In his fascinating new book, The Origins of Overthrow: How Emotional Frustration Shapes US Regime Change Interventions, Payam Ghalehdar discusses a private letter President Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Henry White, who was the American Ambassador in Rome. The letter was posted two weeks before Roosevelt sent 2,000 United States Marines to establish a new provisional government in Cuba. In his letter, he wrote that “I am so angry with that infernal little Cuban republic that I would like to wipe its people off the face of the earth. All we wanted from them was that they would behave themselves and be prosperous and happy” (74). Ghalehdar suggests that the exasperation that is so evident in this letter cannot be dismissed as an isolated and private outburst, but should be seen as an important clue in explaining why President Roosevelt decided to authorize regime change in Cuba despite his initial reluctance to sanction such action. As he explains, “Roosevelt was determined to avoid a military intervention [and…] US regime change would have been unlikely had the president not experienced high levels of emotional frustration with the 1906 August revolt, [President Tomás Estrada] Palma’s inability to quell it, and the Cuban government’s obstinacy in peace negotiations” (81).
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Roundtable Review 15-5
Payam Ghalehdar, The Origins of Overthrow: How Emotional Frustration Shapes US Regime Change Interventions. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. ISBN: 9780190695859
22 September 2023 |PDF: https://issforum.org/to/jrt15-5 | Website: rjissf.org
Editor: Diane Labrosse
Commissioning Editor: Frank Gerits
Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Copy Editor: Bethany Keenan
Contents
Introduction by Thomas Gregory, University of Auckland
Review by Benjamin Denison, Independent Scholar
Review by Michael J. Mazarr, RAND Corporation
Review by Lindsey O’Rourke, Boston College
Review by Melissa Willard-Foster, University of Vermont
Response by Payam Ghalehdar, Hertie School
Introduction by Thomas Gregory, University of Auckland
In his fascinating new book, The Origins of Overthrow: How Emotional Frustration Shapes US Regime Change Interventions, Payam Ghalehdar discusses a private letter President Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Henry White, who was the American Ambassador in Rome. The letter was posted two weeks before Roosevelt sent 2,000 United States Marines to establish a new provisional government in Cuba. In his letter, he wrote that “I am so angry with that infernal little Cuban republic that I would like to wipe its people off the face of the earth. All we wanted from them was that they would behave themselves and be prosperous and happy” (74). Ghalehdar suggests that the exasperation that is so evident in this letter cannot be dismissed as an isolated and private outburst, but should be seen as an important clue in explaining why President Roosevelt decided to authorize regime change in Cuba despite his initial reluctance to sanction such action. As he explains, “Roosevelt was determined to avoid a military intervention [and…] US regime change would have been unlikely had the president not experienced high levels of emotional frustration with the 1906 August revolt, [President Tomás Estrada] Palma’s inability to quell it, and the Cuban government’s obstinacy in peace negotiations” (81).
Cuba is just one of five cases examined in The Origins of Overthrow as its author seeks to explain why the United States has used regime change so often. Ghalehdar identifies at least sixteen overt cases based on his criteria (13-14). American enthusiasm for regime change is puzzling, he argues, because it is such an expensive and ineffective tool, especially when one considers its costs in terms of blood, treasure, and reputation (5). Ghalehdar notes that regime change rarely succeeds in advancing democracy, often undermines the internal stability of targeted states and can destabilise the wider regional peace, and he notes that regime change is also a legally proscribed foreign policy tool (3-5). Whilst there is a sizeable literature on the consequences of regime change, Ghalehdar argues that few studies—with some notable exceptions[1]—have examined why the United States has intervened on so many occasions to alter the domestic political authority structure of the target state. Existing explanations suggest that the United States has used regime change to promote democracy and/or respond to external threats, but Ghalehdar argues that these claims are either misleading or incomplete. On the former, he argues that claims about the democratising imperative do not correspond with the historical record, which shows that the United States has intervened to support authoritarian regimes against democratic movements (6-7). On the latter, he argues that these rationalist explanations struggle to account for why a relatively powerful actor would commit so much in terms of resources to conduct regime change operations in what must be a relatively weak state, when these operations are often unsuccessful (8-9). Ghalehdar does not dispense with the rationalist theories entirely, but he argues that these theories cannot account for the emotional frustration that provokes presidents to intervene (9-12).
His focus on emotional frustration reflects a growing interest in how emotions shape international relations. Emma Hutchison and Roland Bleiker provide a very useful survey of the field.[2] They argue that work on emotions and world politics can—in the crudest possible terms—be divided into two camps: macro approaches that attempt to develop generalisable propositions about the emergence, function and impact of emotions, and micro approaches that examine how specific emotions emerge in specific contexts.[3] There are obvious advantages and disadvantages to both. Macro approaches enable us to trace commonalities across time and place, but fail to appreciate “how specific emotions, such as fear or empathy, acquire different meanings in different cultural contexts.”[4] Micro approaches avoid these homogenising tendencies, focusing on the political significance that certain emotions have in specific contexts, but theorists often struggle to articulate the broader significance of their theoretical findings.[5] It is important to note that Hutchison and Bleiker do not seek to resolve this dilemma, and they do not express a clear preference for either side. Instead, they argue that this dilemma needs to be kept alive so that we are able to trace how individual emotions become collective and political because many of the key actors in global politics—such as states and international organisation—do not have the biological mechanisms needed to experience emotions even though these actors are often an assemblage, association or aggregation of biological bodies.[6]
The paragraphs above provide this theoretical backdrop in order to situate the arguments that Ghalehdar develops in his book as well as those in the reviews collected in this H-Diplo|RJISSF forum. As noted above, the core argument that runs through The Origins of Overthrow is that regime change cannot be understood without paying attention to the role of emotions, and the emotion that Ghalehdar is particularly interested in is the frustration that American presidents experienced when making their decisions on whether to intervene. Drawing on the frustration-aggression hypothesis from psychology, he argues that emotional frustration is behind the historically recurrent pattern of regime change for two reasons: it creates a desire to remove the foreign leaders causing them frustration, and it creates an impulse to aggression, with presidents using military force to “discharge their emotionality” (10-12).[7] Ghalehdar argues that there are three core components to this emotional frustration: hegemonic expectations, perceptions of hatred, and negative affect. The first component—hegemonic expectation—refers to the expectation amongst more powerful actors like the United States that weaker states will do what is demanded even if it means compromising their sovereignty and their autonomy. Given these hegemonic expectations, Ghalehdar argues that presidents will become emotionally frustrated “[w]hen foreign leaders resist hegemonic expectations [and…] their conduct becomes obstructive” (31). Moreover, he argues that this emotional frustration will be even more pronounced when dealing with much weaker states because there is a greater expectation that the weak will do exactly what is demanded (31-32).
The second component—perceptions of hatred—is the sense amongst powerful actors that these states are attempting to thwart hegemonic foreign policy expectations not because they are concerned about shoring up their sovereignty and augmenting their autonomy, but because they are hostile toward the powerful state making these demands (34-35). In The Origins of Overthrow, Ghalehdar is particularly interested in the perception that certain states are seeking to frustrate these hegemonic expectations because they are anti-American (35). The final component—negative affect—refers to the more visceral feelings presidents might experience when their hegemonic expectations are being impeded and anti-American sentiment seems to be motivating the regime that is creating these impediments (36-38). Negative affects are crucial to the decision to intervene because they captures the unreflective feelings, inclinations and moods that create an impulse for regime change and a desire for more aggressive options, even though the costs of intervention are high, and the likely consequences are less than favourable (40-47). Ghalehdar uses this theoretical framework to claim that emotional frustration contributed—in part—to the desire for intervention in Cuba (1906), Nicaragua (1909–1912), the Dominican Republic (1963–1965) and Iraq (2001–2003), but also the decision not to intervene in Iran (1979–1980). He argues, for example, that emotional frustration played an important role in the decision to overthrow Nicaraguan President José Santos Zelaya in 1909 (93-99) and Dominican President Juan Bosch in 1965 (125-127), challenging those accounts that focus on perceived threats to national security.[8] Likewise, he argues that the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 cannot be understood without taking into consideration President George W. Bush’s emotional state. As Ghalehdar argues,
The Bush Doctrine’s hegemonic vision, dividing the world into good and evil and promising to not only target terrorists, but also their alleged state sponsors and safe havens, combined with a radically negative perception of the sources of Iraqi obstruction and intense negative affect, constituted emotional frustration in the US president (198).
As someone who specialises in emotions, rather than regime change, I was particularly interested to see how The Origins of Overthrow sought to grapple with some of the theoretical dilemmas and methodological conundrums that have generated so much discussion in the literature on emotions.[9] At first glance, Ghalehdar seems to have navigated a course between the macro and micro approaches that Hutchison and Bleiker discuss in their article on emotions and world politics. He constructs a theoretical framework that is built around generalisable propositions about how emotional frustration shapes presidential decisions whilst allowing him to examine the specific meanings that are ascribed to these emotions in different times, and in response to different problems (27-28 and inter alia).[10] Yet his book does not trace how emotions become political and collective, focusing instead on the emotional frustration individual presidents experienced. Ghalehdar defends his decision to focus on individuals rather than institutions, arguing that (i) presidents are ultimately responsible for deciding whether to intervene, and (ii) emotions need bodies to exist (25-28). Ghalehdar also suggests that focusing on individual presidents does not mean ignoring the emotional state of other actors in the executive branch, but his book could have done more to trace how emotions might circulate between bodies within an institutional setting, and how the institution itself might become emotionally frustrated with certain regimes due to their intransigence and perceived hostility (26).[11] Paying closer attention to the institutional setting would also enable him to trace how certain feelings have become stuck to certain actors in global politics, which might account for a more hostile disposition that seems to persist between presidents and presidencies.[12]
This lack of an accounting for how emotions might circulate within an institution has a detrimental effect on the book’s empirics. Whilst he acknowledges that the decision to intervene is made within a complex institutional setting, it is unclear how this emotional frustration shapes the decision-making process because such decisions are often made over an extended period, involving numerous actors and agencies. Whilst it is easy to imagine an emotionally frustrated president becoming irritable with aides, losing his temper in meetings and even slamming objects in anger, it is more difficult to imagine a president orchestrating a regime change without taking into consideration the accumulation and circulation of this emotional frustration within the institution. In fairness, the book does pay closer attention to the different institutional settings when examining the various cases, but the analysis is somewhat limited because it focuses on the individual presidents. Ghalehdar could also do more to substantiate his claim that regime change allows presidents to “discharge their emotionality” in ways that other options, such as diplomatic pressure, economic sanctions and limited airstrikes, do not (47 and inter alia). His argument about regime change hinges on the idea that emotional frustration creates both a desire for removal and an impulse for aggression, which sounds perfectly plausible, but it does not follow that presidents must engage in regime change to ameliorate their emotional frustration. Put differently, an emotionally frustrated president might desire regime change to alleviate his frustration, but might find that other options, including diplomatic pressure, economic sanctions and more limited airstrikes, might be enough to soothe their temper.
The Origins of Overthrow is very clear that emotional frustration merely facilitates a turn to regime change, and that it does not predetermine it (40). Ghalehdar also provides a much more nuanced account when discussing his case-studies. In his chapter on the invasion of Iraq, for example, he looks at how members of the Bush administration became increasingly frustrated with what they considered to be obstructive behaviour from Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein, which they believed was rooted in a pronounced anti-American sentiment (182-185). Ghalehdar also explains in much more detail how alternatives to regime change—including diplomatic pressure and economic sanctions—failed to ameliorate this emotional frustration (189-192). Likewise, the chapter explaining the decision not to intervene in Iran following the revolution in 1979 focuses on the Carter administration rather than President Jimmy Carter as an individual, claiming that the administration did not harbour hegemonic expectations towards Iran or perceive the Iranian Revolution as a product of anti-American sentiment (148-153). When frustrations started to arise during the hostage crisis between 1979 and 1981, Ghalehdar argues that Carter was able to alleviate his frustrations through increased diplomatic efforts that were reinforced with economic sanctions against the regime (156-161). Nevertheless, he could have theorised how emotions accumulate and circulate within an institutional setting, and the extent to which this impacts state behaviour in the international arena. These criticisms should not detract from the novel theoretical and methodological contributions that emerge in The Origins of Overthrow, not least the creative methods that he uses to ascertain the emotional frustration that different presidents experienced when dealing with foreign regimes, which draws on both public statements and private communications, including diaries, letters and telephone calls (16-19).[13]
As previously mentioned, my research focuses on emotions rather than regime change, so I am very pleased to introduce the other contributors to this H-Diplo forum, all of whom specialise in regime change but have not written quite so extensively about emotions. In his contribution to the forum, Benjamin Denison notes that The Origins of Overthrow is rich with historical case studies, which demonstrate how regime change becomes a very tempting tool for decision-makers in certain situations. He argues that the book is particularly helpful for understanding when regime change occurs, at the specific moment when presidents become so frustrated with the target state that they begin to abandon other foreign policy tools in favour of military intervention. At the same time, Denison questions the decision to oppose emotional accounts with rationalist explanations when emotions could serve as a “micro-foundation” for existing rationalist arguments—an observation that is consistent with Martha Nussbaum’s claims about how emotions inform ethical judgements.[14] Connecting emotional accounts with existing rationalist explanations would enable Ghalehdar to better account for where hegemonic expectations come from, why we do not see more regime change, and how the international context impacts the decision. Rather than viewing emotions as a challenge to rationalist explanations, Denison argues that The Origins of Overthrow demonstrates that they ought to be viewed as another variable that can help to explain both the origins and timing of regime change decisions.
