United States involvement in regime change
Based on Wikipedia: United States involvement in regime change
In 1953, a successful dentist in Guatemala City looked out his window and watched his country's democracy collapse. Jacobo Árbenz, the democratically elected president who had dared to redistribute unused land from the United Fruit Company to landless peasants, was being overthrown—not by his own military acting alone, but with substantial help from the Central Intelligence Agency, operating under the codename Operation PBSUCCESS. This wasn't an aberration. It was policy.
The United States has, since the nineteenth century, made a habit of replacing foreign governments. Sometimes openly, through military invasion. Sometimes quietly, through covert operations, rigged elections, and support for coups. The scale is staggering: according to researchers who have attempted to count, America carried out at least eighty-one known interventions in foreign elections between 1946 and 2000, along with sixty-four covert and six overt attempts to change entire regimes during the Cold War alone.
This is the story of how a nation founded on the principle that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed became one of history's most prolific engineers of government change—in other countries.
The Backyard Doctrine
To understand American regime change, you need to understand the Monroe Doctrine. In 1823, President James Monroe declared that the Western Hemisphere was essentially closed to further European colonization and interference. The flip side of this—never explicitly stated but always implied—was that the United States reserved for itself the right to shape events in its "backyard."
The first major test came during and after the American Civil War. While the United States was distracted by its own existential crisis, France saw an opportunity. Emperor Napoleon III sent troops to Mexico, ostensibly to collect debts, but actually to install a European monarch on America's southern border. The chosen puppet was Maximilian I, a Habsburg prince with excellent manners and terrible judgment.
Once the Civil War ended, the United States made clear this arrangement would not stand. American weapons began flowing to the liberal forces of Benito Juárez, and American volunteers crossed the border to fight alongside them. Maximilian, abandoned by his French sponsors and outmaneuvered by Juárez's guerrillas, faced a firing squad in 1867. Secretary of State William Seward declared triumphantly that the Monroe Doctrine, "which eight years ago was merely a theory, is now an irreversible fact."
The fact, as it turned out, was this: the United States would decide who governed in the Americas.
The Banana Wars
Between 1898 and 1934, American marines invaded Latin American and Caribbean nations so frequently that the Corps developed a training manual for it. Called The Strategy and Tactics of Small Wars, published in 1921, it codified lessons learned from Haiti, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and elsewhere. These conflicts became known collectively as the "Banana Wars"—a name that captured both their geographic focus and their frequent connection to American fruit companies.
Honduras offers a case study in how this worked. The United Fruit Company and Standard Fruit Company dominated the country's banana exports, and with them, vast swaths of land and the railroads that moved the fruit to port. When Honduran politics threatened these interests, American troops showed up. They came in 1903 to support a coup by Manuel Bonilla. They returned in 1907 when Bonilla faced a Nicaraguan-backed counter-coup. They came again in 1911, 1912, 1919, 1920, 1924, and 1925—sometimes defending regimes, sometimes installing caretaker governments, always protecting what officials called "American interests."
The pattern was similar in Cuba. After the Spanish-American War of 1898, the United States occupied the island and faced a dilemma: many Americans genuinely believed in Cuban independence and had passed the Teller Amendment forbidding annexation. But they also wanted control. The solution was the Platt Amendment, which gave the United States the right to intervene whenever it disapproved of Cuba's government and severely limited Cuban sovereignty in foreign affairs. The Cubans had to write this into their constitution or remain occupied. They wrote it in.
When Cuba's first president, Tomás Estrada Palma, faced accusations of electoral fraud in 1905 and fighting broke out between political factions, the United States simply took over. Secretary of State William Howard Taft invoked the Platt Amendment, marines landed, and a military governor ran the country until 1909. This wasn't seen as controversial. It was seen as proper stewardship.
Nicaragua and the Problem of Legitimacy
Nicaragua reveals the contradictions at the heart of American regime change. In 1909, President José Santos Zelaya made a fatal mistake: he began negotiating with Germany and Japan to build a canal through his country that would compete with the American-controlled Panama Canal. The United States had invested enormously in Panama—not just money but diplomatic capital, having essentially created the Panamanian state in 1903 by backing its secession from Colombia.
A competitor canal was intolerable. So when Governor Juan José Estrada launched a rebellion against Zelaya, the United States provided covert support. When Zelaya executed two Americans fighting with the rebels, the support became overt. Troops landed on the Mosquito Coast. Zelaya fled.
But here was the problem: Zelaya's Liberal Party was popular. Thomas Cleland Dawson, sent as a special agent to assess the situation, determined that any free election would bring the Liberals back to power. His solution was to have Estrada skip elections entirely and instead set up a constituent assembly that would simply select him as president. Democracy was the goal, except when it produced the wrong results.
