In August 2021, American and global audiences were shaken by the swift collapse of the US-backed regime in Afghanistan. The Taliban’s rapid recapture of Kabul, almost 20 years after their ouster by US-led coalition forces, prompted a renewed debate about the wisdom of foreign regime-change interventions, the profound challenges associated with shaping political outcomes in other countries, and the difficulty of predicting what might come after regime change.

Six months later, Russia initiated a massive military campaign intended, by most accounts, to overthrow Volodymyr Zelensky’s government and annex large portions of Ukraine. Although the latter goal might still be within Russia’s reach as of this writing, the first objective failed rather spectacularly. US policy makers and pundits promptly started to call for regime change in Russia as the best, perhaps only, way to end the war. Weakening and ultimately replacing Putin have been the driving logic behind the reinvigorated sanctions regime. Many, including a number of elected officials, have openly advocated assassination and other covert options to remove Putin from office. Although this latter line of action seems improbable, the speed with which skepticism regarding foreign regime change was drowned out by its championing speaks to its entrenchment and enduring popularity as an instrument of foreign policy. Even the detractors in the current debate primarily focus on why regime change is unlikely to happen, rather than what is likely to happen should it succeed. As Alexander Downes artfully demonstrates in his new book, Catastrophic Success: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Goes Wrong, regime change can fail even when it succeeds.

Downes poses important and timely questions; namely, why is it that foreign-imposed regime changes (FIRC) so frequently go wrong? He also asks if and why certain types of regime change are more likely to produce bad outcomes (p. 4). Using a combination of statistical analyses and illustrations from 120 cases of regime change involving 153 interveners between 1816 and 2008, Downes focuses on two mechanisms that produce unfavorable outcomes for the intervener: military disintegration and the “problem of competing principals” (p. 5). Military disintegration leads to civil war when the target leader survives the regime-change operation and attempts to use elements of the military to regain power, or when the leader is killed or exiled and cannot lead a fight but the fragmentation of the military unleashes scores of armed men, creating boundless opportunities for armed violence. The second mechanism, which Downes argues predisposes states to irregular leader removal and, at best, a continuation of poor target–intervenor relations, is what Downes calls the problem of competing principals. Rooted in principal-agent theory (Darren G. Hawkins, et al. “Delegation under Anarchy: States, International Organizations, and Principal-Agent Theory.” Delegation and Agency in International Organizations 3 [2006]) this mechanism creates dynamics, starting with the FIRC operation itself, that inevitably produce conflicting incentives for a newly installed leader. When imposed leaders try to sustain commitments to their external patron(s) at the expense of their domestic audience(s), they risk alienating their constituents and instigating civil war and forced removal. Alternatively, if imposed leaders prioritize their domestic audience and fail to meet the wishes of their external patron, they may face interstate conflict or removal at the hands of the intervening state (p. 40).

To demonstrate the explanatory power of these mechanisms, Downes explores three types of regime-change cases—leadership changes that empower new elites but do not build new institutions (p. 7); institutional regime changes that install new leaders and build new institutions (p. 7); and restoration regime changes that restore to power previous government or leaders (p. 8). Among these, Downes argues that leadership FIRCs, which happen to be the most common type, tend to be associated with the worst outcomes. Downes persuasively demonstrates that FIRCs augment the likelihood of interstate conflict between the target and intervenor and increase the incidence of coups and civil conflict within the target state (p. 301).

This book makes important contributions to the literatures on civil wars, leader tenure and removal, bilateral relations, and intervention (spanning both overt and covert action). Downes expertly synthesizes a variety of literatures to cover an exceptional amount of territory—geographically, temporally, and conceptually. He meticulously builds the evidence chapter by chapter to reach a compelling conclusion. The theory and mechanisms that Downes emphasizes are simultaneously intuitive (p. 41) and masterfully demonstrated. Although methodologically rigorous and written with a scholarly audience in mind, the book speaks to some of the most important debates in contemporary foreign policy and international security.

The focus on statistical analysis and short cases well demonstrates the central claims of the book across time and space. Although the United States represents quite a few instances of foreign-imposed regime change, and a number of the short cases focus on it as an intervenor, Downes shows that other intervenors—from Rwanda to Japan—are also susceptible to the same challenges and often produce similar results.

