what?

is there a local local lower likelihood of civil wars or low lower likelihood of interstate conflict? and i honestly don't think that there is now that's not an argument for wishing change because i think regime change has a lot of costs inherent in it, but you could imagine that let's take the case of ukraine. let's just say putin after reading your books as you know, i don't want to get involved in in a messy insurgency. i'm not going to install a here in in kiev. obviously would be good news for any ukrainian that does not want to be ruled by a russian back to puppet. um, but doesn't prove ukraine's security. i don't think so because any putin led government in moscow

is not going to accept a western aligned government in kiev. so you're going to see this higher probability of interstate conflict even without regime change. let's think of another alternative. imagine if you will for the sake of argument that kiev isn't receiving western aid and so now it's it's somewhat of a sitting duck now russia is in a position where it could pretty, you know easily coerce the government and give to do what it wants. that presents a dilemma for the government in kiev even though it's not foreign installed. it faces pretty much the same dynamic that you're identifying it could concede to russia's demands because it doesn't, you know stand much of a chance against the russian military. but that's not going to go over well domestically and as long as there are domestic groups that say hey, we have a chance here to resist this. they're going to be mad at the government kiev and quite likely rebell against it. now the government can't say well because of that rebellion. you know, we're not going to give it. we're not going to concede. well, then you're back to the scenario where you're going to

have higher levels of conflict in crises between russia and the ukraine. there are other policy tools. it's just coercion or inducement, but i think from a policy standpoint. we have to remember that they don't necessarily solve that problem of interest asymmetry. they may save you a lot of money and and the pain of trying to oppose a foreign government, but they don't necessarily solve the interesting symmetry problem, which you identify as underlying all of this. so the last thing i wanted to ask you about and and sort of think out here. is that this difference you talk about between institutional regime change which is when the intervening state comes in and institutes instead of new institutions versus leadership regime change, which is when the intervening state just pops in the new leader.

and you know that there's different types of institutional regime change you could do you could try to impose a democracy and this is more likely to succeed under certain conditions or you could try to establish authoritarian institutions. and you say, you know under certain conditions either these models could work. we we might not you know for obvious reasons prefers to install authoritarian regime, but if if you're an intervening state and your primary goal is is to get this target to do what you want. you know, this would be one way of going about it. but what strike me what struck me is that even though these cases in which the institution succeed in taking hold seem to be marginally. well, let's say less prone to the bad outcomes that you identified. the leadership regime changes where you pop in a dictator.

you know develops a police state to control the population a pinochet in chile for if you will. or mobutu and zaire versus these cases where you construct an institutional regime change, but you've put in authoritarian institutions, and i wonder how much of some of that failure that you're seeing is really failing the failure that arises when the foreign intervene are kind of for one reason or another could be for geopolitical reasons shifts in the balance of power domestic political pressure withdraws foreign aid for its puppet. because as you you know, you see with what happens for example with mobutu who you know, you use as a case study here in your book, um, you know once once you and i once the cold war is over and he's no longer a a tool, you know for the united states government.

there's the withdrawal foreign aid and so similar story of course happens with with eastern europe and the collapse of a lot of these governments act at the end of the cold war. so i'll wrap it up there. but again great book. it you know gate is is engaging. um, well conceived well-supported argument. all right, excellent. and what that will begin the q&a portion of our event as a just the last reminder. i know there's been a lot of good questions coming in so far. so i i might try and group certain common ones together just so we get through more. for those of you watching on the cato institute website you can input a question via there should be like a little window on your page that you can input the question from and for those of you watching at home. no everyone's at home if for those of you watching on social media, you can submit questions

using the hashtag cato fp. so this is a comp so we've already gotten several questions on this. including from don baldiven a couple anonymous question askers, but what about the success stories? right? what about the you know, the japan's and germany's of the world. i know that this is a common a very common question. i've actually watched a couple other talks that alex has given on this book in proceeding weeks and this comes up a lot. so i think we should begin right there and and sort of alex if you could talk about what does you know, why were they successful? what makes what might make them different from others and and give us some background on that and then from melissa as part of this question in when we were prepping for this you sent me an interesting article you wrote back in 2009 about how the