The American occupation of Nicaragua stretched on. Under Taft, troops arrived. Under Wilson, they stayed and took "complete financial and governmental control." Calvin Coolidge briefly withdrew them, but when rebels captured the town housing the American legation, the troops returned. The United States found itself fighting a guerrilla war against forces led by Augusto César Sandino, a war that would become one of America's longest conflicts. Only the Great Depression, which made the occupation financially unsustainable, finally ended it.
When America left, it left behind the Somoza family, who would rule Nicaragua as a brutal dictatorship for decades. Sandino, who had fought the Americans to a standstill, was murdered by Somoza's forces in 1934. The name "Sandinista," adopted by later Nicaraguan revolutionaries, commemorates him.
The World Wars and Their Aftermath
The two world wars transformed American regime change from a regional practice into a global one. In World War I, the Wilson administration didn't just want to defeat Germany—it wanted to fundamentally change how Germany was governed. "Make the World Safe for Democracy" became the slogan, and Wilson made Kaiser Wilhelm II's abdication a condition of surrender.
Germany complied. The Kaiser fled to the Netherlands. The Weimar Republic rose in his place—a liberal democracy that would itself be destroyed, not by American intervention, but by its own internal contradictions and the rise of Adolf Hitler.
World War II produced regime changes on a far vaster scale. The United States helped dismantle Nazi puppet governments across Europe and Japanese client states across Asia. Germany and Japan themselves were occupied and reconstituted. Italy's Benito Mussolini was deposed with Allied help. The Philippines, Korea, and parts of China saw Japanese-installed governments replaced.
These changes were largely uncontroversial because the regimes being replaced were genuinely monstrous. But World War II's end brought a new dynamic that would define American regime change for the next half-century: the Cold War.
The Cold War Playbook
The logic was called the "domino theory." If one country fell to communism, the theory went, its neighbors would follow like dominoes in a line. Therefore, even small countries far from American shores represented vital strategic interests. Therefore, even democratically elected governments with socialist leanings had to go.
Italy in 1948 offers an early example. The Italian Communist Party was polling well, potentially poised to win the upcoming elections. The United States intervened massively—not with troops, but with money, propaganda, and pressure. Letters poured in from Italian Americans warning relatives not to vote Communist. The CIA funneled funds to centrist parties. It worked. The Christian Democrats won. The playbook was established.
Iran in 1953 showed how far the United States would go. Mohammad Mosaddegh, Iran's democratically elected prime minister, had nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, threatening British petroleum interests. The British convinced the Americans that Mosaddegh was a communist threat (he wasn't, particularly), and the Central Intelligence Agency joined Britain's MI6 in engineering a coup. The operation, codenamed TPAJAX, involved bribery, propaganda, and manufactured street protests. Mosaddegh fell. The Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was restored to power with vastly expanded authority.
The Shah ruled for twenty-six more years, his secret police torturing dissidents, his government a reliable American ally. When he fell in 1979, the revolution that replaced him was virulently anti-American. The hostage crisis, the antagonism that persists to this day—these are downstream consequences of what happened in 1953.
Cuba and the Bay of Pigs
Fidel Castro's revolution in Cuba presented a particular problem. Here was a communist state ninety miles from Florida, a direct challenge to the Monroe Doctrine in its Cold War iteration. The Eisenhower administration began planning an invasion using Cuban exiles, and the Kennedy administration inherited and approved the plan.
The Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961 was a fiasco. The exile force landed at a poorly chosen beach, faced stronger resistance than expected, and received less American air support than promised. Within three days, it was over. Castro had his propaganda victory, and the United States had demonstrated that regime change could fail spectacularly.
The failure didn't end American efforts against Castro—those continued for decades, including assassination attempts that read like dark comedy: exploding cigars, poisoned wetsuits, a seashell rigged with explosives. None worked. Castro died of natural causes in 2016.
Indonesia: The Template for Mass Violence
What happened in Indonesia in 1965 and 1966 represents something darker than a simple regime change. Sukarno, the country's founding president, had grown increasingly close to the Indonesian Communist Party, the PKI, which was the largest communist party outside the Soviet Union and China. The United States wanted him gone.
The opportunity came when a group of military officers attempted a coup, allegedly with PKI involvement. General Suharto suppressed the coup and then launched a systematic campaign against the Communist Party and its suspected sympathizers. The United States provided support: lists of suspected communists, communications equipment, and diplomatic cover.
What followed was one of the twentieth century's worst mass killings. Estimates range from five hundred thousand to over a million dead. Entire communities were massacred. Rivers choked with bodies. The United States not only supported this—it helped make it possible and then celebrated the outcome. Suharto's "New Order" government would rule Indonesia for three decades.
Chile and the Limits of Covert Action
Salvador Allende was exactly what American policymakers feared: a Marxist who won power democratically. Elected president of Chile in 1970, he pursued nationalization of copper mines and other socialist policies while maintaining democratic institutions. Henry Kissinger reportedly remarked, "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people."