With such large theoretical claims, it can be challenging to address competing arguments exhaustively. However, Downes takes pains to address alternative explanations, particularly in his statistical analysis. The emphasis on and time spent addressing questions of selection bias in different sections are particularly welcome.

As with any book that tackles dynamics on such a large geographic and temporal scale, there are areas that could have been more developed. Conceptually, I would have liked to see more unpacking of the independent variables and mechanisms. The dependent variables (civil war, irregular leader removal, and bilateral relations) were well established in the statistical analysis, but I would have liked more discussion regarding the range of both mechanisms and types of regime changes. For example, in the criteria for cases, Downes notes that for states to qualify as targets, they must retain nominal sovereignty after the regime change occurs and have sovereign independence prior to intervention. Moreover, the imposition of regime change on newly independent states by departing colonial powers was not included in the universe of cases. These moves are defensible but run the risk of excluding by definition some of the more successful instances of FIRC and leave open important questions of residual imperial or colonial influence or other types of power and authority that intervening states can wield against targets, even if they are nominally independent (David A. Lake, Hierarchy in International Relations, 2011).

Some of the cases also raise questions of what constitutes “change” in leadership versus changing the individual holding the reins. The 1941 regime change against Reza Shah Pahlavi is coded as a leadership FIRC, even though he was replaced by his son Mohammed Reza Shah. Although it does not meet the coding criteria for a restoration FIRC, the fact that the installed leader was a member of the reigning dynasty has important implications for the resulting regime’s stability and legitimacy (Michael Axworthy, Iran: Empire of the Mind: A History from Zoroaster to the Present Day, 2008). The military disintegration mechanism also seemed to encompass a diverse range of cases that would likely have distinct effects on the outcomes of interest. For example, does disintegration have different effects on fragmentation and the probability of civil war if the breakup of the armed forces is driven internally or directed by the intervenor? How does the existing military hierarchy and cohesion within the state affect the likelihood of fragmentation (Holger Albrecht, and Dorothy Ohl. “Exit, Resistance, Loyalty: Military Behavior during Unrest in Authoritarian Regimes.” Perspectives on Politics 14, no. 1 [2016])? These questions are challenging, because every case is distinct, but more discussion of these nuances would have strengthened the argument and made the general claims easier to sustain. In fact, the book could have potentially been narrowed to focus exclusively on leadership regime change, because there are far fewer cases of restorative and institutional regime change, raising concerns about the robustness of those findings given the far fewer cases.

Although the statistical analysis and short cases enabled exploration of a wide breadth of observations and the book already covers a lot of conceptual and empirical ground, the lack of fully fleshed-out case studies at times felt like a missed opportunity to really drive home the importance of the mechanisms proposed in the theory. Readers who are left with the same feeling, however, are given plenty of indication where to look for more detail on the various cases in the book’s extensive notes and references. In this and other ways, the book is deeply generative. As the author himself indicates, perhaps the most interesting questions explain how the characteristics of the intervenor and target interact. Why do states pursue particular types of regime changes, and how might other typologies or classifications of the targets explain the type of regime change pursued? Although there is some discussion in the book of failed attempts, the focus is primarily on successful regime-change operations. This is an area ripe for further research. Lastly, future research could look to the target states: How, particularly in failed attempts, do target states—and other interested parties—respond? How do states coup-proof against foreign actors? How do they conceptualize their vulnerability to these operations?

This is a theoretically tight and empirically rich book that meticulously demonstrates its central argument. Foreign-imposed regime change, even when a “success,” is likely to destabilize the target state and lead to a range of unwanted outcomes for both the target and the intervener. In addition to being generative and valuable for the scholarly community, this book is also important for a wider audience of foreign policy decision makers and commentators. Downes notes (p. 84), “Interveners contemplating regime change tend to focus myopically on the immediate task at hand—the logistics and mechanisms of overthrowing the target government—and neglect the details of how to govern once regime change occurs.” Advocates of regime change would be wise to avoid repeating this mistake. Downes’s book suggests that the odds are not in their favor.