united states handled the early days or the early years even of its presence in japan and germany after the end of world war. to and so i thought that might be useful for contextualizing some of these perceptions that well number one. it was you know, it was relatively cheap and easy to sort of establish a new government there. once the war was over and i i think that's a common perception that might not play out if you actually look at the history, but alex if you could start us off with with this, that'd be great. sure happy to it's a great question and it helps explain. so we've touched on this question of why the united states or american policy makers keep coming back to this tool of regime change and what is it that you know is so attractive to them about this and and the

world war two cases of germany and japan are a big part of that reason is that yes, there are these successful cases you can point to and say well hey it worked there. why not here? and what what people make they argument tend to overlook, is that the conditions in those cases are very unusual and quite rare. first of all regime change is hardly ever happen against great powers because you have to fight world war two to do it. so lindsey o'rourke's documented all of these covert attempts to meddle inside the soviet union that the united states did and it just they all get wiped out because you're dealing with a very strong state there. so. you know if you're if you're thinking about places to overthrow, those are not going to be very attractive targets, but if you do those places have

certain preconditions that make them more amenable to some kind of institutional transformation. so the comparative politics literature talks about like what kind of things are conducive to stability into democratization and one of the big ones is gdp per capita. like how wealthy is the country. does it have a strong middle class is have a you know industrial base to build on. and those those countries had that it was we had wrecked it, but it was there it was still there ethnic homogeneity is another thing that makes democratizing easier because you don't have all these competing interests and different ethics groups to deal with also countries were utterly destroyed. and so they needed help rebuilding and you know willing to do that and finally both of

them faced a massive. external threat. so the union that was a shared threat in them and up and compared to the tender mercies of the red army. i think i think the german and japanese people were much more willing to go along with the united states in that scenario. so that's case where the interest asymmetry right is reduced by the common threat yeah, i you know, i think alex, you know hits the nail on the head. there's there's dramatically different conditions that that are favorable in this in this instance my research my early research on this this case that you mentioned in the journal of interdisciplinary history from 2009 also actually looks a

little bit more at what us policies were on the ground. um, actually prior toward prior to to germany's defeat because of course the united states or the allies actually have to occupy parts of germany before the actual end of the war before for germany's unconditional surrender and is during those periods that you actually see highly coercive tactics are used by the us military things such as collective punishment in order to ensure cooperation from local population now in terms of why those countries, you know, turn out to sort of become successful democracies. i would point to a lot of the things that alex is saying but i the takeaway from my research is that you know destroying the the target states military and plays a big role and your ability. and of course, this is one of alex's key points is destroying this military plays a key role in your ability to construct a

new government because if you don't you know, they just evaporate and come back and live to fight another day. and of course, you know world war two you get the complaint destruction of the opponent's military and in addition, you know, it loses credibility, right? so those forces that had led this this fight they've lost credibility politically and so that creates this opening for you to come in and create an alternative form of government. if if i may to add on to this ben, i don't know if you had something to add here as well, but i think speaking to what alex mentioned about. the uniqueness of the cases of japan and germany i would add that another thing that made it unique was that. regime change is most often. if i'm reading alex's case studies right regime change is something that is most often

done between states with great power asymmetries, and that regime change results after the end of world war two because of how that war. occurs and how it shakes out but the the sort of conceptualizing for fighting world war two isn't like a regime change operation. it's a it's a massive. great power conflict that is fought for many other reasons and then regime change comes out the other end because of how the war ends and so i think when it comes to that those cases of japan and germany you know when when people point to them and say well, it worked there. why can't it work? in iraq, why can't it work in syria? why can't it work libya etc? is that you know like that. you're you're it's a misreading of the circumstances around it which causes the issue.

and it's not to say that, you know, we shouldn't have because i saw some comment come in on the slider with it's not to say that, you know, we should have not have done regime change in those instances against those regimes because they were very horrible regimes but it's to say that the way that that happened. is very different from the way that most regime change instances do occur and so therefore. it's hard to generalize the success of the regime change operation and that instance across other cases. so ben. i don't know if you wanted to chime in here on the germany and japan thing. i'll just top in really quickly to say it just worth keeping in mind these cases too. i've gone back and looked at, you know, essentially like as they're setting up the school of civil affairs and military governments, you know in preparation for invading germany

and especially italy the initial plans were not so much, you know to do these big nation voting missions in either these cases it kind of results at the end of the war in realization that oh this these countries we defeated them much more as most mentioned. we went through very lots, of course of tactics and kind of in process of fighting the war realized. this is gonna be a much bigger undertaking than we initially thought even when we were thinking about possibly doing regime change at the end of the war. so it's worth keeping in mind as well at these missions end up shifting based on kind of what we're seeing on the ground and these long protracted wars which oftentimes in regime change missions as all the cases and alex's book list. they're much shorter wars. so there's a lot less time to kind of think through what all the options and what's up with the facts in the ground actually are just because i feel compelled to share something i found in the archive is one of my favorite things. i found in the invasion of italy is that we had a large assumption that we could just walk in to these town halls and sicily and southern italy.

