Covert Regime Change

Any debate over the relative merits and demerits of regime change as a legitimate tool of foreign-policy needs to begin with Lindsey A. O’Rourke’s fantastic book. It’s a well-written, important work that should productively inform foreign-policy debates going forward. Essential reading.

This is a book for scholars and policy makers; the footnotes are copious and extensive.

Covert Regime Change is a valuable book that sheds light on an important issue.

Unlike many other books built around accounts of CIA plots, Covert Regime Change takes a scholarly and quantitative approach. It provides charts, graphs, and data sets. Meticulous analysis makes this not the quickest read of any book on the subject, but certainly one of the best informed. O’Rourke injects a dose of rigorous analysis into a debate that is often based on emotion.

O’Rourke’s work provides ample evidence that attempts at forcible regime-change are unlikely to achieve desired ends at a reasonable cost.

Well researched and argued, it places the initial debate over covert action within the national security decisionmaking process during the first years of the Cold War.

In this well-researched and clearly written book, Lindsay A. O’Rourke vigorously argues that during the Cold War U.S. officials repeatedly launched covert interventions in foreign countries, even though most of the operations failed to effect regime changes, because the officials saw them as cheap ways to enhance U.S. security and power…. A well-executed, valuable study.

O’Rourke’s book offers a onestop shop for understanding foreignimposed regime change. Covert Regime Change is an impressive book and required reading for anyone interested in understanding hidden power in world politics.

O’Rourke’s contribution to the history of US foreign relations, intelligence history, and international relations theory is not just valuable but also original. O’Rourke’s dataset identifies more than 60 covert efforts to bring about regime change… pursued by the United States between 1947 and 1989. Few authors have sought to chronicle and analyze them as comprehensively and systematically as O’Rourke, and no one has succeeded as she has. We owe her a great debt.

O’Rourke challenges the historiography by showing that regime change actions, both covert and overt, were the principal action of the US during the Cold War, and in doing so, she joins the ever-growing number of critics who argue that covert actions are ineffective instruments of US foreign policy and national security.

Lindsey A. O’Rourke is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Boston College. Her research focuses on regime change, international security, and US foreign policy.