Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War
Lindsey A. O’Rourke
Cornell University Press, 2018
330 pages
Lindsey O’Rourke has given us a devastating indictment of the foreign policy of the United States during the Cold War and after. O’Rourke, who teaches political science at Boston College, is not a principled non-interventionist in the style of Ron Paul. To the contrary, she sympathizes with the “Offensive Realism” of John Mearsheimer, under whom she studied at the University of Chicago. Accordingly, she does not oppose the efforts of states to increase their power over other states but rather regards this as inevitable.
Her argument is that a key element of American foreign policy has failed to achieve its purpose. The United States has often aimed at “regime change,” both overt and covert. The latter type of regime change has been especially unsuccessful, and, to show that this is so, the bulk of the book analyzes in detail a number of instances of covert regime change during the Cold War.
She states her conclusion in this way: “The vast majority of America’s overt and covert regime changes during the Cold War did not work out as their planners intended. Washington launched these regime changes to resolve security-oriented interstate disputes by installing foreign leaders with similar policy preferences. American experiences during the Cold War, however, illustrate that this was often quite difficult in practice. Thirty-nine out of sixty-four covert regime changes failed to replace their targets, and because America’s role in most of these failed attempts generally did not remain a secret, they further soured Washington’s already negative relationship with the target state. Even nominally successful covert operations — where the US backed forces assumed power — failed to deliver on their promise to improve America’s relationship with the target state.”
Readers of Ludwig von Mises will at once recall this pattern of argument. Just as Mises argues that economic interventions such as minimum wage laws fail to achieve the stated goals of their proponents, so does O’Rourke maintain that regime change, especially of the covert variety, suffers from the same flaw. Again, just as Mises does not challenge the stated goal of higher wages without unemployment, so does O’Rourke accept the goal of an increase in the power of the United States.
In order to grasp the way O’Rourke reaches her conclusion, we must first understand her use of terms. By “regime,” she means “either a state’s leadership or its political processes and institutional arrangements.” A covert regime change “denotes an operation to replace the political leadership of another state where the intervening state does not acknowledge its role publicly. These actions include successful and failed attempts to covertly assassinate foreign leaders, sponsor coups d’état, influence foreign democratic elections, incite popular revolutions, and support armed dissident groups in their bids to topple a foreign government.”…
O’Rourke, one gathers, hopes that the United States will learn from the failure of covert regime change and instead pursue the inevitable grasp for power in a more rational manner. In this she resembles her mentor John Mearsheimer, who hopes that America will abandon ideological crusades in favor of “offshore balancing.” Those of us who, like Murray Rothbard and Ron Paul, favor a noninterventionist foreign policy will not be satisfied with this. Instead, we need to ask deeper questions. Is the pursuit of power in the international system indeed inevitable? Does it not depend rather on human free choice? If so, the time has come to abandon completely a failed policy. “Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground?”
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