they would have their entire town hall set up with typewriters and all the bureaucrats at their desks ready to go so we could just kind of put them to task working for the military government and the first thing you read from everyone running back after the invasion assistly is where are the typewriters. we have no typewriters. how can we do anything without typewriter? so this kind of gives the idea of you know, there's lots of like pre assumptions that go in and even in those cases they were broken down very quickly once they were actually on the ground and realized they needed a much bigger strategy and different types of tactics that were needed. all right. that's a great anecdote ben if i could just add what a couple more points. yeah one is and to put in a plug for melissa's book. this is exactly the puzzle that motivates melissa's excellent book, which everyone should read which is most of these most regime changes occur in highly asymmetric diets, you know one the intervener is much more powerful than the target and the puzzle is well, why can't you get them to do what you want

without having to do regime change? and so it's just a most of the cases fundamentally different from the world war two kinds of cases. phil but the whole strategy is that get adopted after world war two raise this very interesting question, which i thought some about but not a whole lot is why do one versus the other right when the states choose to build institutions of one type or another versus not because the if you're just look at the united states historically it is very weird pattern, right? before world war two we intervened often in latin america. i mean in the caribbean and and central america. then the cold war we be, you know, germany and japan accepted. we basically, you know didn't care about democracy. we were content to install dictators. and then after the cold war all of a sudden we're back to this

we end up in institutional building strategies. so i think a great question to and i think ben's research gets at this is you know, why do the one versus the other? okay, great the next question from andy goodheart from alex's own george, washington university. he writes i'm interested in how often regime change seems aimed at achieving goals directly in the country being invaded and how often it's about signaling to third parties. are there cases where regime change seems either to be a threat to others or a way of building legitimacy with third parties and i think this gets to some of the questions that melissa raised in her comments about how what is that role there of when third parties can support insurgencies and that is that does that have a an impact that might be overlooked?

so i think alex you can start us off there. sure. possibly going to go communists somehow tied to the soviet union and and potentially falling into the soviet camp. and the united states in several of those instances chose to go after those governments, even though it was it was known at the time that you know, jacob are benz was not a communist although our ambassador said well, he you know looks like a communist dogs like a communist

quacks like a duck it's duck, but they're very few communists in guatemala. it wasn't on the verge of turning into having a pull-up bureau, but the united states intervened in some of these places i think to say. hey, this is our backyard. don't think you can come in here and, you know, try to spread your influence in the area and ironically the soviets were not really involved in any of those cases. so it's kind of a an exaggeration on our part. i mean the point that melissa raised about third party intervention the this is a fantastic point. i wish i thought about it and in the book, but you know, you sort of push the ball for the boulder far enough up the hill and you kind of give up after a while, but it would be a great question to pursue. i mean my of course initial response was the one that you thought of which is well, what about what about what about these other cases where this

where there's no real intervenors and yet no medlaries from the outside and yet you still see bad outcomes in the country. guatemala would be exhibit a there, but you're right that in a lot of cases say think of the soviets in afghanistan back in the 1980s where we were more than happy to channel billions of dollars with the military hardware and aid through pakistan. and pakistan was happy to give them some sanctuary and of course then pakistan reprises this role 20 years later in our case. i think that certainly so what often happens say in a military disintegration sarina scenario is these folks from the army or the military running away from being captured need a place to go. it's not always across the border. so in yugoslavia when the nazis blitzkrieged into yugoslavia in april 1941. the army melts away and it goes

into the mountains of which there are quite a few in yugoslavia, and they didn't really have much in the way of external support to get going. but in many instances they do go across a border and often get support. they have the taliban cases and obvious one. another i point to is the khmer rouge in cambodia who flee to the thai border and then the ties the chinese and the united states work together to supply them with the means for resistance. so i think that would certainly be that certainly an exacerbating factor that makes a bad situation worse. great. thanks. alex, ben and melissa. did you want to jump it on this as well? um, i'll just say you know it i to me, it's it's a curious question how much foreign support sort of predicts?

