Toppling Foreign Governments

In Toppling Foreign Governments, Melissa Willard-Foster argues that as long as domestic opposition drives leaders to resist the demands of stronger states, the strong are likely to opt for regime change, seeing it as more cost effective than negotiations.

In 2011, the United States launched its third regime-change attempt in a decade. Like earlier targets, Libya's Muammar Qaddafi had little hope of defeating the forces stacked against him. He seemed to recognize this when calling for a cease-fire just after the intervention began. But by then, the United States had determined it was better to oust him than negotiate and thus backed his opposition. The history of foreign-imposed regime change is replete with leaders like Qaddafi, overthrown after wars they seemed unlikely to win. From the British ouster of Afghanistan's Sher Ali in 1878 to the Soviet overthrow of Hungary's Imre Nagy in 1956, regime change has been imposed on the weak and the friendless.

In Toppling Foreign Governments, Melissa Willard-Foster explores the question of why stronger nations overthrow governments when they could attain their aims at the bargaining table. She identifies a central cause—the targeted leader's domestic political vulnerability—that not only gives the leader motive to resist a stronger nation's demands, making a bargain more difficult to attain, but also gives the stronger nation reason to believe that regime change will be comparatively cheap. As long as the targeted leader's domestic opposition is willing to collaborate with the foreign power, the latter is likely to conclude that ousting the leader is more cost effective than negotiating.

Willard-Foster analyzes 133 instances of regime change, ranging from covert operations to major military invasions, and spanning over two hundred years. She also conducts three in-depth case studies that support her contention that domestically and militarily weak leaders appear more costly to coerce than overthrow and, as long as they remain ubiquitous, foreign-imposed regime change is likely to endure.

Introduction
Chapter 1. Why the Strong Impose Regime Change on the Weak
Chapter 2. How States Impose Regime Change
Chapter 3. Testing the Logic of Foreign-Imposed Regime Change
Chapter 4. The Cold War: American Policy Toward Bolivia and Guatemala, 1952-54
Chapter 5. The Cold War: Soviet Policy Toward Poland and Hungary, 1956
Chapter 6. The Post-9/11 Era: Regime Change and Rogues, Iraq 2003, Libya 2003, and Libya 2011
Conclusion

Appendices
1. Foreign-Imposed Regime Change, 1816-2007
2. A Game Theoretic Model of Regime Change

Notes
Index
Acknowledgments