Like me, Lindsey O’Rourke is impressed with the book’s methodological contributions, noting that The Origins of Overthrow provides a clear, concise and consistent account even though—to quote Ghalehdar directly—“emotional frustration is fuzzy, hardly observable, and barely quantifiable” (49). Whilst she was initially sceptical that emotions, feelings and moods could be reconstructed from the presidential archives, she is impressed with the evidence that Ghalehdar was able to amass from these sources and how he handled this evidence. Nevertheless, she argues that the arguments outlined in The Origins of Overthrow struggle to account for the institutional apparatus that needs to be mobilised in order to overthrow a foreign regime, noting that even the most powerful presidents do not make foreign policy decisions alone—no matter how emotionally cathartic intervention seems. Like Denison, she argues that the arguments outlined in the book seem to complement rather than contest existing studies, noting that her own security-orientated explanations would be enhanced rather than undermined if she paid closer attention to emotions. Even though regime change is often unwise, O’Rourke argues that states do not have to be irrational to attempt it because it still offers a plausible-enough mechanism for states to consider, the costs are not that high for powerful actors like the United States, there are various issues that might cause states to miscalculate their chances for success, and other options mentioned in the book, such as economic sanctions and limited airstrikes, also have a dubious track record.
Michael J. Mazarr argues that the claims presented in The Origins of Overthrow are interesting and well-documented, but remains unconvinced by Ghalehdar’s attempts to turn some intermittent observations into an overarching theory of state behaviour. Mazarr is not suggesting that emotions are unimportant, insisting that emotions are often crucial to the decision-making process, with emotional leaders sometimes overreacting to potential threats. However, he would have preferred a more descriptive account that documents how emotions waxed and waned during specific crises, how different presidents handled the various crises they encountered (and whether their temperament impacted how they handled them), and how specific presidents might have become frustrated at certain moments, but were able to step back and calm down without resorting to regime change. Doing so would also enable Ghalehdar to examine how hegemonic expectations toward certain countries might shift over time, in response to changing circumstances, and it would allow him to document the disagreements within the different administrations about what should be expected of these countries, whether their intransigence was rooted in an anti-American sentiment, and what policies ought to be enacted to achieve their desired objectives. At the same time, Mazarr also contests some of the book’s core empirical claims, rejecting the suggestion that President Bush invaded Iraq because he was emotionally frustrated with his Iraqi counterpart on the grounds that these generic frustrations were symptomatic of the fact that President Hussein was seen as an unacceptable threat to national security. Put differently, he suggests that Ghalehdar’s argument has confused cause with effect—emotional frustration was associated with the implementation of United States foreign policy, it was not the reason this foreign policy exists.
Like other contributors, Melissa Willard-Foster argues that The Origins of Overthrow is a meticulously researched book that advances a novel argument about the role of emotions in regime change, which develops a methodologically innovative research framework to uncover the emotional states of various presidents from the available archival material. Despite the fact that the book paints a very compelling picture, she argues that it leaves several important questions unanswered. First, she argues that we need to understand what is motivating these seemingly intransigent actors in global politics who are willing to risk regime change in order to frustrate American presidents when it is often clear that they do not have the capacity to defend themselves against external aggression. Secondly, she argues that the book does not examine why alternatives to intervention, such as diplomatic pressure, economic sanctions and more limited aggression, are not seen as viable tools even though regime change has such a poor track record. She focuses particular attention on the role of coercion, noting that coercion can be successful in the short-term but leaves the emotionally frustrating leader in place to cause further problems (and frustration) down the line. Finally, she argues that—contrary to the arguments presented in The Origins of Overthrow—that several presidents have backed away from regime change due to the high costs and low odds, but have engaged in regime change in cases where the costs were lower and the odds were higher. In her view, the main difference between cases where presidents have intervened and cases where presidents have not is the balance of power, not the extent of their emotional frustration.
Ghalehdar addresses these comments and criticisms in an excellent final response, which draws out and clarifies the arguments that he makes in The Origins of Overthrow. As someone who is more interested in emotions than regime change, I was particularly interested in his discussion about the relationship between rationality and emotionality, where he challenges all four reviewers on the assumption that the two are diametrically opposed. Drawing on the work of people like Rose McDermott and Robin Markwica, he argues that feelings are essential to rational thought and that an inability to feel can lead to irrational decisions.[15] At the same time, he pushes back against the suggestion that emotions can be viewed as just another variable in rationalist explanations for regime change, insisting that The Origins of Overthrow challenges two core principles that are essential arguments: that actors update their beliefs based on new information, and that actors have an instrumental view of means. Ghalehdar argues that his book challenges these core assumptions because emotionally frustrated actors struggle to update their preferences in accordance with new information because this information is funnelled through their emotional frustrations. Moreover, he argues that emotionally frustrated presidents do not see regime change as an instrument that can be used to achieve their desired ends, but something that enables them to discharge their emotions.
For me, this is one of the most important contributions that Ghalehdar makes in The Origins of Overthrow because it challenges the consequentialist logic that still dominates so many debates in global politics. In an almost throwaway remark in his introductory chapter, Ghalehdar observes that “[p]olitical actors can derive utility not only from outcomes, but also from processes” (10). Shifting the focus from outcomes to processes enables him to trace—in meticulous detail—how actors become emotionally invested in certain processes irrespective of their likely outcome, and I think this is a very significant contribution.
Contributors:
Thomas Gregory is Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. His current research focuses on the politics of killing civilians and his forthcoming book, Weaponizing Civilian Protection: Counterinsurgency and Collateral Damage, is due to be published by Oxford University Press in 2024. He co-edited the book Emotions, Politics and War with Linda Åhäll (Routledge, 2017), and he has published several articles on emotions and affect in relationship to armed conflict. He obtained his PhD from the University of Manchester.
Payam Ghalehdar is a Fellow in the Centre for International Security at the Hertie School. His research interests span US foreign policy, grand strategy, military intervention, and the role of emotions in foreign policy decision-making. He has held fellowships at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and in the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. He was previously Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Göttingen and in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. Payam obtained his PhD from the European University Institute.
Benjamin Denison is a nonresident Fellow with Defense Priorities. Previously he was the assistant director of the Notre Dame International Security Center and a postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth College and The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. His research explores military occupation strategy, origins of poor postwar planning, and the long-term impacts of regime change on international politics. He earned his PhD in political science from the University of Notre Dame.
Michael J. Mazarr is a Senior Political Scientist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation
Lindsey O’Rourke joined Boston College’s Political Science department in autumn 2014. Her research interests include international relations theory, US foreign policy, international security, and military strategy. She is currently completing a book manuscript on the causes, conduct, and consequences of U.S.-orchestrated covert regime changes during the Cold War, as well as a series of related articles on the impact of regime change on interstate relations. She has a PhD in Political Science and an MA in International Relations from the University of Chicago.
Melissa Willard-Foster is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Vermont and author of Toppling Foreign Governments: The Logic of Regime Change (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). Her current project examines whether American presidents’ foreign policy choices reflect their campaign promises. She holds degrees from Georgetown University, the University of Chicago, and UCLA, and teaches classes on international security and foreign intervention.
Review by Benjamin Denison, Independent Scholar
Payam Ghalehdar’s The Origins of Overthrow argues that the role of emotional frustration is an under-discussed explanation for why the US engages in regime-change operations. The book, which is full of rich historical case studies of the United States’ decisions to overthrow regimes, paints a clear picture of how foreign regime change becomes a much more tempting tool in cases where emotional frustration manifests. Specifically, the book highlights the role emotion plays in explaining the timing and the choice to engage in foreign regime-change compared to other policy options. This is a key contribution to the literature that provides additional first-image insights into when leaders are more likely to attempt regime change. As such, there is much to be celebrated in this book, and it should be read widely as a critical contribution to the emerging understanding of regime change as a specific foreign policy tool opted for across various points in history.
Yet, while the book’s focus on emotional frustration provides additional insight into the timing of these choices, particularly when some of these factors remain relatively constant, it misses the opportunity to embrace existing literature to propel the argument even further. As all theories do, Ghalehdar’s argument paints an imperfect picture of the ways in which emotional frustration can fit as a key variable within the existing understanding of the causes of foreign regime change. Existing research on regime change explains the conditions under which states are most likely to engage in regime change and what factors help lead to those conditions; this emotional frustration argument could complement these theories quite well.[16]
This imperfect focus manifests mainly in the theoretical story and the way it approaches case selection and overlooks the tremendous opportunity to enmesh this argument within existing literature to add to our understanding of this phenomenon. The book is largely eager to explain the importance of emotion in explaining the occurrence of foreign regime change, and to place this theoretical story within the realm of other emotion research. Instead of linking this argument within the field of foreign regime change studies, it describes most existing research on the topic as falling in the category of rational choice, and an alternative argument should be proven incorrect,[17] thereby losing the chance to highlight how emotional frustration might serve as a microfoundation for existing ‘rationalist’ arguments.[18] This is a missed opportunity that, with along with the microfoundations, could have produced both a more interesting theoretical argument and a more compelling discussion of why emotional frustration is so crucial to understand. The rest of this review will mainly focus on this unmet need to tie the argument to existing literature and highlight how a more productive dialogue would have been possible by more productively engaging existing knowledge of the topic.
The Origins of Hegemonic Expectations
First, the book argues emotional frustration manifests in contexts where hegemonic expectations exist. Hegemonic expectations, according to Ghalehdar, occur when great powers have policy expectations that sometimes directly challenge the sovereignty of foreign leaders and expect to dictate foreign policy to these states and leaders. When leaders resist these hegemonic expectations the path towards emotional frustration opens and allows regime change to look attractive.
But where these hegemonic expectations come from, why they vary, and how they are activated is a missing part of the theoretical story. As Ghalehdar notes, frustration on its own is not enough to lead to foreign regime change because it requires an expectation that a leader should actually follow the dictates of the hegemon to activate emotional frustration (28). On its own, this is not a problem because existing literature, most notably works by Melissa Willard-Foster and Lindsay O’Rourke, provide evidence of when these expectations emerge and the policy disagreements that these expectations produce.[19] They both provide arguments for what hegemonic expectations in foreign policy might look like and when foreign regime change seems like a viable policy tool due to continued intransigence by foreign states, aspects that will complement this theoretical story.[20] Their accounts highlight the fact that when states recognize that weaker states are resisting their desires, it sometimes appears more cost-effective or relatively simple to change the leader instead. Emotional frustration might be the emotional basis for this decision in the rational choice model, but the policy disagreements set the stage for where the origins of these hegemonic expectations can then be turned into a policy action.
Without understanding what policy areas activate hegemonic expectations and why they are activated for some states and not others, the theoretical story is incomplete. In this way, this book provides a possible avenue to explore some of the microfoundations that are seen in the broader regime-change decisions. This is a lost opportunity to tie these strands of argumentation together rather than overly focus on how only emotion can explain these outcomes. Ghalehdar effectively highlights emotional frustration can be a key part of the chain that leads to regime change, but the broader international and structural dynamics also play a significant role.
When Does Emotional Frustration Matter?
Second, while the book highlights why emotional frustration might sometimes be a necessary condition to regime change, it does not always discuss the fact that it alone cannot be a sufficient condition for explaining regime change. In other words, given the amount of frustrated presidents we see, why don’t we see more regime change? There is abundant emotional frustration throughout many different international relationships, yet the number of cases of regime change is surprisingly low based on this argument. In many cases, presidents are frustrated with the behavior of various leaders, even those over whom they have hegemonic expectations, yet regime change is not selected.
While Ghalehdar argues that hegemonic expectations and a perception of hatred are the conditions that allow for emotional frustration to eventually lead to regime change, the case of President Woodrow Wilson seems to obfuscate this slightly. Wilson came to office when hegemonic expectations existed across various Latin American countries, but the level of emotional frustration, the perceptions of hatred, and the time it took to lead to different cases of regime change during his time in office varied immensely. In Mexico, for instance, Wilson was frustrated with President Victoriano Huerta from his inauguration in 1913 onwards, and felt he had clear hatred for the US, but it took almost a year of trying many different other policy tools for Wilson finally to authorize regime change as a last resort. The level of emotional frustration, perceptions of hatred, and hegemonic expectations were constant across the year, so something else has to explain the decision of regime change when it did finally come to invade Veracruz.[21] In contrast, even though Wilson authorized a regime change operation in the Dominican Republic in 1916, his private papers reveal that he was more disappointed than frustrated that it has had to come to this, without any clear discussion of hatred for the current leadership. If anything, the regime change mission was undertaken more to prevent a potential future government that might have hated the US, in Wilson’s view, but this case features very little frustration before the decision to invade.[22]
In general, there are many cases of regime change in US history where hegemonic expectations existed, perceptions of hatred were created, and yet no regime change occurred. Rather than overt regime change, covert action, containment, or other policies were chosen, given various other factors absent from this story.[23] In other cases of regime change, such as the cases in Europe, there were sometimes fewer hegemonic expectations but still a compulsion to overthrow the leader, leading to questions of whether it is truly a necessary condition for regime change but rather one pathway to this policy option. In framing emotional frustration as a necessary condition for regime change rather than a factor that makes it more likely, it becomes more difficult to square these disparate policy choices together.
Admittedly, Ghalehdar acknowledges this, but more discussion throughout the chapters is merited to figure out what the cases of regime change that do not have the highlighted emotional factors have in common. In the Iran and Iraq chapters, one encounters fruitful negative case discussions with evidence of frustration but no regime change in 1979 in Iran and after 1991 in Iraq. However, these discussions in the book overstate the role of the lack of emotional frustration in determining what policy was enacted, and also miss an opportunity to frame the discussion within earlier regime-change actions in the region where hegemonic expectations did exist after the Second World War. In the 1950s, regime change in both countries by the US and the UK was discussed or carried out, which provides context that is missing from these chapters to show how similar conditions can produce different policy options. Finally, a broader discussion on Libya as a reluctant case of regime change by the US would offer a valuable point of comparison for these actions. Thinking about Venezuela, North Korea, Syria, and Iran today, all of which offer instances where emotional frustration seems to exist and regime change has not happened, would enhance the compelling argument further since each country has at times been considered emotionally frustrating to US presidents.
