Alternative Arguments
I test my argument against two sets of alternative explanations: those that suggest policymakers, at least on one side, are too deluded to avoid FIRC and those that suggest that actors cannot avoid FIRC even when rational. These explanations are common in the conflict literature and historical accounts of individual cases but only sometimes appear in studies on the causes of FIRC. I focus on them because they can explain why states would use FIRC, despite its costs, rather than negotiate with the targeted state’s existing leaders.
More typically, scholarly work focuses on the policy aims states seek to attain when pursuing FIRC. These can include ideological goals, humanitarian aims, security interests, economic incentives, or domestic political gains.16 Although these arguments can tell us why states enter into disputes, they do not tell us why those disputes end in FIRC. If regime change is too costly to impose, states may be forced to set aside their ideological convictions, normative values, or interests, however defined, and negotiate with the target. Even when it would seem their goals can only be attained through FIRC, they could still reduce those goals, if necessary, to negotiate deals that satisfy less ambitious aims. Targeted leaders have incentive to negotiate as well. If they could anticipate their fate, surely they would rather preempt it by negotiating. Why conflicts of interest arise between states is an undeniably important question, but only arguments that can explain why states overthrow leaders to resolve their conflicts, when they should neither need nor want to, can fully explain FIRC.
The first alternative approach suggests that policymakers are too blind to the true costs of FIRC to know they should avoid it. Two arguments commonly used to explain why policymakers enter into conflicts they later come to regret assert that either psychological bias or pressure from bureaucrats and/or lobbyists can cause leaders to err in their judgments. These theories imply that policymakers, whether misled by their own biases or by self-serving domestic actors, choose regime change because they lack the ability to make judgments in the state’s best interest.17 Psychological-bias arguments and arguments focusing on bureaucratic and/or interest-group pressure are often used to explain the targeted leader’s behavior as well.18 Leaders like Saddam and Qaddafi are said to resist because they are too delusional or too deceived by domestic actors to know when to back down.
Arguments that emphasize misperception may be helpful in explaining the origins of conflict, but the logic of these arguments is limited when it comes to explaining FIRC. Biased policymakers may be prone to disputes, but not all disputes end in regime change, which suggests that even biased policymakers sometimes choose to settle. Biases may also cause actors to underestimate the costs of FIRC, but this does not necessarily mean that actors with better judgment would have chosen differently. They might merely pursue FIRC differently. Although the many high-profile cases of failed regime change might suggest that the choice to pursue FIRC is the product of flawed judgment, such thinking rests on a “fallacy of the converse” in which the converse of an argument is erroneously assumed to be true.19 Just as we cannot assume that a cancer victim is a smoker simply because smoking causes cancer, neither can we assume that regime change stems from poor judgment because poor judgment can lead to failed regime change. FIRC can fail for a variety of reasons, even when the decision-making that led to it was based on strategic logic.
A second problem with arguments attributing FIRC to errors in judgment is that they cannot explain regime-change cases that end successfully. Regime change may have a poor reputation, but successful cases are more than mere outliers. American policymakers, for example, generally achieved their aims by imposing regime change on Germany (1945), Japan (1945), Grenada (1983), and Panama (1989).20 And although the Soviet Union’s attempt at regime change in Afghanistan failed disastrously, its attempts in Mongolia (1921, 1984), Hungary (1956), and Czechoslovakia (1968) were more successful. Likewise, France successfully used regime change to protect its interests in Spain (1823) and, much later, in Gabon (1964), as did the United Kingdom in Iran (1941) and Iraq (1941). Success, of course, can have many meanings, but if defined to mean that the imposing state achieves its central policy aims, then not all regime change ends in failure. As such, there is little reason to infer that poor judgment causes it.
Just as not all policymakers pursuing FIRC do so because their judgment is poor, not all targeted leaders suffer regime change because they foolishly challenge a more powerful state. Although some defy the foreign power’s demands until deposed, others offer concessions but are overthrown anyway. Czechoslovakia’s Alexander Dubček, for example, indicated he was planning to resign in a phone call with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev on August 13, 1968. Yet just one week later, Brezhnev ordered a massive military invasion to overthrow him.21 Similarly, in 1909, Nicaraguan President José Santos Zelaya made concessions, including his own resignation, to prevent a conflict with the United States. Instead, the United States persisted in backing Nicaraguan rebels until they seized power.22 These cases suggest that even if defiant leaders were to make concessions, they might still get deposed.
In this book, I show that psychological-bias models and bureaucratic and/or interest-group models, although potentially helpful in explaining why conflict occurs or why a chosen policy fails, fall short when it comes to explaining why states pursue regime change. Neither the quantitative nor the qualitative evidence I review in this book supports the argument that biased decision-making leads policymakers to pursue FIRC. Indeed, in the case studies, I show that the very same policymakers, faced with two similar cases at roughly the same time, might choose to negotiate in one instance but impose regime change in the other. So even when we would expect little variation in policymakers’ biases or bureaucratic/lobbyist pressures, different outcomes may result. I also show that the experience of a failed FIRC does not necessarily deter policymakers from trying it again. Rather than inferring that FIRC fails, policymakers may simply conclude that it should be carried out in a different way. Psychological-bias arguments and bureaucratic and/or interest-group theories may still inform our understanding of various other aspects of FIRC, but to understand the choice to pursue it, we need to look elsewhere.
The second set of alternative arguments I address stems from the rationalist literature on war. The two dominant rational actor approaches tell us that conflict arises either because there are problems of incomplete information (one side doubts the other’s threats)23 or problems of credible commitment (one side doubts the other’s promises) that make an enforceable bargain impossible to achieve.24 Several arguments employ the problem of credible commitment to explain FIRC. In separate studies on wartime termination, Dan Reiter and Alex Weisiger contend that states seek regime change when they doubt the defeated leader will uphold a settlement.25 Similarly, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and his coauthors argue that popular leaders will depose other popular leaders because the latter cannot be trusted to stick to a politically unpopular settlement.26 Other arguments focus on the role of incomplete information in driving asymmetric conflict, which commonly characterizes FIRC. According to these arguments, the weaker side’s doubts about the stronger side’s threats cause the weak to resist, which causes the strong to choose war.27
I do not argue that the standard rationalist arguments are wrong, only that they are incomplete. Credible-commitment and incomplete-information problems help us understand why bargaining is difficult and thus why conflicts arise between states. But these theories on their own do not explain why states continue fighting when they have the means to overcome the problems that impede a settlement. I show that if the weaker party doubts the stronger side’s resolve, as occurs in cases marked by the incomplete-information problem, the more powerful state can demonstrate its resolve by using costly signals or applying limited force to make its threats more credible and convince the target to concede.28 When the victor doubts that the vanquished will uphold a settlement, as occurs when the credible-commitment problem is present, the victor can employ enforcement mechanisms to obtain the target’s compliance. It can use third-party inspectors or its own troops to force the target to carry out the settlement terms.29 In fact, the unequal power relations that characterize the conditions under which regime change occurs should make resolving problems of information and commitment easier. The strong have the military capacity to make their threats credible and also to enforce the terms they