Overview of US-Backed Regime Changes during the Cold War

Abstract

This chapter provides a historical overview of America's experience with regime change during the Cold War. Looking at the broad trends in America's regime change policy highlights the shifting security interests driving U.S. behavior over this period, the reasons why leaders preferred covert conduct, and the general utility of covert operations. The chapter is split into three sections. These correspond to the three types of security interests motivating these operations: offensive, preventive, and hegemonic. Each section outlines the motives behind that type of regime change, followed by a discussion of how each type of operation fulfilled the two prerequisites for intervention introduced in Chapter 2: namely, that they were in response to a chronic, security-oriented interstate dispute and that the intervening state must have identified a plausible political alternative to the target regime. Although the chapter deals with both covert and overt cases, the six overt cases receive closer individual attention because they pose a stronger challenge to the assertion that states generally prefer to conduct their regime changes covertly.