International Context
Third, and tied to the previous discussion, the broader international context in which regime change operations take place can help frame when emotional frustration matters. There is often additional international context behind these decisions outside the relationship between the target country and the current president, and scant discussion of the international context in which the president was operating and how his views on previous actions might have affected the level of frustration and the policy choices available. The discussion of the Dominican Republic in 1965 and Iran in 1979, for instance, omits the context of the Vietnam War as conditioning the policy options available even when emotional frustration was present. In the Dominican Republic case in 1965, with a highly mobilized military escalating a war in Southeast Asia, the addition of an additional limited military strike in the near abroad was politically feasible. In the Iran 1979 case, the recent experience in Vietnam, especially following the regime change of the Diem government in South Vietnam, conditioned the options available for dealing with the new regime in Tehran. There was no appetite for such a new war less than a decade after the end of the Vietnam War, which conditioned how leaders view their options.
An additional type of international context that could also be missing is the structure of ideological competition in the international system. As John Owen has shown, ideological competition can often matter for explaining when we should see additional cases of regime change.[24] Again, this offers an opportunity to highlight how emotional frustration operates within this international context, and perhaps how emotional frustration is more likely to matter in this context. However, this potential insight similarly can get lost when the argument is overly focused on the individual level without embedding it in the larger international context. As Elizabeth Saunders has shown, the way in which individual leaders process this international context can matter for the types of regime change or intervention decisions they make.[25] Embedding the emotional frustration argument into the international context would have allowed the author to enhance and build upon these intriguing insights.
Postwar Planning
Finally, the discussion of postwar planning contains a slight tension. While not a major focus of the argument, one observable implication offered for the theory, including in explaining the Iraq case, is the poor postwar planning before the regime change attempt. However, existing research on poor postwar planning would support Ghalehdar’s argument in a nuanced and interesting way. For instance, Aaron Rapport has argued that, based on construal level theory, it is the leaders who most want to engage in regime change that overlook planning for the postwar period.[26] This would provide more of a potential justification for the claim that emotionally frustrated presidents fall into this common trap of poor postwar planning and provide another avenue to explore.
But importantly, poor planning is not just the province of regime change via emotional frustration, but exists even in cases where emotional frustration did not lead to regime change. For instance, the World War Two cases of regime change in Germany, Italy, Austria, and Japan have less emotional frustration in the initial conflict. Yet, in all of these cases, the pre-invasion planning for the postwar phase was poor. Others have argued that poor postwar planning is a regular occurrence for a variety of reasons related to organizational factors in the military and other psychological reasons related to how leaders process uncertainty.[27] A crucial argument missing in the discussion of postwar planning is the role of uncertainty about local conditions, which allows for over-optimistic assumptions about how easy the regime-change mission will be. Future research on that incorporates uncertainty about the costs of regime change and its role in allowing emotional frustration to take over and lead to regime change is a fruitful path forward. Understanding that when the costs of regime change are clearer that even emotionally frustrated Presidents will be reluctant to turn to regime change is an exciting future step in this research agenda.
Conclusion
Overall, while this review highlights some missed opportunities with the ways in which emotional frustration is not brought into conversation with other research on this topic, the book remains a joy to read and is a vital contribution to the literature. While Ghalehdar has shown that emotions can be a potentially valuable piece of the regime change story, there is now even greater work to be done tying this argument into existing literature to help create a more holistic story about the origins and timing of regime change decisions.
Review by Michael J. Mazarr, RAND Corporation
I am writing the review of this book under the shadow of Europe’s most profound tragedy since 1945. Russian President Vladimir Putin, having decided that Ukraine’s trajectory toward the West had become intolerable, has authorized a criminal and callous invasion of an innocent nation, seemingly devoted to changing the Ukrainian regime. And he did so with his state of mind publicized for all to see in a series of televised national security meetings in Moscow as well as public speeches.[28] Those broadcasts suggested that Putin had descended into a kind of rage at the United States and the West generally. His shocking act appeared to be as much a product of this emotional state as any rationalistic calculation of advantage.
These events could be pulled from a chapter of Payam Ghalehdar’s new book, which investigates the role of emotional frustration in generating the urge to regime change among great powers. Ghalehdar’s book focuses on the United States, but the dynamic he explores could be true of any great power. His central argument is that US regime change efforts stemmed as much from psychological frustration and fury as from any strategic calculus—much the pattern that the world may be seeing in Russia’s crimes today.
The resulting argument is thoughtful, well documented, and well written. His basic message is persuasive enough: Watch out for overwrought emotions when leaders confront recalcitrant smaller powers. In reading the book I had only one real critique, though an over-arching one: The argument would have been more persuasive if it had been offered in more general, non-academic terms. The attempt to turn the description of an intermittent and fragmentary pattern into a generalizable theory of state behavior ends up weakening the argument.
The Emotional Basis of Regime Change
Ghalehdar argues that US presidents and administrations become emotionally activated when confronted with troublesome regimes in small states that are frustrating US foreign policy objectives. Regime change operations flow from their anger, resentment, and negative affect. He refers to the sum of these components as a state of generalized frustration which affects senior leaders.
That phrase is not just an abstract description; it represents, in this analysis, a more precisely-defined condition composed of several primary components. It “combines hegemonic foreign policy expectations, fundamentally negative cognitive appraisals of target state obstruction, and the experience of negative affect.” Ghalehdar defines “hegemonic aspirations” as “the anticipated attainment of specific goals vis-à-vis a target state or a group of states that, if attained, would be concomitant with a violation of the target’s sovereignty.” He uses phrases like “one’s goals shape the expectations one holds” and argues that frustration is related to the “intent to gratify the primary drive” (23, 28-29). This strikes me as political-science language for a claim that US leaders expect to be able to tell others what to do: judge harshly any foreign governments which obstruct these assumptions; and get incredibly upset when obstructed.
This central observation is fascinating and can provide an interesting lens into great-power temptations for regime change. Certainly, anger is part of the decision-making mosaic of leaders and groups. But this has long been known: Emotional leaders sometimes overreact to security threats. Case studies are filled with such episodes, and of course some leaders are more prone to these kinds of temptations than others.[29]
But turning that rather prosaic observation into a formal theory of state behavior is tricky, especially because we know, as Ghalehdar readily admits, that such emotional frustrations are only one of many factors bearing on the decision to pursue regime change.[30] A leader’s emotional state can wax and wane during a crisis or decision process, meaning that generic claims about his or her level of anger cannot capture the complex trajectory of emotion.[31] It would seem difficult to say anything other than ‘emotions sometimes play a role, which we will find very difficult to measure.’ But that would not make for a meaningful theory. Yet it is precisely in constructing a theory that I think Ghalehdar builds a bridge that his evidence does not support.
To start with, I am not sure of the gap in the literature that Ghalehdar claims. He suggests that “existing explanations in the IR (International Relations) literature have failed to account for this foreign policy practice [of regime change]” (6). That may be true in formal IR theory, but there is an immense, library-filling catalogue of case studies on regime change operations.[32] Only when trying to force this idea into the straitjacket of theoretical constructs can anyone claim a lack of existing research.
The cases I am familiar with, including one I authored, do not support the idea that emotional frustration is the leading cause of these actions.[33] Many cases show that this is at best a marginal factor.[34] Some cases—like the example of President Jimmy Carter and Iran that Ghalehdar cites—show that such frustration does not always produce regime change. And when regime change efforts do occur, the precise role of emotional frustration cannot be determined. This leaves the thesis in an uncertain middle ground, having suggested a possible factor but not any way to judge its relative significance.
One problem is lack of data. Ghalehdar sets out to assess “the emotional state of US presidents” (25), but this is an incredibly difficult thing to do.[35] Second-hand and later memoir accounts simply cannot get inside a leader’s head at the time they are making the choice.[36] “I rely primarily on private government deliberations, both written and spoken, as my main source of evidence,” Ghalehdar notes (51). But these sources will be radically incomplete.
Nor does Ghalehdar precisely define the decision-making process or chain he has in mind. A US president has hegemonic assumptions about a country; that country frustrates US goals. So far, so good. But his theory then goes on to claim that it is the frustration-based fury which causes the resulting intervention. There is no space for a phase during which the fury can cool down, a period of reflection when a president can step back and get advice that mitigates his emotional outburst. Examination of actual decision processes suggests that exactly such moments occur—National Security Council meetings or other forums that occur after the “negative affect” has formed and add nuance and complexity to the decision process.[37]
At the core of his mechanism stands the idea of hegemonic goals, whose frustration produces negative emotions. He defines such hegemonic aims as objectives which violate the target’s sovereignty, but that is far too generic. It could apply to everything from influencing Japan’s trade policy to conquering a neighboring country. And what if a significant group of people in the target country want the same thing as the United States (getting rid of a dictator, for example, or large-scale economic reform)? Does that make a difference to whether a US objective counts as hegemonic?
His assumption of frustrated goals also begs many questions about just what the precise US objectives were in these cases—and how consistent. In some of his case studies—US intentions toward Cuba in the 1960s, for example, or Iraq in 2002–2003—the case descriptions only briefly survey the goals of US policy. They do not discuss, in any real detail, the differences in conceptions among senior leaders, how goals shifted over time, or how the political foundations for US policy evolved. These issues are mentioned briefly, but a deeper case study would, I think, illustrate that US objectives are far less simple than straightforward hegemonic aspirations, which require violating the target country’s sovereignty.
In the actual cases, all these factors take on contingent life that makes universal theorizing extremely difficult. Real preference sets tend to be incredibly complex, often mutually contradictory, and held in a difficult balance. The United States in the early 1960s, for example, had a range of objectives toward Cuba: ending the Castro regime, pulling it from the Communist orbit, putting in place a friendly government, bringing back outside investment, promoting the freedom of the Cuban people, “looking tough,” and more. These implied certain futures for Cuba, which by definition meant at least an implicit US belief that it had the right to condition Cuban sovereignty. But that is hardly a new or unique objective—many countries seek to condition the sovereign choices of others, internally and externally, in various ways. Subsuming that long and complex process under the theoretical banner of a single concept simplifies too much.
Much hinges, too, on the identification of “expected” achievements. It is the gap between expectation and reality that produces frustration, from a psychological point of view. But expectations in foreign policy (as opposed to goals) are typically imprecise and shifting. To generate truly behavior-altering frustration, they would have to be fairly specific and powerfully held. Yet it is not clear to what degree US presidents actually did expect Cuba or Iran or the Dominican Republic to follow US demands.
“Negative affect” (36-38) also turns out to be too generic of a concept to do much practical work explaining real decision makers. It amounts to saying that leaders become infuriated. Fine, but how much? And to what degree does their fury cancel out pragmatic calculations?
A good example of these limitations arises in the case study on the Dominican Republic. Ghalehdar offers some persuasive quotations from President Lyndon Johnson and some of his aides that catalogue just how angry he became. But anyone who has listened to hours of the Johnson White House tapes knows that the president was capable of intense ferocity followed very quickly by calm and reflective comments that put his anger into context. He would also sometimes seemingly lapse into a performative mode, showing anger or calm or any other emotion because he thought it was the way to get what he wanted from the person on the other end of the call.[38] But even here many of the terms used are things like “distressed,” “puzzled” and “frustrated,” which don’t amount to a quasi-irrational emotional state (124).
Another example of the explanatory limits of the cases emerges in that of US intervention in Cuba in 1906. Ghalehdar contends that the actions of the Cuban regime “added emotional intensity to [Theodore Roosevelt’s] frustration.” Perhaps, but it is not clear how much intensity is being discussed, or what precise role these psychological factors played in the decision. Ghalehdar does not say; probably Roosevelt himself could not have said. He admits that there is limited direct evidence of Roosevelt’s state of mind but that hints of evidence appear in private correspondence. This is thin gruel on which to base a comprehensive theory.
Later Ghalehdar quotes from a letter in which Roosevelt declared himself “so angry with that infernal little Cuban republic that I would like to wipe its people off the face of the earth” (70-74). This is strongly worded, but its probative value is unclear: an hour after writing those lines, Roosevelt might have denied that he meant them literally. But if he did not, it is not clear that the anger alone would have prompted him to launch an invasion. Anger, simply put, even the specific form of frustration Ghalehdar is trying to define, doesn’t always lead to behavior, which points again to the problem of drawing a simple causal arrow between negative affect and actions.
To his credit, Ghalehdar does nod at alternative explanations in each case, offering evidence that they were not the cause of regime change. Some of these arguments are persuasive, but one alternative factor which gets much too little attention in the account is national security fears. The United States did have concerns about Communism in Central America and the Caribbean, which underpinned its reactions to left-leaning or nationalist leaders in the region. Ghalehdar attempts to cobble together reasons why the fear of Communism could not, or should not, have produced actions like the Dominican Republic intervention. But the historical record is undeniable that this was part of US calculations, perhaps the leading element.[39]
The least persuasive effort to sideline security fears comes in the Iraq case, which is the one I know best. Ghalehdar’s portrait of the US decision to oust Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein offers a crimped and incomplete catalogue of the goals, preferences, and ideas of President George W. Bush and his key advisors. My own research, including over 100 interviews with participants, suggests that security fears tied to weapons of mass destruction, and the wider sense that Saddam’s regime posed an unacceptable threat in the era of major terrorist attacks, which built on over a decade of generalized security fears about Saddam’s Iraq—were together the overwhelming reason for the operation. Generic frustration with Saddam’s slow rolling of inspections was a symptom of that larger motivation, but I would argue that it was not the basis for US policy in and of itself.
