Toppling Foreign Governments examines when and in what form states engage in policies of foreign-imposed regime change (FIRC); that is, the replacement of a foreign leader or political institutions. For Melissa Willard-Foster, key questions include why it is that strong states absorb great costs to change the preferences of foreign leaders via FIRCs, as well as why weak states and their leaders resist the demands of strong states and risk FIRCs. According to Willard-Foster, the answer lies with the domestic opposition to the leader in the weak state. Leaders in target states that are domestically weak are more vulnerable to FIRC because they are unable to make concessions to the challenging state. In addition, challenging states can resort to the leader’s opposition as the basis of a new regime. Under these conditions FIRCs become a rational policy choice made by challenging states.

Willard-Foster employs a mixed-methods approach to test her expectations regarding FIRCs, developing a formal model, using a large-N sample for the period 1816–2003, and crafting seven case studies. Key to the observational and case study components is the attention to rival explanations for FIRCs; namely, psychological, bureaucratic, and rationalist alternatives. For the observational data, Willard-Foster collects “FIRC events” in which policy makers in one state stop negotiating with the leader or regime of another state, implement a plan to depose that leader or regime, and plan to restore the targeted state’s sovereignty. In doing so, she codes all FIRC attempts, not only those that succeed, resulting in a data sample that includes 150 cases. Willard-Foster operationalizes a leader’s domestic political weakness by recording the history of irregular leader removal in a state, changes in a state’s political institutions, and a target state’s economic growth. Analysis of FIRCs in relevant pairs of states (those containing a major power or geographic contiguity or both) and states with histories of militarized conflict demonstrates strong and robust support for Willard-Foster’s chief expectation: FIRCs occur when the leaders of the target state are politically weak domestically.

The case studies enable Willard-Foster to examine the strategic bargaining process more closely, and it is here that the volume impresses. Relying on memos, dispatches, cables, government documents, and memoirs of the principals, Willard-Foster uses a most-similar case study design, with four case studies from the Cold War and three from the post–9/11 period. In the Latin American cases of Bolivia and Guatemala, each country pursued nationalist economic reforms, and communist parties partook in politics—conditions alarming for US foreign policy. Yet, the United States pursued a settlement in Bolivia and a FIRC in the form of partial regime change in Guatemala. For Willard-Foster, the key to US policy choice turned on the different impact of revolutions on domestic political opposition in the two countries. In Bolivia, the uprising in 1951 led to the election of President Victor Paz Estenssoro and the elimination of threats to his power from elites and the military. Absent opposition, Paz Estenssoro could make concessions to the United States, and a FIRC became costly for the United States to pursue. In Guatemala, President Jacobo Árbenz confronted opposition to land reform from external elites as well as internally from the army. Árbenz’s political weakness both reduced his ability to make concessions to the United States and lowered the cost of pursuing a FIRC for the United States.

In the Eastern European cases, nationalist uprisings in Poland and Hungary yielded different responses from the Soviet Union regarding the decision to pursue FIRCs. In Poland, First Secretary Władysław Gomułka faced no external opposition, and internal opposition from party hardliners was severely weakened before he assumed power. As a result, Gomułka’s domestic popularity raised the cost to the Soviet Union of pursuing a FIRC, thereby allowing him to pursue domestic reforms while allaying Soviet concern regarding the Polish commitment to the Warsaw Pact. As a result, Khrushchev pursued a settlement in Poland. By contrast, in Hungary prime minister Imre Nagy confronted internal and external opposition to his leadership; these political threats made concessions more difficult and lowered the cost to the Soviets of pursuing partial regime change.

In the Middle Eastern cases, US policy makers deemed both Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi to be menaces to international politics, possessors of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), and supporters of terrorism; yet, the United States pursued different polices in Iraq and Libya, and within Libya in 2003 and 2011. Willard-Foster argues that central to an explanation for US policy choice is the nature of the domestic political opposition confronted by Hussein and Qaddafi. In Iraq, Hussein confronted renewed internal and external opponents in 2003; these threats to his power constrained his capacity to make concessions, raised the cost of containment, and lowered the perceived cost to the United States of pursuing a FIRC. In Libya, Qaddafi had largely eliminated domestic threats to his power by 2003, conditions that allowed him to make concessions to the United Kingdom and the United States and raised the cost of pursuing a FIRC. But conditions had changed for Qaddafi by 2011, when he confronted significant threats to his rule that reduced his capacity to make concessions and afforded coalition states a viable opposition with which to form a new government after a FIRC. As a result, the coalition states pursued full regime change against Qaddafi in 2011.

The theory of Toppling Foreign Governments is anchored to domestic political conditions in target states. Yet, a survey of Willard-Foster’s sample of FIRCs (appendix 1, table 14, pp. 249–52) suggests both the potentially pivotal role of the United States and heterogeneity in the source and purpose of FIRCs. For instance, the United States engaged in 39 FIRCs in the period under consideration, a frequency that dwarfs those by the United Kingdom (16) and France (8) during their democratic phases. During the Cold War, the United States engaged in twice the number of FIRCs as the Soviet Union (16 vs. 8). Moreover, US FIRCs are by far the most global in scope, ranging from Mexico to Chile to Germany to Albania to Iraq to Japan and to Indonesia. The influence of the two world wars on the sources and motivations of FIRCs also deserves attention: combined, the two wars account for roughly 35% (52/150) of the FIRCs in the sample. Moreover, the FIRCs associated with the world wars arguably differ in process from FIRCs suggested by the theory in which warfare is pursued to effect regime change (e.g., United States in Iraq in 2003), rather than FIRCs resulting from the unpremeditated consequences of warfare. Last, postcolonial relationships in Africa and Asia, as well as the security belt fashioned by the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe after World War II, suggest that FIRCs are tools of maintenance of defined spheres of economic and strategic influence.

The historical idiosyncrasies of FIRCs notwithstanding, Toppling Foreign Governments is compelling because it scrutinizes FIRCs as a means of understanding political behavior more broadly in international politics. For instance, Willard-Foster’s analysis suggests that coercion short of regime change in interstate politics is more likely to succeed when the targeted leader is domestically strong and can afford to make concessions to the challenging state. Additionally, she explains the high failure rate of coercion attempts by the fact that strong states pursue negotiations when they are unwilling to engage in regime change, which leads targets to resist. Toppling Foreign Governments, therefore, achieves three qualities rare in academic writing: it answers a new scholarly question, it innovates theory about international relations, and it generates insights that are germane to contemporary policy making.