success and failure over the long term because absolutely so there are these cases where you know, outsiders or supplying the insurgency, but you know the cambodia create case is a great example once outsiders. supplying that aid. suddenly the problem. i don't want to say it goes away. obviously, you know, there's a massive un peacekeeping mission that has to go to cambodia and attempts to rectify this but but the the long-term outcome, you know looks very different once once born meddlers, you know, once they're incentives change it and and their activities change. that's absolutely true. and of course the end of the cold war shows this in spades, which is a lot of conflicts that had been going on owing to external support from the united states and the soap and the soviet union dries up. and the parties involved become much more amenable to

settlements. so nicaragua el salvador are good cases of this and the one you mentioned obviously in cambodia. yeah, i mean it would be interesting to see. you know whether you could catch variation in support or sanctuary because we know from the civil war literature that having external support sanctuary is a big predictor of rebel success a rebel viability. and so taking that away obviously is going to make things their lives much more difficult. and i'll just add to any question really quickly that i think alex is accurate. there are some cases where there is some signaling going on, especially in the caribbean and central american cases pre-world war two that he's talking about they're the roosevelt corollary essentially gets created as a way to present german and british influence in those countries where we're intervening and overthrowing regimes and dominican republic

haiti mexico largely because we're afraid they're too close to the germans and british, but just to turn andy's question around a little bit as often cases with the united states that we overthrow governments, and we don't realize that we're sending these third parties signals. so, you know the most famous example recently is in overthrowing libya's government in 2011 that said a signal to the north koreans that we really should not give up our nuclear weapon and even going so far as john bolton saying, you know, we want to have olivia model for our negotiations with north korea, you know, put up, you know, really big block, you know, really big screaming lights and absolutely i we know what happens when we you know, if we do give up our nuclear weapons, so i think sometimes actually there are these signals being sent out but the united states and other countries aren't aware of the signals that they're sending. great. all right. i'm going to group several questions together with this next one because i think they they hit on a couple similar

themes. one of them has to do with so the first grouping we'll do these seperately just to make it easier to answer but for the first grouping this has to do with alex how you looked at the data and some of the results michael holmes asks, did you test whether the regime type of the intervening state mattered to the consequences of regime change we're democracies more successful or not as liberal piece theory might suggest and then ed chambliss asks a similar sort of question about the data. is there more is there a greater chance of success when the exercise when regime change involves simply the separation of a specific territory and the creation of a new country as with the creation of hannah. so alex if you could add answer both of those just because it's i think related to like how you looked at the data.

sure, so just to get a little background here the time period i was looking at was a broad one, but it goes sort of limited by the the ability to gather quantitative data in international relations, which is essentially the post napoleonic period so you get a good 200 years, but you can't really do all of history at least if you want to use sort of quantitative methods to sort of correlate across these across these cases and what i found was 120 instances of leader change some of those have like multiple leaders changed in a single episode. so the guatemala case of 1954 one two, three leaders are removed in a matter of days before castillo armas ends up as the one we settle on. so, you know more than a hundred episodes of this over about 200 year period so, you know once every other year, this is not a

super rare event. um in terms of looking at the regime type of the intervener i did this in a in a separate project where i looked at. success of democratization after regime changes by democracies um and one the most interesting things i found is that how rare it is for democracies to promote democracy when they do regime change only 30% of the time. did they attempt or have the intention to to change the regime and in those cases? there's a handful of successes and they they stick out as the ones that we've already talked about germany, japan panama 1990. there's just not very many and the there's the failures outweigh the successes and the failure is tend to happen in these places that have

heterogeneous populations, very low income all the things we sort of you think we know about the prospects for democratization? i did not look at the some of the analyzes in the book on conflict outcomes and divide the intervener by regime type my suspicion is that i wouldn't find a lot of difference. i focused much more on the strategy that was used. i actually might find a better outcome for soviet cases then maybe american cases thinking of the eastern europe situations which speaks to the building of repressive institutions which in some cases it didn't completely prevent uprisings in those countries, but it did keep many of them peaceful in a not very nice way for a long time.