The chapter on Iraq reflects some of the challenges with data and sourcing in making such an argument. The footnotes here are filled with newspaper accounts, a few senior official memoirs, and some early treatments of the war’s origins which have now largely been superseded. In my own reading of that literature as well as conversations with senior officials who dealt with President Bush every day, I certainly came across references to outbursts of emotion. But this was an eighteen-month process from the attacks of 9/11 to the invasion which involved vastly more calm discussion and implicit weighing of risks than emotionalism. My understanding of the case does not support an assertion that negative affect was the primary driver behind the invasion.
One problem with this explanation, for example, is that Saddam Hussein was already frustrating US hegemonic goals before 9/11. Many senior Bush officials—and many Clinton administration officials before them, as early as 1999—had concluded that he had to go. (Remember that Bush was already said to be “emotionally frustrated” with Saddam because the Iraqi dictator had tried to have his father killed).[40] But a few ill-fated coup attempts had failed, and the United States was left with the profound choice, if it really wanted regime change, of invading. Only 9/11 and the associated security fears changed the US risk calculus so that Washington embraced that option. Saddam was not creating a higher negative affect after 9/11; he had come to embody a threat that the Bush administration decided could not be left in place. Ghalehdar’s effort to underplay the security motives flies in the face of the vast majority of evidence we have about this decision.[41]
Many of the cases Ghalehdar examines, in fact, strongly suggest that any account which discounts security fears as a basis for many of these actions will be misleading. For Ghalehdar’s theory to be right we would have to imagine that presidents routinely engage in regime change primarily because of their hegemonic expectations-based frustration, and therefore conduct such operations regardless of security issues. That argument is not proven in these or other cases.
In the end I would have preferred a non-theoretical approach to the topic, one that simply highlighted the risks of excessive emotionalism when presidents perceive security risks from regimes or decision makers in smaller powers that are seemingly determined to obstruct the goals of the larger one. That is a provable phenomenon, but in trying to make it into a precisely delineated theory, the conceptual bounds of Ghalehdar’s argument are stretched too far.
Review by Lindsey O’Rourke, Boston College
Speaking before a crowd of Ukrainian refugees in March 2022, President Joseph Biden ended his prepared remarks with an exasperated, unscripted plea: “For God’s sake, this man [Vladimir Putin] cannot remain in power.” [42] Biden’s impromptu remark came as a surprise to the White House, which quickly walked back his statement by explaining that Biden was simply expressing his “moral outrage” with Russian behavior, rather than advocating for an official policy of regime change in the Kremlin.[43] Afterward, many foreign policy analysts were quick to describe the president’s remarks as “shocking,” a “blunder,” and an “unforced error.”[44] However, one scholar undoubtedly unsurprised by Biden’s plea for regime change is Payam Ghalehdar, whose ambitious new book, The Origins of Overthrow: How Emotional Frustration Shapes US Regime Change Interventions, details the long and storied history of emotionally-frustrated American presidents desiring regime changes for the purposes of quelling their moral outrage.
The Origins of Overthrow is a clear, well-written, and thought-provoking addition to the burgeoning literature on the causes of foreign-imposed regime change. Existing studies of the causes of foreign-imposed regime change have focused on the ideological,[45] economic,[46] and security rationales for intervention.[47] While differing on the specific goals of regime change, these accounts all view regime change as a form of instrumental aggression aimed at acquiring material objectives for the intervening state. Ghalehdar’s work, by contrast, highlights the emotional dimension of foreign policy decision-making, and in particular the “cathartic promise” (12) that regime change can offer to emotionally-frustrated American leaders. Building upon the frustration-aggression hypothesis within the field of psychology, Ghalehdar argues that US presidents have repeatedly pursued regime change not just for the material gains offered by the operation, but also for the emotional amelioration that the experience of violently overthrowing a defiant foreign leader can provide to leaders who are experiencing emotional distress (12).[48]
Specifically, Ghalehdar contends that US presidents are most likely to pursue foreign-imposed regime changes if three necessary conditions are met. First, the president must have “hegemonic expectations” regarding the behavior of the target state. In other words, they must be pursuing goals vis-à-vis the regime change that “if attained, would be concomitant with a violation of the target’s sovereignty” (28). Second, if the target government refuses to comply with Washington’s demands, the president must perceive that the root cause of the target state’s obstruction to be “fundamental anti-Americanism,” that is, “a product of hatred for what the United States is rather than what it does” (11). Lastly, the president must experience significant “negative affect” or emotional frustration regarding the situation, which, in turn, creates the urgency to act and impulse towards aggression behind the intervention. “None of the[se] reasons… warrants regime change on their own,” Ghalehdar explains.
Put together, however, the permanent and targeted nature of regime change moves emotionally frustrated presidents towards this particular tool of aggression, simultaneously making regime change a coveted instrument and other possible courses of action—diplomatic pressure, economic sanctions, or limited airstrikes—relatively less useful to ameliorate emotional frustration (46-47).
Provided these three conditions are met, Ghalehdar argues that the emotional desire to overthrow a recalcitrant foreign leader can become so powerful that it overrides a leader’s rational calculations regarding the utility of different foreign policy options, causing that leader to prefer regime change over more cost-efficient policy alternatives (44). This, in turn, explains why the United States has continued to pursue regime change despite its poor track record of success in acquiring the instrumental objectives outlined by existing studies (4-5).
Before turning to three theoretical questions raised by the book, allow me to praise two of its consistent strengths. First, trying to figure out what is going on inside any political leader’s head is never an easy task, and psychological theories of foreign policy often struggle to persuasively translate the complexity of human psychology into parsimonious yet generalizable theories of state behavior. This study is no exception to the methodological challenges associated with studying inherently vague psychological variables because, as Ghalehdar notes, “Like other emotions, emotional frustration is fuzzy, hardly observable, and barely quantifiable—in other words, it proves difficult to identify” (49). Nevertheless, Ghalehdar’s account is clear, concise, and consistently forthright regarding its evidentiary limitations. Toward this end, each case study is carefully structured to clearly provide historical evidence of the three necessary conditions and to process trace their role relative to the alternative explanations. A variety of primary source declassified documents provide evidence of the particular president’s emotional state, including records of private conversations, presidential letters, and diary entries (50). While I went was skeptical that the declassified record would offer convincing evidence of each President’s internal state in the case studies, I was consistently impressed by the evidence that Ghalehdar had amassed. For instance, the case study of Lyndon B. Johnson’s regime change in the Dominican Republic includes primary-source documents wherein the President described his “intense frustration” with the situation (125) and admitted that he “felt terrible” (125) and was “very puzzled and frustrated on what we do in the Dominican Republic” (124). Second, and related to this, I appreciate that Ghalehdar does not over-claim based on his available evidence. He consistently gives credit to competing explanations when the evidence suggests it is due and acknowledges that his theory does not account for all cases of regime change.
At the same time, Ghalehdar’s study raises three questions regarding the theory’s relationship to the existing literature and the generalizability of its findings. For one, throughout the book, I repeatedly found myself wondering whether Ghalehdar’s theory of the importance of the emotional frustration of leaders was compatible with existing instrumental explanations of regime change—as opposed to being a competing explanation. While Ghalehdar frames his theory as a competing explanation, there is significant overlap between his theory and several existing security and economic-oriented explanations, suggesting that they might not be quite as at odds as he argues. I raise this point not to point out a shortcoming of the book. To the contrary, I would argue that that synthesizing Ghalehdar’s theory and evidence regarding the individual-level motives of American leaders with existing state-level accounts is a useful endeavor for the purposes of knowledge accumulation.
At the theoretical level, one challenge facing individual-level psychological explanations is that they alone cannot provide a comprehensive theory of foreign policy, which, by definition, is a state-level phenomenon. A president may desire a foreign regime change for the purposes of emotional catharsis (or any other reason for that matter), but even powerful presidents do not make foreign policy alone. Thus, for instance, while President Biden may genuinely desire that Putin be removed from power—as his impromptu emotional appeals would suggest—few analysts would expect the United States to pursue an overt regime change against Russia because of the potential security costs associated with the operation. For the president’s desire for regime change to become a reality, some significant portion of their administration and military bureaucracy must go along with the policy. Presidents therefore may find more success in having their emotional desire for regime change met when these desires align with their administration’s broader instrumental goals, such as maximizing their security or economic interests. Does this create room for a theoretical synthesis between Ghalehdar’s work and the existing explanations?
On this point, consider Ghalehdar’s three necessary conditions for intervention. The first variable—“hegemonic expectations”—states that the president must be seeking an objective from the regime change that violates the target state’s sovereignty. He then cites several examples of hegemonic expectations that are consistent with the instrumental goals identified by existing studies. He writes, “Hegemonic foreign policy expectations may concern the target’s foreign policy, for example, its alliance behavior or compliance with bilateral or international treaties, or any number of specific domestic policies, such as the target’s willingness to implement free market economic reforms?” (30). He continues, “Hegemonic expectations can be indicative of a hierarchical relationship between the potential regime changer and a target state” (31). As the author of a security-oriented theory of regime change, I could not help but notice how well Ghalehdar’s condition aligns nicely with one form of regime change in my own account, which I call “hegemonic regime change.” I write, for instance, “states launch a third type of regime change in pursuit of the goal of regional hegemony—a position that offers many important military, political, and economic benefits… the defining feature of a hegemonic regime change is the desire to maintain a hierarchical relationship between the intervener and target state.”[49]
Likewise, Ghalehdar’s second condition for intervention—“perceptions of hatred in the target state”—partially aligns with one of the preconditions for intervention in my security-oriented account—i.e. “perception of a chronic, irreconciled divergence of national security interests.”[50] Thus, in both theories, one precondition for intervention is that the two governments find themselves bogged down in a chronic and heated interstate dispute. Only Ghalehdar’s third condition—“negative affect”—does not align to any aspect of my theory. At the same time, however, there is nothing in my security-oriented theory (or any other instrumental explanation) saying that a president’s cannot feel emotionally frustrated prior to intervention. Given this overlap, I found myself wondering if Ghalehdar’s theory offered a nice compliment to existing instrumental accounts by showing how individual presidents become emotionally capable of ordering a foreign leader overthrown, which is after all an incredibly audacious thing for any individual to demand.
Meanwhile, throughout the case studies, Ghalehdar discounts security-oriented theories as a plausible explanation for individual cases by showing that US policymakers had no reason to fear a direct security-threat from the targeted state (e.g. 76-77, 100). As the author of a security-oriented account, however, I disagree that that target state must pose a direct threat to the intervening state in order for an operation to have been motivated by security concerns. Weak states can still pose a threat to the intervening state’s security interests—even if the intervener is not worried about the target state launching a direct attack—by taking a number of actions, such as moving towards a rival alliance, sponsoring terrorism, developing nuclear weapons, pursuing policies that undermine regional stability, allowing adversarial regimes to station troops or weapons on their territory, or trying to defect from the intervening state’s sphere of influence. What is more, minor threats to a states’ security interests can seemingly justify regime change when policymakers ascribe to domino-theory logic, which US presidents undoubtedly did during the Cold War. While regime change may appear to be overkill in many cases due to the relatively minor security interests at stake that does not mean that they were not relevant as a motive.
A second question raised by The Origins of Overthrow is whether irrational explanations for state behavior become necessary when states consistently make the same foreign policy mistakes over and over. Ghalehdar cites a recent wave of scholarship showing that regime changes seldom achieve the objectives that policymakers set for them, whether that be promoting democracy,[51] improving intervener-target relations,[52] increasing bilateral trade,[53] or promoting domestic stability in the target state.[54] Given this failing record, he concludes, “If national security, economic benefits, or target state democratization are really pursued by regime changers—a widely held assumption—engagement in regime change is hardly plausible, particularly compared to the immense costs in term of blood, treasure, and international legitimacy that large-scale interventions can have” (5).
While numerous scholars have rightly questioned the wisdom of regime change, I would nevertheless argue that states do not have to be irrational to attempt it, for four reasons. First, regime change offers a plausible-enough mechanism of action that I do not think scholars need to incorporate non-rational motives to explain why states would want to try it. Indeed, the theoretical appeal of regime change remains almost too good to be true: when successful, regime change offers the promise of replacing a hostile leader with a friendly puppet who will reliably pursue the intervener’s wishes. Given this alleged ability to transform hostile regimes into friendly puppets, regime change can rationally be viewed as a high risk/high reward endeavor. Second, for a country as big and powerful as the United States, most regime changes are simply not prohibitively costly in terms of blood or treasure—particularly when they target weak states in the Western Hemisphere, which constitute most of Ghalehdar’s cases. Tragically, most of the costs of regime change—domestic instability, civil war, and mass killings—are felt by the target state as opposed to the intervener, meaning that they do not necessarily figure into the intervening state’s cost-benefit calculation.[55] Third, I would argue that the rationalist explanations that have been provided for war (another phenomenon which is generally not in the ex-ante interest of either side) hold true for regime change as well. These include rational miscalculation due lack of information, disagreements regarding the two states’ relative power, issue indivisibility, and commitment problems.[56] Specifically focusing on regime change, Melissa Willard-Foster provides a powerful rationalist account for how commitment problems cause interventions.[57] Finally, while Ghalehdar’s theory highlights the emotional reasons why leaders would prefer regime change over policy alternatives, such as “diplomatic pressure, economic sanctions, or limited airstrikes” (47), I would note that these policies also have quite dubious track records of success. Do policymakers have to be irrational to try them?
