Covert Regime Change - deep dive

Описание: Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War (Lindsey A. O’Rourke)

This briefing synthesizes an in-depth analysis of United States-backed covert regime change operations conducted during the Cold War (1947–1989). The analysis reveals that covert intervention was a far more common instrument of U.S. statecraft than overt military action, with the U.S. attempting 64 covert regime changes compared to just six overt ones. These operations were driven by national security interests, which can be categorized into three distinct strategic logics: offensive "rollback" against Soviet influence, preventive "containment" of potential communist expansion, and hegemonic maintenance of U.S. dominance in the Western Hemisphere.
Policymakers overwhelmingly favored covert methods due to a tactical calculus that prioritized minimizing potential costs—military, economic, and reputational—through the doctrine of "plausible deniability." This preference held despite a significantly lower probability of short-term success compared to overt interventions (a 39% success rate for covert missions versus 66% for overt). The most successful covert tactics were those that required minimal U.S. contribution to tip a pre-existing political balance, such as interfering in elections or backing military coups, particularly against weak, democratic, or allied states.
However, the long-term consequences of these operations were overwhelmingly negative for U.S. interests and catastrophic for the target states. Contrary to their intended purpose of installing stable, friendly governments, covert interventions were found to increase the likelihood of future militarized interstate disputes between the U.S. and the target nation. Furthermore, these operations correlated with a higher probability of civil war, a decrease in democratization, and an increase in human rights abuses within the targeted countries. This suggests a fundamental overestimation by policymakers of the effectiveness of covert regime change as a foreign policy tool and a failure to anticipate its destabilizing blowback.