you know in the second question about separation of territories, so i creating hiving off a section of a state. to create a new state. so this is the panama example is the united states wants to build across. it's me in canal. we had talked about doing it in nicaragua and then we change our minds and decided to do it in panama. panama was part of columbia. at the time and we supported a resistance movement in 1903 to create an independent panama which we then negotiated a deal to to build a canal. so my that doesn't show up in my case universe because it's a part of a it's a piece of territory that was part of a country beforehand and we the intervention is to make a new country. um, and my cases is to are to look at countries that were already independent where you

then change the regime rather than just, you know, help them help empower leader is transitioning into independence safe from being part of another state or being colonized so that gives you a sense of of the kind of cases that do not do and do not appear in my in my data. okay, great the second sort of pair of questions. you know, if not regime change then what so like what are the some of the alternatives and also why do we keep doing something that has such a mixed at best track record. so the first one is from an anonymous poster, i think an alternative to regime change is a limited war for limited objectives iraq afghanistan etc. however, as we have seen they rarely end well either so where does that leave us? and i know melissa that your

book sort of looks at part of the reason why do states choose to do regime change when other options might be on the table? and the other question is from cheryl. why do we keep doing it or doing regime change if seemingly it never goes well, is there a sufficient benefits to benefit to us on some other level besides just the regime change either to demonstrate muscle or signal? it's a third parties as we obso you examined earlier, you know military industrial complex issues right or to spread democracy etc. so i think melissa if you could start us off and then ben if you want to weigh in yeah, well, um to speak to cheryl's question, you know, the the short answer i think would be hubris. yes as i said before what i what i saw a lot of these cases was even after a country had um, you know suffered a major defeat if

you look at the british invasions of afghanistan and and alex does a great job and and detailing the first angular afghan war and it's disastrous consequences. that doesn't deter the british from trying it again and just a few decades later and and the rationale is oh, well, we can do it better this time. you know, we have a different plan. you know, it was that general who just made all these mistakes and and we're gonna get a better general. um, so there's so many ways that a country can go about imposing another government. and in fact if you sort of think about the various. that this could happen through covert means through overt means through invasion through indirect military support almost every us president since fdr. i find in my research has an act has pursued some form of a regime change and and that's because there's just so many ways to do it. and so when you have these big

failures what tends to happen is, okay? well the problem was a regime change it was it was this form of regime change, so we'll try a different a different way. and the reason why regime change i find is so appealing and become sort of this this low-hanging fruit is because the alternatives don't work very well. um and often that alternative is coercion. it could be inducement. and so there's you know, it really what i do in my book is i compare these cases of okay. here's a case where an intervener shows regime change. here's another case. we're actually they chose to use coercion. and what was the reason why they just do coercion. so the are benz case in guatemala provides and there's an interesting counterpoint to that and that's bolivia. at the very same time of the eisenhower administration is plotting against our benz and guatemala. it actually decides to give the largest per capita aid package in the world at the time. so the bolivian government which is just as progressive as the

guatemalan government has come to power through a progressive revolution has modeled itself on some of the things that the guatemalan government is trying to do ends up enacting this this ranging land reform decree nationalizes its tin mines, but the us response to it is entirely different instead of overthrowing the government. we give them this massive age package. why is that? well there really wasn't an alternative to the ruling party of bolivia at the time the the mnr because during the revolution the right-wing factions of the political spectrum had then utterly utterly destroyed the military had been destroyed. so, you know the eisenhower administration looks at the situation and says well either we get this sort of center leftist coalition or the alternative as a is a far more leftist government. so we'd rather these these centrists and so ultimately it's interesting because what this aid package does is it becomes somewhat of attrition horse where the united states can now use the aid to say. okay.

well if you want us to keep giving you the same well now you have to enact these policies and a lot of these policies end up. they're aimed at the labor. they're aimed at the left wing of the the mnr and so they over time they drive a wedge between the centrist and the leftists and the bolivian government underpaws us in store starts turning to the united states and says, well, actually we can use military. and they end up using some of this military aid to crack down on the leftist and it's that military that ends up overthrowing causes and sorrow so this is why i was saying some of these outcomes in the long term they end up in the same positions that you know the same kind of things that alex is identifying irregular removal of the leader civil wars. you know it you don't necessarily have better alternatives. they might however be a little bit lower cost. so, you know. the guatemalan civil wars horrific, you know at the time