A final question raised by Ghalehdar’s work is why so many different American presidents have pursued regime changes over time. His universe of cases includes 16 overt and 3 covert regime changes conducted by Republican and Democratic presidents alike over more than one hundred years of history (16). However, individuals vary significantly in their propensity to become emotionally frustrated, which raises the question of why there was not more variation between administrations in terms of their propensity towards regime change. Why did so many US leaders respond in a consistent fashion?[58] Shouldn’t we have expected hotheaded presidents to pursue regime change more frequently than their level-headed counterparts? Or is there something unique about the psychology or experience of the American presidents that made them generally behave in the same manner?
One possible explanation for this lack of variation in behavior could be that individuals capable of becoming president of the United States also share some psychological traits that carry over into their foreign policy decision-making. For instance, one could imagine that to emerge ‘top dog’ in a political arena as large and competitive as the United States requires an assertive, strategic, ambitious, and/or ruthless personality. Individuals of this personality type may then be more prone towards emotional frustration when faced with intransigent foreign foes, thus inspiring them to pursue punitive actions towards them, just as they bested their domestic rivals. Nevertheless, a cursory look at history suggests too much variation in presidential temperaments for this hypothesis to hold up. On the one hand, and consistent with Ghalehdar’s theory, presidents such as Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon were all known for their explosive tempers—and aggressive foreign policies. Other presidents, however, appear to have been far less prone towards anger and frustration. Abraham Lincoln, for instance, was often characterized as melancholic rather than angry, while Calvin Coolidge, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter were known for their distinct lack of a temper.[59] What is more, at the level of individuals, presidential temperament does not appear to be closely correlated with records of regime change. For instance, Donald Trump—arguably the most hot-headed president in recent memory—did not launch any regime changes during his time in office despite getting in numerous spats with foreign leaders (see 201-202 for Ghalehdar’s discussion of Trump). Meanwhile, Barack “No Drama” Obama pursued regime change in both Libya and Syria.[60]
For his part, Ghalehdar is agnostic to the sources of the emotional experiences of presidents and does not try to attempt to explain variation at the level of individual presidents (28). Indeed, he needs to be agnostic about these issues in order for his theory to retain its predictive qualities. Purely for the purposes of having a predictive theory, how could one explain variation in outcomes (a foreign-imposed regime change or lack thereof) when the independent variable is such a common and seemingly universal human experience (emotional frustration)?
In sum, The Origins of Overthrow is an interesting, concise, and well-designed study that should be read by anyone interested in the causes of regime change. Ghalehdar’s focus on the emotional motivations of US presidents raises questions about whether his theory is compatible with existing rationalist instrumental accounts and how to generalize beyond the American case, both of which are fruitful avenues for future research.
Review by Melissa Willard-Foster, University of Vermont
Payam Ghalehdar’s Origins of Overthrow is a superbly written account of the role emotions play in the choice of American presidents to impose regime change. Meticulously researched, the book proposes a novel argument that focuses on emotional frustration. Defined as an emotional syndrome, emotional frustration has both a cognitive element—in which presidents perceive their target’s obstructions as rooted in hatred—and an affective dimension—in which presidents experience “psychologically induced discomfort” (37). Using military force to overthrow the target offers a release for presidents who are looking to discharge their frustration. The book’s five case studies incorporate archival evidence to uncover the emotional states of presidents leading up to their decisions to pursue (or forego) regime change. As a description of the frustration and misperception that characterize the choice to topple a foreign leader, the book paints a compelling picture. However, as an explanation for why leaders pursue regime change, the argument leaves central questions unanswered, suggesting that emotional frustration may be more a symptom of regime change than a cause.
Emotional frustration, Ghalehdar argues, stems from a president’s hegemonic expectations, which he defines as “the anticipated attainment of specific goals vis-à-vis a target state” that would violate its sovereignty (28). For Ghalehdar, why and when presidents adopt these expectations is less important than the expectations themselves. As a result, why presidents believe that they can violate a target’s sovereignty, whether to impose policies or regime change, remains unclear. One might expect that presidents would be more likely to adopt hegemonic expectations toward militarily vulnerable states, but Ghalehdar argues that hegemonic expectations do not depend on the target’s material capabilities. His universe of cases, however, suggests otherwise. Among the book’s sixteen cases of US-imposed regime change, military vulnerability appears to be a universal condition for target states, suggesting an asymmetric military balance of power may create the conditions for hegemonic expectations to arise.
Ghalehdar acknowledges that in practice a military advantage gives “US presidents the needed confidence to anticipate that their expectations are realistic enough to be met” (32). However, if target states rarely have the capacity to defend themselves, why would they resist the regime changer’s demands in the first place? If the regime changer will violate the target’s sovereignty whether its leader resists or capitulates, then resistance appears to offer targeted leaders little benefit. Compliant leaders, in contrast, might preserve their freedom and lives, if not also their political positions and privileges. To understand regime change, we therefore need to explain why targeted leaders defy a more powerful state’s demands, despite the lethal consequences of doing so. Ghalehdar’s argument leaves this central question unanswered.
Although Ghalehdar’s argument cannot explain why targets defy presidents’ hegemonic expectations, the book does take on another central question: why presidents pursue regime change despite its poor record of success. This is an intriguing puzzle as research on regime change outcomes suggests that it rarely stabilizes the target or improves relations with it.[61] However, poor outcomes do not necessarily reflect poor decision-making. Decisionmakers who choose a policy that ends in failure may have believed alternative policies were unlikely to produce a better result. To understand why presidents choose policy tools leading to poor outcomes we must consider why they believed alternative tools would be less effective.
The primary alternative to regime change is coercion. Rather than use force to topple foreign leaders, presidents could coerce them into submission. The problem with coercion is that even when it is successful in the short-term, the targeted leader is free to renege over the long term. Targets thus suffer from a commitment problem, wherein their ability to pose a problem tomorrow makes them candidates for regime change today. Ghalehdar contends that this argument erroneously assumes that presidents care more about future outcomes than present ones. However, doing nothing about a future loss can be as politically costly as taking action to prevent it. President Lyndon Johnson predicted that if he lost Vietnam, “[Republicans] will be all over me in Congress. They won’t be talking about my civil-rights bill…No sir, they’ll push Vietnam up my ass every time.”[62] He cited a similar concern in deciding whether to intervene in Brazil and the Dominican Republic, as did President Dwight D. Eisenhower with Guatemala and President John F. Kennedy with Cuba. Each feared that if he failed to assure the target’s compliance, his political opponents would blame him for losing a strategic ally, just as Republican hawks had blamed Truman for “losing” China.[63]
Installing a loyal leader may appear to be more effective than coercing a recalcitrant one to make concessions that may not last. However, the problem, as Ghalehdar correctly notes, is that regime change rarely produces a more effective solution. In his recent book, Alexander Downes argues that regime changers eventually find that the leaders they install are no better than the leaders they removed at reconciling the regime changer’s interests with those of the leader’s domestic constituents. A dual principal-agent problem arises in which the installed leader struggles to satisfy two principals with divergent interests. If leaders prioritize their foreign patron’s interests, they may face a domestic uprising. If they prioritize their domestic constituents, they could antagonize their foreign patrons and become a target for regime change themselves.[64] Downes argues that regime change can succeed under narrow conditions, but that regime changers cannot necessarily control these conditions.[65]
Why then do US presidents repeatedly pursue regime change if it rarely produces a reliable ally? The answer lies in the fact that the alternative—coercion—is unlikely to do any better. The competing pressures that make foreign-installed leaders unreliable also make their predecessors difficult to coerce and thus tempting targets for regime change.[66] If a targeted leader bows to a foreign power’s coercive pressure, she risks alienating her constituents, which will erode her domestic political power. But if she resists the foreign power, she risks regime change. Whether a targeted leader acquiesces to a foreign power’s pressure or defies it, depends on whether she regards the foreign power or her domestic enemies as a greater threat. The more powerful her domestic enemies are, the stronger her incentive to resist the foreign power’s will be so she can protect her domestic political power. However, a leader with powerful domestic enemies also appears easier to overthrow. Accordingly, the foreign power may conclude that installing one of the leader’s domestic rivals, who is willing to make concessions for help in attaining power, will be more effective than trying to coerce the leader to make concessions that may not last. Thus, what makes targeted leaders difficult to coerce—their domestic political vulnerability—can also make them appear easier to overthrow, even if regime change will not necessarily produce a better outcome.
Ghalehdar argues that presidents choose regime change because their emotional frustration blinds them to policy alternatives, such as coercion, which deny them the opportunity for release (40-7). However, if military force satisfies this need for release, it remains puzzling why presidents would use limited or covert measures that entail minimal force. Ghalehdar proposes that domestic and international norms may force presidents to alter their plans for regime change, even though their cravings for release will persist until discharged (45). If so, one might expect that presidents would escalate regime change operations when limited force fails to deliver the release that they crave. Yet Kennedy refused to escalate force in the Bay of Pigs invasion for fear of revealing US involvement. Similarly, President Bill Clinton backed off covert attempts to topple Saddam Hussein after the CIA’s operations in Iraqi Kurdistan ended in disaster.[67] Escalation in Iraq only occurred once the 9/11 terrorist attacks stimulated the American public’s appetite for war and lowered the political costs of using force. These cases suggest that high costs and low odds of success can dim a president’s desire to pursue regime change, contrary to the emotional frustration hypothesis.
If high costs and a low probability of success can convince presidents to back away from regime change, it follows that low costs and a high probability of success will encourage it. Indeed, this may explain why the decision to pursue regime change sometimes follows rather than precedes the use of force, as in the post-World War II regime changes in Germany and Japan. Ghalehdar argues that these cases fall outside his theory because regime change is a consequence, not a cause, of war (14). However, the consequences of war stem from the victor’s war aims, which reflect its decision to fight. That decision is not discrete, but continuous.[68] Belligerents repeatedly update their odds of victory to decide whether to settle or keep fighting to attain or expand their war aims. The primary difference between cases in which regime change follows hostilities and cases in which it motivates them is the prewar military balance of power. When belligerents are roughly equal in power, regime change may appear infeasible until battlefield victories create the power asymmetry to lower the costs and raise the probability of success.
None of this is to argue that emotions play no role in the choice to topple a foreign leader. Ghalehdar’s case studies offer solid evidence that they do. From President Theodore Roosevelt’s confession in a letter that he was “so angry with that infernal little Cuban republic” that he wanted “to wipe its people off the face of the earth,” to George W. Bush’s profanity-laced outbursts regarding Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein, the heightened emotions of presidents are sometimes undeniable (74, 187). However, while emotions may characterize regime change decisions, this does not mean that regime change would disappear in a world without them. Indeed, rationalist theories show that even rational actors, unfettered by emotion, may choose force despite its costly consequences.[69] Although these theories rest on the unrealistic assumption that humans are cost-benefit utility maximizers, they allow us to consider what might happen in a hypothetical world devoid of emotion. By showing that even actors who are immune to emotional frustration might pursue regime change, these theories indicate that emotional arousal is not necessary for regime change to occur.
If regime change can be a rational response to the expectation that coercion will fail, this may explain why presidents lacking hegemonic expectations and less prone to negative affect might still pursue it. President Barack Obama’s call for a “new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world,” suggested he had no hegemonic expectations toward Libya.[70] Yet, as Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi appeared poised to crush Libya’s “Arab Spring,” Obama backed a NATO air campaign to help topple him. Obama seemed an unlikely candidate for emotional frustration. He even confessed ambivalence about his decision to intervene, telling his Secretary of Defense that it “had been a 51-49 call for him.”[71] But Obama also faced a dilemma. Qaddafi was unlikely to uphold any settlement with rebels that degraded his political power, which meant that the international community would have to enforce any deal with him. However, as one White House insider explained, there was no appetite for enforcement: “NATO and its allies weren’t going into Libya as peacekeepers to referee a protracted stalemate between loyalist and rebel forces, and they couldn’t pretend that was their role. To solve the problem, Qaddafi had to go.”[72] For Obama, coercing Qaddafi to honor a settlement was infeasible, whereas regime change appeared viable.
Libya’s political collapse in the wake of Qaddafi’s ouster does as much as any case to suggest that regime change rarely stabilizes the target or improves relations with it. But one strikingly recurrent pattern across regime change cases is the frequency with which presidents believe they can succeed, even when recent history should give them pause. One reason for this optimism is that regime change can be accomplished in different ways. Obama believed that George W. Bush had erred in installing a large troop presence in Iraq, so he avoided doing so in Libya. Bush believed that his predecessors had erred in using covert action against Saddam, and so he chose a military invasion.[73] Like generals fighting the last war, presidents often believe regime change fails on tactics rather than strategy.
Yet, herein lies the important contribution of Ghalehdar’s argument. Emotional frustration may not be necessary for presidents to pursue regime change, but it may increase their risk propensity for it. Presidents with hegemonic expectations and negative affect may be quicker to dismiss coercion as ineffective and conclude that regime change will be relatively easy because their emotionally heightened states create an impulse toward aggression that causes them to minimize the risks of forcibly toppling a leader. Regime change might still occur even with a more risk-averse president who is less susceptible to emotional arousal, but it is hard to believe it can be avoided under a president who is disposed to emotional frustration.
Response by Payam Ghalehdar, Hertie School
I thoroughly enjoyed reading the reviews of The Origins of Overthrow and Thomas Gregory’s generous introduction to the roundtable. Benjamin Denison, Michael J. Mazarr, Lindsey O’Rourke, and Melissa Willard-Foster raise important questions in their discussion, testifying to their close reading of the book. In what follows, I would like to engage their incisive commentary and critique by specifying my approach and the scope of my argument, discussing the role of desires and decision-making processes, positioning the book in the context of the claimed divide between emotions and rationality, and, finally, by addressing alternative arguments for regime change that the reviewers present: the role of international factors, security interests, and resisting targeted leaders.
