The conventional wisdom in Washington is that armed regime change is an effective tool for supplanting odious dictatorships and advancing American interests. Unfortunately, academic research shows that regime change is a costly strategy in which the benefits rarely outweigh the costs. Indeed, the use of armed force to impose new leaders usually spirals into lengthy state-building projects and often fails to achieve predetermined goals. Furthermore, the overuse of this foreign policy tool undermines other more successful tools for promoting democracy and human rights abroad, while also undermining America’s security.

Explanations of regime change typically fall into two broad categories: macro-processes and micro-events. Macro-processes theories explain why countries follow different paths of domestic development, whether in terms of economic growth or institutional evolution. Micro-events, meanwhile, capture short-term disruptions that can destabilize institutions and lead to transitions from one regime type to another. However, neither of these approaches can fully account for the global patterns of democratization that are so evident in empirical evidence.

One possible explanation involves the interplay between the incentives for internal and external politics. Internal forces may motivate citizens to pursue a particular path of reform, while external pressures can reinforce that preference. Moreover, a nation’s history of regime change can put other regimes on notice that they are likely next on the list of potential victims and thus spur them to take countermeasures. For example, landed elites in nineteenth-century Latin America feared that democracy would lead to the seizure of their estates; if they could diversify assets abroad and secure loans from Miami banks, they could protect their wealth from potential expropriation.