bolivia of at that period of time bolivia points that so um in the end there are these other alternative solutions, but they run into some of the problems of interest asymmetry. yeah, i guess just to kind of build on that. i agree a lot with what melissa just said. i think you know hubris is a great way to think about a lot of kind of why we keep seeing these actions going on over and over again if you just look at the debate now about what went wrong with the iraq war in 2003 as alex mentioned a lot of the debate is about oh bremer show something wrong. we didn't come in with enough aid afterwards if we would have had, you know more if we would a listen to general secchi and come in with enough troops. that would have been enough and there's very little discussion on basically how fundamentally broken the iraqi state was that we just didn't know about it and basically any invasion probably would have led to a maybe marginally less bad outcome with a better strategy but a bad outcome no matter what and so my

own work in the way i think about this is we often have lots of fundamental uncertainty about what countries are gonna look like after regime change and also what they look like even before we engage in regime change and i think melissa's book to plug it again also has some great things in there about how various locals from governments in ex-pats will actually go to the united states and say actually we can tell you exactly what we want. we can tell you exactly what our government looks like and if you put us in power we can control it very well trust us. let's put us in power. everything will go rosie and honky dory and because we don't have very much good knowledge and basically what those institutions on the ground actually look like it sounds reasonable. it sounds a little cost. why not try it and i think kind of this hubris mindset in this perceived low cost of in of our regime change our plays out. there's a lot of discussion i think too about days to assume that, you know, even if the leadership strategy doesn't succeed as oxus talking about it's just such a low cost to

install someone and then get out that they don't have to you know, it seems like why not try it. unfortunately the cases where you try to do a leadership strategy end up sucked in for much longer a much more costlier and lead to much broader effects than you ever thought about i'm not looking that far in the future. i think drives a lot of this poor decision making for instance might just to conclude you know, one of my favorites is people often say for interact in afghanistan if we just had a marshall plan like in europe after world war two that might have led to success but we spent you know, well well beyond the marshall plan and all the years interact in afghanistan even as a percentage of gdp even overall, and so it's not just that you need more resources. there's this fundamental, you know problems with the act of regime change that need to be factored into these decisions. it just to emphasize that last point pouring more and more money into a place with poor

institutions and a lot of corruption is like you just have 50 holes in the bag that's catching the money and it starts to pour out in different directions. i just want to make a couple brief points on those questions. so why keep doing this if it doesn't work, i'll just highlight a couple of other things one is focusing myopically on the task at hand and engaging in a lot of wishful thinking and not engaging in serious analysis about what comes next that's that's plagued a lot of these these ones the second one is is lack of intelligence or biased intelligence and this is a point that melissa makes in her book, which is oftentimes. the interviewer doesn't know a lot about the target country. they don't have a good intelligence. so they rely on people who are exiles to who whisper sweet nothings in their ears about this is gonna be easy people in

the country are in favor of doing this. oh people in mexico are in favor of a monarchy. and and the intervene are not, you know knowing very much takes this intelligence and it gets a little blinded by it. i want to respond to one thing that melissa said cuz it's a super important point which is what happens if you even if you don't do regime change and bad things happen. she's totally right turning to regime changes often driven by the fact that getting other countries to do what you want is hard that speaks to the poor record of economic sanctions. it speaks to the poor record of course of diplomacy or compellence. there's even evidence now that more powerful countries are less successful at getting their way in court in course things smaller states and so to try and get at this issue of comparing. how do we know the regime change

is causing things and they just wouldn't happen anyway. okay, great. i think this might be our last question since we have about nine minutes left, but julian spencer churchill from concordia university in montreal. i'm assuming he just as a kanu

montreal. i must i pretty sure that's concordia. he asked a question for all how do you measure the difference between the regime being imposed and the political equilibrium japan's liberal population wanted the us to impose democratic regime change coupled with a guarantee of access to the us market. so i guess yeah the this question of you know the regime that the new regime that you put in different from, you know, the equilibrium of the old and does that. maybe effect results and we'll just go in order that we did with the speaking. so alex ben and melissa. thanks. i'll try to be brief so it's an interesting question in most cases. it's pretty easy to tell because you're supporting some kind of political opposition. this is why and melissa's book regime change is often carried out as the presence of a political opposition or some actors rebels inside the target