Providing an explanation for US regime change, the main goal of the book, is challenging. Individual cases are believed to be over-determined by multiple potential causes, with each explanation arguably powerful enough to trigger regime change on its own. President George W. Bush, for example, claimed in September 2002 that “liberty for the Iraqi people is a great moral cause, and a great strategic goal,”[74] implying that there could be two individually sufficient rationales for the 2003 Iraq War.[75] Even without multiple sufficient causation, which is the root cause of over-determinacy, identifying empirically sound drivers for regime change remains a challenge. In the words of Robert Jervis, “it is the excess rather than the paucity of reasons that confuses us.”[76]
For scholars and analysts, there are two ways to deal with over-determinacy and, more generally, indeterminacy. The first is a “non-theoretical approach” or what Harry Eckstein calls a “configurative-idiographic” case study approach.[77] Favored by Mazarr, this approach eschews any pretensions to general theorizing. Instead, it aims for a careful reconstruction of a given case, resulting in a chronological yet impressionistic narrative of a decision process that Mazarr describes as “emergent, indirect, and intuitive” in his own analysis of the 2003 Iraq War.[78] The second way to deal with the challenges of indeterminacy is a theory-guided approach. Based on a set of transparent assumptions and theoretical claims, this approach offers theory-based explanations which are employed to analyze empirical cases. Indeterminacy is tackled, first, by developing a consistent set of assumptions and theoretical expectations and, second, by broadening the scope of empirical probing to a set of deliberately chosen cases. Ultimately, the goal of the theory-guided approach is to uncover common patterns across cases and explain them.
Mazarr faults The Origins of Overthrow for adopting the second approach. He argues that regime change is too “intermittent and fragmentary” a pattern to lend itself to a “generalizable theory of state behavior.” Indeed, Mazarr is not the first to recognize the difficulties that are associated with the study of regime change. His rejection of any attempt at theorizing, however, strikes this author as curious. There is nothing inherently peculiar about regime change compared to other phenomena in world politics that would make studying it impossible based on a theory-guided approach. Nor does the notion that actors’ motives represent a “complex and often contradictory mix” solely apply to emotion-based research. The same mix of motives poses a challenge to all theoretical approaches that attempt to distinguish the signal from the noise, that is, to adjudicate between causally relevant factors and epiphenomenal ones. Understood this way, Mazarr’s criticism could be leveled at any attempt at theorizing in International Relations (IR) and encompasses skepticism toward IR theory as a whole.
What is more, as much as The Origins of Overthrow is an exercise in theory-guided explanation, it is modest in terms of generalizability. Cognizant of the ubiquity of real-world contingencies, the emotion-based account for regime change offered in the book is no covering-law explanation: first, The Origins of Overthrow focuses on the United States as one regime changer among others. While I hope that the emotion-based argument of the book will be applied to non-US settings in future research,[79] the book imposes strict scope conditions, narrowing its universe of cases down to sixteen overt US regime interventions (16).[80] Second, without “any pretensions to the unconditional generalizability of its main claims” (15), the book focuses on a set of regime change episodes in the history of US foreign policy. Its goal is to show common patterns of US regime change across five in-depth case studies and two mini case studies, featuring variation both on the main hypothesized cause and regime change as the outcome of interest.[81] The causal link between emotional frustration and regime change in the cases covered, that is, internal validity, receives more attention in the book than an analogous concern for external validity.
The scope of the book’s central argument is even more modest than it is described in the review of Denison, O’Rourke, and Willard-Foster, who argue that I consider emotional frustration a necessary condition for regime change. Necessity would, strictly speaking, mean that there is no regime change without emotional frustration. But as I detail in the book, not every instance of regime change can be “reduced to the behavioral implications of emotional frustration” (40). In other words, I acknowledge that there are cases of regime change without emotional frustration. Denison, for example, mentions President Woodrow Wilson’s 1916 decision to intervene in the Dominican Republic. Similarly, the decision to authorize airstrikes in 2011 against the regime of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, which is invoked by all four reviewers and represents an unusual case of US regime change due to the lack of ground forces and its explicitly multilateral character, is better explained by President Barack Obama’s attitudes toward the use of military force.[82] Denison suggests that the emotion-based argument of the book is “rather one pathway to this policy option.” I write, almost verbatim, that emotional frustration is “but one pathway to regime change among many others” (40).
Regarding the decision-making process leading up to regime change, Mazarr asserts that although emotions wax and wane, the institutional setup of “actual decision processes” is such that it mitigates “frustration-based fury.” Regarding the 2003 Iraq War, he notes that the leadup to war was an “eighteen-month process from the attacks of 9/11 to the invasion which involved vastly more calm discussion and implicit weighing of risks than emotionalism.” Focusing on the level of analysis, O’Rourke adds that “even powerful presidents do not make foreign policy alone.” Underlying these statements is the fundamental question of whether the emotional state of foreign policymakers, even presidents, is consequential enough to cause action in highly bureaucratized decision environments like the one dominating US foreign policy.
The answer provided in The Origins of Overthrow is in the affirmative. As I detail in the book, emotions shape decisions in two ways. In the most fundamental sense, emotions create desires (41-43). From a motivational standpoint, it is futile to emphasize the mitigating role of decision settings without specifying what triggers these processes in the first place. Mindful of the difference between preferences and action,[83] scholars mostly agree that desires, or interests according to the standard language of IR, are key to state behavior.[84] What one wants goes a long way toward explaining what one does. Emotions, as others and I argue,[85] create an impetus to action. The frustration-focused argument in the book entails not only an explanation for how emotional frustration “blinds [presidents] to policy alternatives,” as Willard-Foster notes, but also an explicit account of how the desire for regime change is a combination of an outgrowth of perceived hatred making foreign leaders irredeemable, and of negative affect calling for remedial action (43).
There is perhaps no better case to illustrate the claim about emotion-induced desires for aggression than the George W. Bush administration’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. As the Iraq chapter of the book argues, the 2001 terrorist attacks of 9/11 put the United States on a path to war not least because of the direct affective impact of the attacks on the desires of the president himself. The pre-9/11 containment policy and the post-9/11 turn to regime change were each the result of Bush’s specific emotional state. Within his administration, it was known well before 9/11 that al-Qaeda posed a threat to US security (186), and officials like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz were early advocates of military action in Iraq (169). Bush, however, remained mentally and emotionally uninvolved in these matters relating to terrorism and Iraq, with no desire to act.[86] This changed fundamentally in the period following 9/11. Advocates of regime change, who had been ineffective and isolated before 9/11, no longer needed to impress on the president the urgency of military action against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein; they were now preaching to the converted, not only because 9/11 “lowered the political costs of using force,” as Willard-Foster argues, but, more fundamentally, because unlike the pre-9/11 period, Bush now coveted a violent reaction. In fact, once Bush became emotionally focused on Iraq, his desire for military action exceeded the boldest pre-9/11 proposals put forward by the likes of Wolfowitz and other advocates of neoconservatism.
More broadly speaking, the book argues that US presidents dominate US foreign policymaking through their desires. O’Rourke is right in pointing out that we cannot discount the role of the “administration and military bureaucracy” behind presidents. Yet, whether a focus on presidents can amount to a theory of foreign policy should not be ruled out by fiat. The book features broad variation in terms of the institutional context in which US presidents operated, with little discernible constraint on their dominance in US foreign policy (48). What is more, my argument does not presuppose unanimity within administrations. In fact, the case studies in the book reveal “differences in conceptions among senior leaders,” as Mazarr puts it, for example between President Lyndon B. Johnson and his close confidant Abe Fortas in the Dominican Republic case and President Jimmy Carter and his national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski in the Iran case (127; 129-130; 146-147). The Nicaragua case even shows that the driving force for regime change can be a senior administration official other than the president, as long as the latter is eventually persuaded.[87] Yet, the case studies also demonstrate that all efforts are for naught in cases where the commander-in-chief remains reluctant to use force. Testing how this finding translates to institutional contexts outside the United States is worthwhile.
Apart from creating desires, emotions shape behavior by leaving their mark on the decision-making process once desires are instigated. While Mazarr asserts that I do not “precisely define the decision-making process,” The Origins of Overthrow does exactly that, detailing how emotional frustration tilts the menu of policy options toward military solutions (44-45). This does not mean, as Mazarr implies, that an emotionally instigated desire for aggression eviscerates the process of deliberations within a given administration. Precisely because of the institutional context in which emotionally frustrated presidents operate, they do not “carelessly head into military adventures” (45). Emotional frustration makes presidents impatient, but it does not make them oblivious of their institutional surroundings. Pointing to the “eighteen-month process” from 9/11 to the start of the 2003 Iraq War does not invalidate the emotion-based argument of the book as such.[88] Curiously, Mazarr’s account of Bush’s invasion of Iraq is not so different in this regard. Far from being the rigorous decision-making process to which he compares my emotion-based argument, Mazarr characterizes discussions within the Bush administration in the run-up to the war as focusing on how to do regime change in Iraq rather than whether the United States should engage in regime change in the first place.[89] Indeed, Mazarr considers a “passionate, urgent, even desperate imperative to act,” that is, a “feeling that overrides concerns about risks or costs” as one of two important causal factors for the 2003 Iraq War.[90]
All four reviewers touch upon the relationship between emotions and rationality, considering the two as opposite poles. Mazarr calls the phenomenon that I classify as emotional frustration a “quasi-irrational emotional state,” O’Rourke treats it as an “irrational explanation,” Willard-Foster contrasts emotionally frustrated presidents with rational actors who are “unfettered by emotion,” and Denison notes a lack of engagement with “existing ‘rationalist’ arguments.” Indeed, the reviewers raise an important point, and an intricate one at that. The strict divide between emotion and rationality that pervades the arguments in the reviews, however, is an assumption the book does not make. Quite the contrary. By drawing on previous research,[91] I argue in the book that emotionally induced behavior need not be irrational. More precisely, emotionally frustrated presidents remain goal-oriented in their behavior (44). Thus, they are “minimally rational.”[92] In fact, acting upon emotional impulses can lead to outcomes that rationalists would have a hard time considering irrational, as an anecdote from Carter’s dealings with revolutionary Iran illustrates: lamenting the President’s refusal to resolve the hostage crisis by force, Brzezinski claimed in a 1982 interview that Carter would have won the 1980 presidential election if he had ameliorated the American public’s mounting frustration with Iran by embarking on military intervention (159). If Brzezinski’s assessment is correct, acting upon frustration can win a president elections, hardly an irrational outcome from the perspective of the incumbent.[93] In turn, a world without emotion would not necessarily be a rational world. As previous research demonstrates, the inability to feel can lead to “suboptimal and outright irrational decisions.”[94] Rather than treating emotion and rationality as separate, a more appropriate distinction is one between material and immaterial goals, as O’Rourke mentions,[95] which brings to the fore the focus of the book on affective aggression as opposed to instrumental aggression.
Transcending the divide between emotion and rationality does not imply that my argument is reconcilable with rational choice theory. As much as Denison prefers my emotion-based argument to operate as a “microfoundation for existing ‘rationalist’ arguments,” the latter are based on assumptions that are incompatible with the book’s argument. To be more precise, the book violates two key rational choice precepts: first, it eliminates the prominent assumption that actors update their beliefs based on new information. As the book argues, emotionally frustrated presidents are “insensitive to new evidence and refrain from updating their prior perceptions of target state obstructions” (45). Second, I assume that presidents can have preferences over means; rationalists assume that actors have an instrumental view of means. Following a strictly consequentialist logic, they assume that actors choose what they believe will be the most efficient way to achieve a given goal. In contrast, I assume that actors can derive satisfaction, or what rationalists call utility, from means as well. If regime change is the goal, aggression, as a means, is more than a possible instrument among others; it can be a source of satisfaction itself. My account allows for the very act of fighting to be valued by presidents, an argument that is anathema to rationalist theories.
The implications of the divergent view of means are wide-ranging for the study of regime change: in rationalist theories, violent overthrow can only be explained with recourse to a separate goal, be it lasting conflict settlement[96] or “altering the underlying preferences of a foreign government.”[97] In contrast, The Origins of Overthrow presents an argument that does not hinge upon the second phase of regime change, that, is, replacement after overthrow. Because it allows for violent overthrow to create emotional amelioration, it can account for the lack of post-war planning that is noticeable in several US regime change operations. Herein lies a significant departure from instrumental accounts[98] that see the utility of regime change in some form of pacification of bilateral relations with a given target state. It is certainly true that hegemonic expectations, as conceptualized in the book, capture instrumental goals a potential regime changer might pursue vis-à-vis another state, serving as a breeding ground for frustration. But as much as hegemonic expectations and perceptions of hatred, two of the three components of emotional frustration, resemble key features of O’Rourke’s own theory of regime change, it is the question of what regime change is for—emotional amelioration versus improved bilateral relations—that ultimately sets apart my emotion-based account from instrumental ones. Regime change might very well by characterized as a “high risk/high reward endeavor,” but that does not resolve the more fundamental question of whether the reward is understood to be the installation of a friendly puppet regime or the discharge of emotional frustration. Interestingly, the same applies to alternative foreign policy tools like diplomacy, airstrikes, or economic sanctions: rather than a sign of irrational use, their “dubious track records of success,” as O’Rourke puts it, might be testimony to their non-material logic. Further research is needed to probe whether policy tools other than regime change are employed for non-material reasons, which would explain their recurrent use despite commonly defined ineffectiveness.
