Covert Regime Change

O’Rourke’s book offers a onestop shop for understanding foreignimposed regime change. Covert Regime Change is an impressive book and required reading for anyone interested in understanding hidden power in world politics.― Political Science Quarterly

States seldom resort to war to overthrow their adversaries. They are more likely to attempt to covertly change the opposing regime, by assassinating a foreign leader, sponsoring a coup d’état, meddling in a democratic election, or secretly aiding foreign dissident groups.

In Covert Regime Change, Lindsey A. O’Rourke shows us how states really act when trying to overthrow another state. She argues that conventional focus on overt cases misses the basic causes of regime change. O’Rourke provides substantive evidence of types of security interests that drive states to intervene. Offensive operations aim to overthrow a current military rival or break up a rival alliance. Preventive operations seek to stop a state from taking certain actions, such as joining a rival alliance, that may make them a future security threat. Hegemonic operations try to maintain a hierarchical relationship between the intervening state and the target government. Despite the prevalence of covert attempts at regime change, most operations fail to remain covert and spark blowback in unanticipated ways.

Covert Regime Changeassembles an original dataset of all American regime change operations during the Cold War. This fund of information shows the United States was ten times more likely to try covert rather than overt regime change during the Cold War. Her dataset allows O’Rourke to address three foundational questions: What motivates states to attempt foreign regime change? Why do states prefer to conduct these operations covertly rather than overtly? How successful are such missions in achieving their foreign policy goals?

Table of Contents

1. The False Promise of Covert Regime Change

2. Causes: Why Do States Launch Regime Changes?

3. Conduct: Why Do States Intervene Covertly versus Overtly?

4. Consequences: How Effective Are Covert Regime Changes?

5. Overview of US-Backed Regime Changes during the Cold War

6. Rolling Back the Iron Curtain

7. Containment, Coup d’État, and the Covert War in Vietnam

8. Dictators and Democrats in the Dominican Republic

9. Covert Regime Change after the Cold War

Review

Any debate over the relative merits and demerits of regime change as a legitimate tool of foreign-policy needs to begin with Lindsey A. O’Rourke’s fantastic book. It’s a well-written, important work that should productively inform foreign-policy debates going forward. Essential reading.

― The National Interest

This is a book for scholars and policy makers; the footnotes are copious and extensive.

― Choice

Covert Regime Change is a valuable book that sheds light on an important issue.

― Survival: Global Politics and Strategy

Unlike many other books built around accounts of CIA plots, Covert Regime Change takes a scholarly and quantitative approach. It provides charts, graphs, and data sets. Meticulous analysis makes this not the quickest read of any book on the subject, but certainly one of the best informed. O’Rourke injects a dose of rigorous analysis into a debate that is often based on emotion.

― Global Research

O’Rourke’s work provides ample evidence that attempts at forcible regime-change are unlikely to achieve desired ends at a reasonable cost.

― Christopher Preble, War on the Rocks

Well researched and argued, it places the initial debate over covert action within the national security decisionmaking process during the first years of the Cold War.

― International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence

In this well-researched and clearly written book, Lindsay A. O’Rourke vigorously argues that during the Cold War U.S. officials repeatedly launched covert interventions in foreign countries, even though most of the operations failed to effect regime changes, because the officials saw them as cheap ways to enhance U.S. security and power…. A well-executed, valuable study.

― Journal of American History

O’Rourke’s book offers a onestop shop for understanding foreignimposed regime change. Covert Regime Change is an impressive book and required reading for anyone interested in understanding hidden power in world politics.

― Political Science Quarterly

O’Rourke’s contribution to the history of US foreign relations, intelligence history, and international relations theory is not just valuable but also original. O’Rourke’s dataset identifies more than 60 covert efforts to bring about regime change… pursued by the United States between 1947 and 1989. Few authors have sought to chronicle and analyze them as comprehensively and systematically as O’Rourke, and no one has succeeded as she has. We owe her a great debt.

― Parameters

The reality of covert operations that meddle with the domestic regimes of other states, as Lindsey O’Rourke documents, is that when the secret intervention fails it becomes public, leaving the unsuccessful intervener with egg on his face and blood on his hands. Every government library from the White House to the C.I.A. needs copies of this book on their shelves.

— Michael Desch, Packey J. Dee Professor of International Relations, Founding Director of the Notre Dame International Security Center, and author of Cult of the Irrelevant

About the Author

Lindsey A. O’Rourke is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Boston College. Her research focuses on regime change, international security, and US foreign policy.