country that facilitates and makes your job easier as an outsider. and so there is a clear difference between what came before and what came after trickier cases are the ones we've been talking about germany and japan where? part of one thing we didn't mention is the intervener is willingness to work with. actors from the prior previous regime. yes many people were put on trial for war crimes and justly so but many, you know nazi and japanese officials reappeared from before to after so that is a you know, there were institutions that were there and you still have some of the same people to to man them or woman them in whatever case it is and that's a source of continuity and then it's like, you know, can you differentiate before to after now, of course, i would argue that the change in regime

and the embrace of democracy and pacifism in japan. anyway signals that something is different. yeah, so it's a fantastic question and just kind of my brain was triggered by what alice had just mentioned about kind of this idea. we actually sometimes keep some of the old regime as much as we can obviously in the world war two cases. there was clear evidence of alex mention of trying to do the notification the fascistation in italy, which is the case. i've looked at a lot but even in italy there was real concerns during the war that we might be going a little bit too fast with this deficitation organic throwing out the baby with the bathwater and the state is basically now on functional or even worse according to at least churchill always becoming likelihood of becoming communist. so we needed to keep these folks around and so there is real evidence that even in those cases and also in some of the cases in eastern europe with the soviets where they kept some of

the old secret police from the previous regime and kind of put them into the new secret police for the communist regime as a way to keep some of the institutional strength that was there previously. why i lose that's institutional capacity if you can keep it and move forward, but i think more on kind of the nature of the the question itself. i think some of the previous examples we've been talking about where there is there's a thought oftentimes that when they engage in regime change that we are actually doing what the local population wants us to do if you look at kind of the discourse around some of the ad, you know, advocacy for regime change today. it's usually always in terms of we need to liberate the people that are under the the yoke of this repressive regime and kind of we want you to overthrow this regime to help the local population regardless of actually if they do view a us installed regime where us support of regime as preferable and so that come that's where this hubris and lack of knowledge. i think comes back the link back to both what melissa and had said that we oftentimes engage

in regime change because we think the new install regime might actually be useful. or support above the local population might support it, but we just didn't have that knowledge. we might have been mistaken for a variety of different reasons about whether or not that's actually true and so i would discourage vc, you know, those kind of indications being talked about in new stories about oh, they would they would welcome us as liberators. they would welcome with open arms the us installed regime to treat those with the grain of salt. um so yeah, just to piggyback on some of what alex and and ben have said here. i think yeah, there are absolutely cases where you come in with the intention of perhaps really changing up the regime, but then then you you ultimately for one reason or another end up actually importing a lot of the same actors the former regime so in my book, i i differentiate

between what i call partial regime change and institutional sorry full regime change, it's someone akin to alex's idea between and institutional but for me the key difference comes down to who do you end up putting in power leaders? i already face two different types of domestic political rivals, either those that operate within their current political system and could use that political system to challenge them. so if it's an authoritarian regime, it's you know, say a military junta. it's might be another general who's who's waiting around to orchestrate a coup or if it's a democracy. it could be another opposition party and then you have people who are outside that existing political system and these are also often insurgencies opposition groups. there are actually looking to overthrow the political system that's in place and and implement entirely new one and so i argue that interviewers most of the time actually would prefer to use what i call outside opposition that group that wants to completely overthrow things and establish a new system because more likely

their preferences are closer to yours. they're gonna wipe out the entire new regime and create a new one and as alex points out when you have these institutional structures in place oftentimes, you know, the folks who put in power can hold on to power longer. but oftentimes it comes down no matter of cost. it's really expensive to put those outsiders in it often takes a lot more military commitment on part of the intervener to put those outsiders in power. so what ends up happening in some cases is is they prefer to use these insiders to orchestrate coups, but that does mean, you know to speak to your question about the political equilibrium and how much it's changing is that you have a lot of those same actors hanging around who have the same incentives and the same preferences as the previous ruler and so not necessarily a whole lot changes. all right, excellent. we're coming up on 130 now. i don't think that we have enough time to give another full question. it's it's due so, i think i'll

begin, you know the closing now first off. thank you very much to alex ben and melissa. you guys were great speakers. definitely for everyone at home get your copy of catastrophic success. it's an excellent book highly recommend it and thank you to all of you who watched today are attendees. thank you for such an active question and answer period there were lots of questions that we unfortunately couldn't get to just because of the time limitations, but we greatly appreciate the very active participation for so many of you and a full recording of this of this event is going to be available on the cato website so you can watch it again or you can share it with friends who might be interested in we certainly encourage that so, thank you all and have a great