The reviewers invoke other potential causes of regime change that do not occupy center stage in the book’s causal narrative. I would like to address three in particular: the role of the international context, security as a potential driving force for regime change, and the role of resisting leaders. Regarding the first factor, Denison argues that the book’s argument could have been embedded more explicitly in the context of international ideological competition and prior US foreign policy. In response, I submit that one striking feature of US regime change is its recurrence in the face of considerable changes in the international distribution of power. Be it multipolarity, bipolarity or unipolarity, the universe of US regime change encompasses all these power configurations (6). What is more, the ideological competition between liberalism, communism, and fascism that began in the early twentieth century cannot account for two of the early US regime change episodes presented in the book, that is, Cuba (1906) and Nicaragua (1909-12), and several other US interventions from the 1900s to the 1930s.[99]
Regarding the context of prior US foreign policy, Denison’s observation is on point: the book’s case studies come close to a “parallel demonstration of theory,”[100] that is, the repeated application of theoretical expectations to independent cases. Because the book treats history as a source of data rather than an explanation in its own right,[101] it cannot account for effects of previous decisions on current ones, for example, the long shadow of the Vietnam War on Carter’s dealings with revolutionary Iran.[102]
Turning to another potential driving force for regime change, Mazarr cites “security risks from regimes or decision makers in smaller powers” as a basis for regime change, seconded by O’Rourke who argues that the pursuit of regime change is due to states having “enduring security interests.” While many of the security threats listed by O’Rourke, for example, shifting alliances, acts of regional destabilization, or sponsoring terrorism, are accommodated by what I call hegemonic expectations in the book, the problem with invoking security threats as a principal driving force for regime change is two-fold: first, if security threats alone were the reason for regime change, the latter would be massively over-predicted.[103] State leaders constantly label actions of other states as security threats, yet regime change remains a rare policy response. Take the 2003 Iraq War. If “Saddam’s regime posed an unacceptable threat in the era of major terrorist attacks,” as Mazarr argues, North Korea, being “ahead of Iraq in virtually every category of WMD,”[104] should have topped the Bush administration’s regime change agenda. Mazarr mentions “a decade of generalized security fears about Saddam’s Iraq,” but there is little reason to believe that Bush was bent on toppling the Iraqi dictator prior to 9/11.[105] More generally, a solution might be to avoid taking security-invoking justifications of administrations at face value. It is uncontroversial to argue that public statements do not always reflect motives, but the difficulty lies in establishing objective criteria for when a justification can be safely regarded as simply a tool to enhance the legitimacy of one’s actions (203-204). Looking at power disparities, for example, reveals that “military vulnerability appears to be a universal condition for target states,” as Willard-Foster demonstrates, which sheds doubt on the notion that security threats play a dominant role in regime change decisions against smaller powers.
Second, even if we accept security-invoking justifications for regime change, the latter seems to be an odd tool for confronting security threats. Among foreign policy options, it sits awkwardly between conventional interstate war and outright annexation, with the former leaving the domestic complexion of target states untouched (think the 1991 Gulf War), while the latter eliminates statehood altogether (think the 1898 annexation of Hawaii). If one believes that security threats stem from the internal makeup of states, regime change—a policy that retains the juridical sovereignty of the target—is an unlikely remedy. In a world of sovereign states, there is no guarantee that a newly installed regime would heed the demands of the regime changer.[106] If security were the problem, regime change would hardly be the solution.
Finally, Willard-Foster argues that in order to explain regime change, it is necessary to understand why targeted leaders resist the regime changer’s demands. In her own theory of regime change, target leader resistance, spurred by domestic opposition, is the decisive factor explaining the variation between coercive bargaining and regime change, with the latter being a cost-efficient solution when domestic opposition is strong and target leader resistance high.[107] Yet, in the cases presented in the book, the two factors do not figure prominently in administration deliberations before military intervention. In the case of the Dominican Republic, the Johnson administration systematically disregarded any attempts by the constitutionalists to accommodate US wishes (125; 130). Similarly, the George W. Bush administration ignored signs of Iraqi compliance with UN-mandated weapons inspections and efforts to establish a communications channel (191).[108] In the cases of Cuba and Nicaragua, the president of the respective target state even resigned before the onset of regime change (70; 95). Once emotional frustration gripped US presidents, the decision-making process tilted heavily toward military solutions, eliminating off-ramps that the target states were desperate to establish. Without a valuation of the act of fighting, it remains unclear why various US administrations might have considered regime change to have been a solution that was preferable to coercion.
Once again, I would like to point out how gratifying an experience it was to read and engage the reviews of my book. I thank Diane N. Labrosse, Frank Gerits, Thomas Gregory, and all four reviewers for the opportunity to have this important discussion. More research is needed to understand the causes of regime change. I hope The Origins of Overthrow contributes to this endeavor.
[1] These include Lindsey O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018); Melissa Willard-Foster, Toppling Foreign Governments: The Logic of Regime Change (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018); Alexander Downes, Catastrophic Success: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Goes Wrong (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021); John Owen, The Clash of Ideas in World Politics: Transnational Networks, States, and Regime Change, 1510-2010 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Downes and Jonathan Monten, “Forced to be Free? Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Rarely Leads to Democratization,” International Security 37:4 (2013): 90-131; Downes and O’Rourke, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want: Foreign Imposed Regime Change and Interstate Conflict,” International Security 41:2 (2016): 43-89.
[2] Emma Hutchison and Roland Bleiker, “Theorizing Emotions in World Politics,” International Theory 6:3 (2014): 491-514. See also: Neta Crawford, “The Passion of World Politics: Propositions on Emotion and Emotional Relations,” International Security 24:4 (2000): 116-156; Hutchison, Affective Communities in World Politics: Collective Emotions After Trauma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Andrew Ross, Mixed Emotions: Beyond Fear and Hatred in International Conflict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Brent Sasley, “Theorizing States’ Emotions,” International Studies Review 13:3 (2011): 452-476; Karin Fierke, Political Self Sacrifice: Agency, Body and Emotion in International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Todd Hall, Emotional Diplomacy: Official Emotion on the International Stage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015); Jonathan Mercer, “Feeling Like A State: Social Emotion and Identity,” International Theory 6:3 (2014): 535-557; Simon Koschut, ed., The Power of Emotions in World Politics (London: Routledge, 2020); Linda Åhäll, “Affect as Methodology: Feminism and the Politics of Emotion,” International Political Sociology 12:1 (2018): 36-52; Linda Åhäll and Thomas Gregory, eds., Emotions, Politics and War (London, Routledge, 2017); L.H.M. Ling, “Decolonizing the International: Towards Multiple Emotional Worlds,” International Theory 6:3 (2014): 579-583.
[3] Hutchison and Bleiker, “Theorizing Emotions in World Politics,” 493.
[4] Hutchison and Bleiker, “Theorizing Emotions in World Politics.”
[5] Hutchison and Bleiker, “Theorizing Emotions in World Politics.”
[6] Hutchison and Bleiker, “Theorizing Emotions in World Politics,” 492. See also Sasley, “Theorizing States’ Emotions”; Crawford, “The Passion of World Politics”; Mercer, “Feeling Like A State.”
[7] For a feminist critique of the language used when talking about international politics, see Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott, eds., Gendering War Talk (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Carol Cohn, “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals,” Signs 12:4 (1987): 687-718; Charlotte Hooper, Manly States: Masculinities, International Relations and Gender Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
[8] On regime change in the Dominican Republic, see Russell Crandall, Gunboat Diplomacy: U.S. Interventions in the Dominican Republic, Grenada, and Panama (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006). On regime change in Nicaragua, see Dana Munro, Intervention and Dollar Diplomacy in the Caribbean, 1900– 1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964).
[9] This introduction differs slightly from the H-Diplo norm in that it offers an evaluation of the book. Given that the author of the introduction specializes in the history of emotions, as the reviewers do not, we have allowed this commentary to stand here—ed.
[10] Hutchison and Bleiker, “Theorizing Emotions in World Politics.”
[11] Hutchison, Affective Communities. See also, Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd Edition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).
[12] On the “stickiness” of emotions, see Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion.
[13] On researching emotions in international relations, see Maéva Clément and Eric Sanger, eds., Researching Emotions in International Relations: Methodological Perspectives on the Emotional Turn (New York: Palgrave, 2018).
[14] Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). See also, Renée Jeffrey, Reason and Emotion in International Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
[15] Robin Markwica, Emotional Choices: How the Logic of Affect Shapes Coercive Diplomacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Rose McDermott, “The Feeling of Rationality: The Meaning of Neuroscientific Advances for Political Science,” Perspectives on Politics 2:4 (2004): 691-706.
[16] For a small sample, see Melissa Willard-Foster, Toppling Foreign Governments: The Logic of Regime Change (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018); Lindsey A. O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018); John M. Owen IV, The Clash of Ideas in World Politics: Transnational Networks, States, and Regime Change, 1510-2010 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Michael Poznansky, In the Shadow of International Law: Secrecy and Regime Change in the Postwar World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); Alexander B. Downes, Catastrophic Success: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Goes Wrong (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021); Benjamin Denison, “The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same: The Failure of Regime Change.” Policy Analysis No. 883, Cato Institute, Washington, DC, 6 January 2020. https://doi.org/10.36009/PA.883.
[17] See pages 8-9 for the discussion on existing literature and rational choice.
[18] It is worth noting that the claim that existing literature all focuses on security explanations and all fits in the rationalist explanations of war program is incorrect, even though Ghalehdar’s argument does provide an excellent way to ground various observations within this program. For more on the ways microfoundation research based on emotion and psychology can complement rationalist arguments, see: Joshua D. Kertzer, “Microfoundations in International Relations,” Conflict Management and Peace Science 34:1 (2017): 81-97; Jonathan, Renshon, Julia J. Lee, and Dustin Tingley, “Emotions and the Micro-Foundations of Commitment Problems,” International Organization 71:1 (2017): 189-218.
[19] Willard-Foster, Toppling Foreign Governments: The Logic of Regime Change (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018); O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018).
[21] As Wilson said in one letter to “our friend Huerta is a diverting brute” who is “so full of bravado, the bravado of ignorance.” He went on to admit that “one moment you long for his blood, and the next you find yourself entertaining a sneaking admiration for his nerve.” Throughout this period the emotional frustration remained high as he refused to recognize Huerta as the legitimate ruler of Mexico. Woodrow Wilson, “To Mary Allen Hulbert,” in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur S. Link. Vol. 28 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), 217.
[22] When Wilson did authorize the occupation of the Dominican Republic, he noted, “it is with the deepest reluctance that I approve and authorize the course here proposed, but I am convinced that it is the least of the evils.” Here regime change was less the result of anger and perceptions of hatred and more frustration at instability that Wilson’s administration could not solve in any other way, a critical distinction. Sumner Welles, Naboth’s Vineyard: The Dominican Republic, 1844–1924. Vol. 2 (New York: Payson & Clarke, 1928), 792.
[23] It would also be worth taking the time to determine how emotional frustration fits with other forms of covert regime change, such as electoral interference. Dov H. Levin, Meddling in the Ballot Box: The Causes and Effects of Partisan Electoral Interventions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
[24] John M. Owen IV, The Clash of Ideas in World Politics: Transnational Networks, States, and Regime Change, 1510-2010 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
[25] Elizabeth N. Saunders, Leaders at War: How Presidents Shape Military Interventions (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011).
[26] Aaron Rapport, Waging War, Planning Peace: US Noncombat Operations and Major Wars (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015).
[27] A few examples include Jennifer Mitzen and Randall L Schweller, “Knowing the Unknown Unknowns: Misplaced Certainty and the Onset of War,” Security Studies 20:1 (2011): 2-35; Nadia Schadlow, War and the Art of Governance: Consolidating Combat Success Into Political Victory (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2017); Isaiah Wilson III, Thinking Beyond War: Civil-Military Relations and Why America Fails to Win the Peace (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Brendan R. Gallagher, The Day After: Why America Wins the War But Loses the Peace (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019).
[28] Zach Beauchamp, “Why Is Putin Attacking Ukraine? He Told Us,” Vox, 23 February 2022.
[29] Examples of scholarly work on the emotions driving international decision making are Richard K. Herrmann, James F. Voss, Tonya YE Schooler, and Joseph Ciarrochi, “Images In International Relations: An Experimental Test of Cognitive Schemata,” International Studies Quarterly 41:3 (1997): 403-433; Yixin Hu, Dawei Wang, Kaiyuan Pang, Guangxing Xu, and Jinhong Guo, “The Effect Of Emotion and Time Pressure On Risk Decision-Making,” Journal of Risk Research 18:5 (2015): 637-650; and Jonathan Mercer, “Human Nature and the First Image: Emotion In International Politics,” Journal of International Relations and Development 9:3 (2006): 288-303.
[30] A good example of the wider cognitive context for decision making emerges in the concept of the “feeling of knowing,” a sense of intuitive rightness that often drives decisions, but is not equivalent to an emotional response. See Asher Koriat, “The Feeling of Knowing,” Consciousness and Cognition 9:2 (2000): 149-171. Other research points to the ways that emotion underpins rational thought, but in a much broader and less direct way that Ghalehdar suggests. See Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt, 1999).
[31] The route from emotions to behavior is not necessarily linear; see Lucile Eznack, “The Mood Was Grave: Affective Dispositions and States’ Anger-Related Behavior,” Contemporary Security Policy 34:3 (2013): 552-580.
[32] Major recent surveys include Alexander Downes, Catastrophic Success: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Goes Wrong (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021); Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (New York: Times Books, 2006); and Lindsey A. O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018);
[33] Michael J. Mazarr, Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America’s Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019).
[34] Much more common is classic motivated reasoning—finding evidence to support existing views, which ends up skewing both the diagnosis of a situation and the resulting behavior. See Ziva Kunda, “The Case for Motivated Reasoning,” Psychological Bulletin, 108:3 (1990): 480-498, and Leonard S. Newman, “Motivated Cognition and Self-Deception,” Psychological Inquiry, 10:1 (1999), 59-63.
[35] One example can be drawn from the mid-Cold War. US leaders and analysts sought to understand Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s motives for sending missiles to Cuba, and operated on a range of theories. Having reviewed archives, interviews, and Khrushchev’s own memoirs, William Taubman concludes that the real motives were a complex and often contradictory mix that actors at the time did not grasp. Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 529-577.
