Ellen Knickmeyer
The United States is the world leader in regime change, toppling 35 foreign heads over the past 120 years, by one reckoning. It’s a record built on a dangerous combination of unparalleled military might, a large group of perceived enemies—and a sunny self-confidence that has repeatedly proven mistaken.
No one has shown himself more tempted by the power to unleash the world’s strongest army and economy to win arguments, take territory, smack down adversaries, and cow allies than President Donald Trump. Washington is leading a growing military and covert campaign targeting President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, after already striking Iran and Yemen and issuing other, vaguer threats against Nigeria, Mexico, Panama, and even Denmark and Canada.
Overthrowing another country’s leader is a routine enough tactic that it has its own acronym among academics: FIRC, or foreign-imposed regime change.
According to a tally by Alexander Downes, an associate professor and political scientist at George Washington University and the author of the book Catastrophic Success: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Goes Wrong, the United States carried out nearly a third of all of about 120 forced ousters of foreign leaders around the world between 1816 and 2011.
Regime change and other strong-arm interventions rarely go as planned, but some of those that Trump is threatening, such as going “guns-a-blazing” into Nigeria, with its armed extremists and ethnic and sectarian divides, seem like obvious disasters. But past failures should remind Americans of how catastrophic the consequences of hubris can be—both on an individual human scale and a national one.
Take U.S. Foreign Regime Change No. 34, Iraq, and the series of military patrols that I tagged along with as a reporter in Baghdad in May 2006.
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