The modern international order rests on a contradiction rarely examined in full daylight. Western states present themselves as guardians of international rules, democracy, and self-determination, yet the historical record of their behavior abroad tells a different story — one written not in treaties or speeches, but in classified cables, deniable operations, and shattered political systems.Covert Regime Change, first published in 2018,matters because it documents, with unusual rigor, how this contradiction became a governing method. Lindsey A. O’Rourke, Associate Professor at Boston College, does not ask whether covert intervention occasionally went wrong. She demonstrates that it became a routine instrument of statecraft, one whose predictable consequences were political collapse, mass violence, and long-term instability.
The book’s starting point is empirical, not rhetorical. O’Rourke assembles the most comprehensive dataset to date of U.S.-backed regime change attempts during the Cold War, identifying seventy cases between 1947 and 1989. Sixty-four were covert. Only six were overt. This imbalance is not incidental. It reveals a strategic preference for secrecy as a means of exercising power without democratic constraint. Covert regime change allowed policymakers to intervene repeatedly while insulating themselves from public accountability.
O’Rourke also dismantles the notion that covert regime change primarily served democratic ends. Statistically, covert interventions overwhelmingly produced authoritarian outcomes. Where democratic transitions occurred – and they are hard to find – , they were more often associated with overt interventions, where public scrutiny imposed limits. Secrecy correlated with repression, not reform. O’Rourke’s findings dispel the myth that the US fought for democracy during the Cold War: “The United States supported authoritarian forces in forty-four out of sixty-four covert regime changes, including at least six operations that sought to replace liberal democratic governments with illiberal authoritarian regimes. Yet, Washington’s proclivity for installing authoritarian regimes was also not absolute. In one-eighth of its covert missions and one-half of its overt interventions, Washington encouraged a democratic transformation in an authoritarian state.” In other words: Washington supported whatever regime or rebel group served its interests — and showed little concern for democracy.
What makes the book so unsettling is that it refuses to stop at the moment of intervention. O’Rourke tracks what followed. Using comparative statistical analysis, she shows that states targeted by covert regime change were significantly more likely to experience civil war and mass killings. Her statistical analysis shows that “states targeted for covert regime change were 6.7 times more likely to experience a Militarized Interstate Dispute with the United States in the ten years following intervention.” US regime change operations also steeply increased episodes of mass killing: “States targeted in successful operations were 2.8 times more likely to experience an episode of mass killing, whereas states targeted in failed covert missions were 3.7 times more likely.”
Vietnam demonstrates how covert regime change could deepen rather than prevent war. Before large-scale U.S. troop deployments, Washington pursued covert efforts to shape South Vietnam’s leadership. O’Rourke reconstructs the U.S. role in facilitating the 1963 coup against President Ngo Dinh Diem. Rather than stabilizing the regime, the coup fragmented power and intensified dependence on U.S. military support. What began as covert political manipulation ended in a war that killed millions of Vietnamese and devastated the region.
In the Western Hemisphere, the United States utilized hegemonic operations to enforce a brutal regional conformity, often at the direct expense of democratic institutions. The CIA-backed overthrow of Jacobo Árbenz in 1954 destroyed Guatemala’s young democracy. Guatemala’s subsequent trajectory: decades of military rule, a civil war lasting more than thirty years, and the killing of roughly 200,000 people, the majority civilians. Indigenous communities were systematically targeted.
The case of the Dominican Republic illustrates the cold transition from secret meddling to open violence. The US first backed Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship. Following the 1961 assassination of Trujillo — an operation in which the CIA provided the weapons — the country attempted a fragile democratic opening. When the reformist Juan Bosch won the presidency in 1962, his refusal to launch a McCarthyite purge of domestic leftists led Washington to view him as a “weak link” in the regional defense against communism. After Bosch was ousted in a military coup, a popular uprising in 1965 sought to restore the democratic constitution. Fearing a “second Cuba,” the Johnson administration launched a massive overt invasion to crush the rebellion and install a more compliant regime. The empirical record here is clear: for American planners, the survival of a pro-Washington hierarchy was far more important than the survival of a Caribbean democracy.
One of the book’s most analytically important findings concerns repetition. States subjected to one covert regime change attempt were far more likely to experience subsequent interventions. Covert action did not resolve instability; it institutionalized it. Political systems weakened by external manipulation became perpetual sites of interference.
The moral failure documented inCovert Regime Changeis therefore not accidental. It is structural. Secrecy enabled policymakers to externalize violence, displace responsibility, and treat foreign societies as experimental terrain. Civil wars prolonged, civilians killed, and political futures destroyed were foreseeable consequences of deliberate choices.
One of the most revealing dimensions ofCovert Regime Changeis the attention it pays to proxy warfare. Covert intervention rarely meant the United States acted alone. It meant empowering others to act violently on its behalf, often with full awareness of who those actors were and what they represented.
Source: Antiwar.com