[36] This is partly because leaders themselves are often unaware of their true motives. See Ruud Custers and Henk Aarts, “The Unconscious Will: How the Pursuit of Goals Operates Outside of Conscious Awareness,” Science, Vol. 329 (July 2, 2010), 47-50.
[37] A leading example is President Obama’s decision-making on Afghanistan, which famously stretched over months and was highly rationalistic. See Bob Woodward, Obama’s Wars (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010). Even in the case of Iraq, as I argue below, fully eighteen months passed between 9/11 and when US forces crossed into Iraq. A more general treatment of presidential absorption of information in decision processes is Alexander L. George, Presidential Decisionmaking in Foreign Policy: The Effective Use of Information and Advice (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1980).
[38] Michael R. Beschloss, Reaching for Glory: Lyndon Johnson’s Secret White House Tapes, 1964-1965 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001).
[39] See for example Britta C. Crandall and Russell C. Crandall, “Our Hemisphere”? The United States in Latin America, from 1776 to the Twenty-First Century (New Haven: Yale University Press), 149-288; and Stephen G. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of Anticommunism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
[40] Thomas S. Langston, “‘The Decider’s’ Path to War in Iraq and the Importance of Personality,” in George C. Edwards III and Desmond King, eds., The Polarized Presidency of George W. Bush (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007): 145-1721. For a discussion of the specific motive of the plot against his father, see Reed Johnson, “Revenge: A Family Affair,” The Los Angeles Times, 11 December 2002.
[41] For a recent summary of the evidence, see Fred Kaplan, “Why Did We Invade Iraq,” The New York Review of Books, 22 July 2021.
[42] Deepa Shivaram and Avie Schneider, “Biden Says of Putin: ‘For God’s Sake, This Man Cannot Remain in Power,” NPR, 26 March 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/03/26/1089014039/biden-says-of-putin-for-gods-sake-this-man-cannot-remain-in-power.
[43] Domenico Montanaro, “Biden Says He Was Expressing Moral Outrage When Saying Putin Shouldn’t Stay In Power,” NPR, 28 March 2022, https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/npr/2022/03/28/1089300515/biden-says-he-was-expressing-moral-outrage-when-saying-putin-shouldnt-stay-in-power/ .
[44] See for example, The National Review, “Biden’s ‘Regime Change’ Blunder,” 28 March 2022, https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/03/bidens-regime-change-blunder/ ; Tom Nichols, “Biden’s Comments About Putin Were an Unforced Error,” The Atlantic, 26 March 2022, https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/peacefield/email/09aef104-ce4d-4df5-8ce7-ce9e9eb35a07/.
[45] John M. Owen, The Clash of Ideas in World Politics. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
[46] Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (New York: Times Books, 2006); Michael J. Sullivan, American Adventurism Abroad: Invasions, Interventions, and Regime Changes since World War II (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008).
[47] Lindsey O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2018).
[48] On the frustration-aggression hypothesis see, John Dollard, et al., Frustration and Aggression (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1939); Leonard Berkowitz, “Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis: Examination and Reformulation,” Psychological Bulletin 106:1 (1989): 59-73; Johannes Breuer and Malte Elson, Frustration-Aggression Theory (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2017).
[49] O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change, 39-40.
[50] O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change, 6.
[51] Bruce Bueno De Mesquita and George W. Downs, “Intervention and Democracy,” International Organization 60: 3 (2006): 627-649; James Meernik, “United States Military Intervention and the Promotion of Democracy,” Journal of Peace Research 33:4 (1996): 391-402; Alexander B. Downes and Jonathan Monten, “Forced to Be Free?: Why Foreign-imposed Regime Change Rarely Leads to Democratization,” International Security 37:4 (2013): 90-131; O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change; Downes, Catastrophic Success: Why Foreign Imposed Regime Change Goes Wrong (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2021).
[52] Downes and O’Rourke, “You Can’t Always get What You Want: Why Foreign-imposed Regime Change Seldom Improves Interstate Relations.” International Security 41:2 (2016): 43-89; O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change; Downes, Catastrophic Success.
[53] Paul Zachary, Kathleen Deloughery, and Downes, “No Business Like FIRC Business: Foreign-imposed Regime Change and Bilateral Trade,” British Journal of Political Science 47:4 (2017): 749-782; Downes, Catastrophic Success.
[54] O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change; Downes, Catastrophic Success.
[55] O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change; Downes, Catastrophic Success.
[56] James D. Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War,” International Organization 49:3 (1995): 379-414; Robert Powell, “War as a Commitment Problem,” International Organization 60:1 (2006): 169-203.
[57] Melissa Willard-Foster, Toppling Foreign Governments: The Logic of Regime Change (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).
[58] I would argue that the United States has so consistently pursued regime change because states have enduring security interests regardless of which individual leader is in power.
[59] Mark Perry, “When Presidents Get Angry,” Politico, 27 September 2017, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/09/27/donald-trump-anger-215648/ .
[60] Ed Rogers, “The Problem with ‘No-drama Obama’,” The Washington Post, 13 January 2014.
[61] Alexander B. Downes, Catastrophic Success: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Goes Wrong (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2021); Goran Peic and Dan Reiter, “Foreign-Imposed Regime Change, State Power, and Civil War Onset, 1920–2004,” British Journal of Political Science 41:3 (2011), 453-475; Andrew J. Enterline and J. Michael Greig, “Beacons of Hope? The Impact of Imposed Democracy on Regional Peace, Democracy, and Prosperity,” The Journal of Politics 67:4 (2005): 1075–1098; Alexander B. Downes and Jonathan Monten, “Forced to Be Free: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Rarely Leads to Democratization,” International Security 37:4 (2013), 90-131; Downes and Lindsey A. O’Rourke, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Seldom Improves Interstate Relations,” International Security 41:2 (2016): 43–89; Paul Zachary, Kathleen Deloughery, and Downes, “No Business Like FIRC Business: Foreign-Imposed Regime Change and Bilateral Trade,” British Journal of Political Science 47: 4 (October 2017): 749–782.
[62] Michael Grow, U.S. Presidents and Latin American Interventions: Pursuing Regime Change in the Cold War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 77.
[63] Grow, 21–22, 45, 76–78, 82.
[64] Downes, Catastrophic Success.
[65] Downes, 4–9.
[66] Melissa Willard-Foster, Toppling Foreign Governments: The Logic of Regime Change (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).
[67] Although these operations aimed to instigate a domestic coup, which Ghalehdar excludes from the data, the US played a significant role, making these operations similar to covert operations in Iran (1953) and Chile (1973), although less successful. Jim Hoagl, “How CIA’S Secret War On Saddam Collapsed,” Washington Post, 26 June 1997, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1997/06/26/how-cias-secret-war-on-saddam-collapsed/b83592cb-0117-4c3c-a101-9550e29c94a3/.
[68] Dan Reiter, How Wars End (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
[69] James D. Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War,” International Organization, 49:3 (1995): 379-414. Rationalist explanations for regime change include Bruce Bueno de Mesquita et al., The Logic of Political Survival (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), particularly chapter 9; Reiter, How Wars End; Willard-Foster, Toppling Foreign Governments: The Logic of Regime Change.
[70] “President Obama Speaks to the Muslim World from Cairo, Egypt,” The White House, accessed 7 June 2022, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/node/13022.
[71] Robert Michael Gates, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (New York: Knopf, 2014), 519.
[72] Sanger cites a source who was present at the meeting. David E. Sanger, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power (New York: Crown Publishers, 2012), 346. For a similar account, see Christopher S. Chivvis, Toppling Qaddafi: Libya and the Limits of Liberal Intervention (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 58–59.
[73] Willard-Foster, “Three Lessons from the History of Foreign-Imposed Regime Change,” Political Violence at a Glance (blog), 1 February 2019, https://politicalviolenceataglance.org/2019/02/01/three-lessons-from-the-history-of-foreign-imposed-regime-change/.
[74] George W. Bush, President’s Remarks at the United Nations General Assembly, 12 September 2002, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/09/20020912-1.html.
[75] Johannes Gullestad Rø, Mechanistic Realism and US Foreign Policy: A New Framework for Analysis (New York: Routledge, 2013), 129.
[76] Robert Jervis, “Explaining the War in Iraq,” in Why Did the United States Invade Iraq?, ed. Jane K. Cramer and A. Trevor Thrall (London: Routledge, 2012), 29.
[77] Harry Eckstein, Regarding Politics: Essays on Political Theory, Stability, and Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 136.
[78] Michael J. Mazarr, Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America’s Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019), 12.
[79] Mazarr’s invocation of Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine is one such extension to a non-US case. Note, however, that it is doubtful whether the Russian invasion can be classified as regime change. Depending on Russian motivation, the invasion could be viewed as an attempt at wholesale annexation, violating Ukraine’s juridical sovereignty, the latter being a sine qua non for regime change as a concept.
[80] Note that, in addition, the book’s universe of cases comprises US covert regime change operations and a range of negative cases.
[81] The case studies are Cuba (1906), Nicaragua (1909-12), the Dominican Republic (1963-65), Iran (1979-80), and Iraq (2001-03). The two mini cases deal with the Cuban Crisis of 1933 and the 1991 Gulf War (58-59; 140-142).
[82] Payam Ghalehdar, “The Purpose of Military Force and the Obama Doctrine: No Fighting for Face,” International Relations OnlineFirst (2023), https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117823115190.
[83] Jeffry A. Frieden, “Actors and Preferences in International Relations,” in Strategic Choice and International Relations, ed. David A. Lake and Robert Powell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 48. See also Melissa Willard-Foster, Toppling Foreign Governments: The Logic of Regime Change (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 11.
[84] See, for example, Charles L. Glaser, Rational Theory of International Politics: The Logic of Competition and Cooperation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 35-40; Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 233-237.
[85] See, for example, Robin Markwica, Emotional Choices: How the Logic of Affect Shapes Coercive Diplomacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 69-70.
[86] This is evidenced by the Bush administration’s lack of hegemonic expectations and perceptions of hatred prior to 9/11 (172-174; 179-180).
[87] Philander C. Knox, William H. Taft’s Secretary of State, played an outsized role in convincing the US president to use military force against Nicaragua (82).
[88] The same argument about the difference between impatience and careless action might account for the interval between Wilson’s frustration and the occupation of Veracruz in 1914, a case invoked by Denison. Note, however, that because Wilson refrained from driving US forces into the Mexican capital, the book does not consider the invasion a case of regime change. See also Lester D. Langley, The Banana Wars: United States Intervention in the Caribbean, 1898-1934 (Wilmington: SR Books, 2002), 108.
[89] Mazarr, Leap of Faith, 182.
[90] Mazarr, Leap of Faith, 15.
[91] See, for example, Rose McDermott, “The Feeling of Rationality: The Meaning of Neuroscientific Advances for Political Science,” Perspectives on Politics 2:4 (2004): 691-706.
[92] David A. Lake, “Two Cheers for Bargaining Theory: Assessing Rationalist Explanations of the Iraq War,” International Security 35: 3 (2010): 9.
[93] As I argue in the book, if the effectiveness of regime change is measured in terms of emotional amelioration, it can be considered a highly effective foreign policy instrument (206-207).
[94] Markwica, Emotional Choices, 23. See also Jonathan Renshon, Julia J. Lee, and Dustin Tingley, “Emotions and the Micro-Foundations of Commitment Problems,” International Organization 71, no. S1 (2017): S197. Mazarr acknowledges in his review that “emotion underpins rational thought.”
[95] The divide between materiality and immateriality transcends the divide between rationalism and non-rationalism. While rationalism has a “perceived materialist bent,” this is not to say that the basic logic of rationalism is reducible to materialism, see James D. Fearon and Alexander Wendt, “Rationalism v. Constructivism: A Skeptical View,” in Handbook of International Relations, ed. Walter Carlsnaes, Thomas Risse, and Beth A. Simmons (London: Sage, 2002), 59.
[96] Willard-Foster, Toppling Foreign Governments, 5.
[97] Lindsey A. O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), 5.
[98] For an instrumental view of regime change as a policy tool that serves to “obtain desired policy outcomes,” see Dov Levin and Carmela Lutmar, “Violent Regime Change: Causes and Consequences,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics (2020). See also Benjamin Denison, “The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same: The Failure of Regime-Change Operations,” in Cato Institute Policy Analysis, vol. 883 (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2020), https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/more-things-change-more-they-stay-same-failure-regime-change-operations.
[99] John M. Owen, The Clash of Ideas in World Politics: Transnational Networks, States, and Regime Change, 1510-2010 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 165.
[100] Theda Skocpol and Margaret Somers, “The Uses of Comparative History in Macrosocial Inquiry,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 22:2 (1980): 175.
[101] For this distinction, see Payam Ghalehdar, “Historical Analysis,” in Routledge Handbook of Foreign Policy Analysis Methods, ed. Patrick A. Mello and Falk Ostermann (New York: Routledge, 2023).
[102] In her review, Willard-Foster makes an intriguing argument about how presidents take lessons from mistakes their predecessors committed.
[103] In her theory of regime change, O’Rourke presents perceptions of chronic interstate disputes and the availability of regime alternatives as two conditions for regime change, since security interests alone provide “only half an answer.” See O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change, 5.
[104] George Tenet, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA (New York: Harper Collins, 2007), 319. Mazarr cites Tenet in his own book and names Pakistan as a second example, see Mazarr, Leap of Faith, 254; 382.
[105] In his own account of the war, Mazarr agrees with this point, see Mazarr, Leap of Faith, 66.
[106] O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change, 11.
[107] Willard-Foster, Toppling Foreign Governments, 6.
[108] See also Willard-Foster, Toppling Foreign Governments, 193.