The Nixon administration tried everything. Economic pressure designed to "make the economy scream." Support for opposition media. Funding for anti-Allende politicians. Cultivation of military officers. On September 11, 1973, General Augusto Pinochet led a military coup. Allende died in the presidential palace—by suicide, according to most evidence, though conspiracy theories persist.
Pinochet's dictatorship lasted seventeen years. Thousands were tortured. Thousands more "disappeared." Chile became a laboratory for free-market economic policies that admirers called a miracle and critics called catastrophe. The American role in Allende's downfall, long denied or minimized, has been thoroughly documented by declassified records.
After the Cold War
The Soviet Union's dissolution in 1991 removed the ideological framework that had justified decades of regime change. But it didn't end the practice. If anything, it enabled it. The United States was now the sole superpower, unchecked by a rival. The justifications simply shifted.
In Panama in 1989, it was Manuel Noriega's drug trafficking (though he had been a CIA asset for years). In Haiti in 1994, it was restoring a democratically elected president who had been overthrown. In Yugoslavia throughout the 1990s, it was stopping ethnic cleansing. In Afghanistan in 2001, it was responding to the September 11 attacks and pursuing Al-Qaeda. In Iraq in 2003, it was weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist.
Libya in 2011 deserves particular attention. Muammar Gaddafi, the eccentric dictator who had ruled for four decades, faced an Arab Spring uprising. The United States and NATO intervened, ostensibly to protect civilians, with air strikes that helped rebels overthrow and kill Gaddafi. The result was not democracy but chaos—a failed state carved up by militias, a humanitarian crisis, and a destabilization that spread across the region.
The Patterns
Looking at this history, certain patterns emerge.
First, regime changes often work in the short term but fail in the long term. The Shah stayed in power for a quarter-century, which looks like success until you consider what replaced him. Suharto lasted three decades, but Indonesian democracy, when it finally came, had to grapple with the unhealed wounds of 1965. Afghanistan's Taliban government fell quickly in 2001; twenty years later, the Taliban were back.
Second, the justifications shift with the times, but the underlying impulse remains consistent. In the nineteenth century, it was the Monroe Doctrine and manifest destiny. In the early twentieth century, it was protecting American business interests. During the Cold War, it was fighting communism. After 2001, it was fighting terrorism. The specific ideological framework matters less than the belief that the United States has both the right and the ability to determine how other countries should be governed.
Third, there is a persistent gap between stated goals and actual outcomes. The United States claims to support democracy, but it has overthrown democracies (Iran, Guatemala, Chile) when their policies conflicted with American interests. It claims to oppose dictatorships, but it has installed and supported dictators (Pinochet, Suharto, the Somozas, the Shah) when they served American purposes. The rhetoric of freedom and self-determination has coexisted with practices that deny both.
Fourth, the costs are almost always borne by the people of the targeted countries. Americans rarely see the consequences of regime change operations. The families destroyed in Indonesia, the dissidents tortured in Chile, the chaos that engulfed Libya—these are abstractions, if they're known at all. The distance between action and consequence is vast, which makes repetition easy.
The Question of Effectiveness
Set aside the moral questions for a moment. Does regime change actually work on its own terms? Does it advance American interests?
The record is mixed at best. Germany and Japan after World War II are success stories—but they involved total military defeat, prolonged occupation, and massive investment in reconstruction. They are not models that can be easily replicated.
Most other cases are harder to assess optimistically. Iran became a much more formidable adversary after the Islamic Revolution than it ever was under Mosaddegh. Iraq after Saddam Hussein became a sectarian battleground that gave rise to ISIS. Afghanistan absorbed twenty years of American effort and then returned to Taliban rule within weeks of American withdrawal.
Even the "successes" often look different in retrospect. Was it really in America's long-term interest to have the Somozas ruling Nicaragua, generating the resentments that eventually produced the Sandinista revolution and the Iran-Contra scandal? Was it wise to support Suharto's Indonesia if the price was becoming complicit in mass murder?
The Present and Future
Regime change has not disappeared from American foreign policy, but it has become more controversial and difficult. The failures in Iraq and Libya made policymakers more cautious. The rise of social media and investigative journalism makes covert operations harder to conceal. Other powers—Russia, China—have grown more capable of blocking American interventions or conducting their own.
The fundamental tension remains unresolved. The United States genuinely does value democracy and human rights; these are not merely propaganda. But it also has interests—economic, strategic, ideological—that sometimes conflict with those values. When push comes to shove, interests usually win.
And there is the deeper problem: the arrogance of believing you can engineer other societies. Countries are complex systems. Their politics reflect their histories, cultures, economies, and the intricate balance of forces within them. An outside power can destroy a government, but it cannot easily create a better one. It can remove a dictator, but it cannot remove the conditions that produced him.
The dentist in Guatemala City watching his democracy fall in 1953 might have wondered what gave distant Americans the right to decide his country's fate. Seventy years later, the question still has no satisfying answer.