1 Patrick Porter, “Why America’s Grand Strategy Has Not Changed: Power, Habit, and the U.S. Foreign Policy Establishment,” International Security 42, no. 4 (2018): 9–46.

2 William J. Clinton, A National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement (Washington: White House, 1994), pp. 18–19, http://nssarchive.us/NSSR/1994.pdf.

3 George W. Bush, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington: White House, 2002), http://nssarchive.us/NSSR/2002.pdf.

4 Barack Obama, National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington: White House, 2010), http://nssarchive.us/NSSR/2010.pdf.

5 Michael C. Desch, “America’s Liberal Illiberalism: The Ideological Origins of Overreaction in U.S. Foreign Policy,” International Security 32, no. 3 (2007): 7–43.

6 For instance, see Jessica Donati, Vivian Salama, and Ian Talley, “U.S. Push to Oust Venezuela’s Maduro Marks First Shot in Plan to Reshape Latin America,” Wall Street Journal, January 30, 2019; Jason Rezaian, “Call Your Iran Policy by Its True Name,” Washington Post, July 30, 2019; and Megan Specia and David E. Sanger, “How the ‘Libya Model’ Became a Sticking Point in North Korea Nuclear Talks,” New York Times, May 16, 2018.

7 In other words, forceful democracy promotion’s goal is “to make the world safe for democracy.” See Tony Smith, America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 3. As political scientist Jonathan Monten explains it, “Democracy promotion is not just another foreign policy instrument or idealist diversion; it is central to U.S. political identity and sense of national purpose.” Jonathan Monten, “The Roots of the Bush Doctrine: Power, Nationalism, and Democracy Promotion in U.S. Strategy,” International Security 29, no. 4 (2005): 112–56.

8 Examples of this argument related to Vietnam include Mark Moyar, “Was Vietnam Winnable?,” New York Times, May 19, 2017; and Lewis Sorley, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam (Orlando: Harvest, 1999).

9 Max Boot, The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2018); and Seth G. Jones, “Averting Failure in Afghanistan,” Survival 48, no. 1 (2006): 111–28.

10 Larry Diamond, “What Went Wrong in Iraq,” Foreign Affairs 83, no. 5 (2004): 34–56; and Michael E. O’Hanlon, “Iraq Without a Plan,” Policy Review no. 128 (December 2004): 33–45.

11 To the extent that missions ever succeed, it often occurs when they aim for less expansive goals. Patricia L. Sullivan, “War Aims and War Outcomes: Why Powerful States Lose Limited Wars,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 51, no. 3 (2007): 496–524.

12 Alexander B. 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, no. 2 (2016): 43–89.

13 Downes and O’Rourke, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” p. 56. See also Stephen M. Streeter, Managing the Counterrevolution: The United States and Guatemala, 1954–1961 (Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 2000), pp. 223–24.

14 Paul Zachary, Kathleen Deloughery, and Alexander B. Downes, “No Business Like FIRC Business: Foreign-Imposed Regime Change and Bilateral Trade,” British Journal of Political Science 47, no. 4 (2017): 749–82.

15 Zachary, Deloughery, and Downes, “No Business Like FIRC Business,” p. 778.

16 Bruce J. Calder, The Impact of Intervention: The Dominican Republic During the U.S. Occupation of 1916–1924 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984), pp. 165–70.

17 Zachary, Deloughery, and Downes, “No Business Like FIRC Business,” pp. 757–59.

18 Daniel Berger, William Easterly, Nathan Nunn, and Shanker Satyanath, “Commercial Imperialism? Political Influence and Trade During the Cold War,” American Economic Review 103, no. 2 (2013): 863–96.

19 As Bush articulated it, “Freedom’s advance in the Middle East will have another very practical effect . . . The success of free and stable governments in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere will shatter the myth and discredit the radicals.” George W. Bush, “Remarks by the President at the United States Air Force Academy Graduation Ceremony,” June 2, 2004.

20 For an explanation of this logic, see Robert Jervis, “Understanding the Bush Doctrine,” Political Science Quarterly 118, no. 3 (2003): 365–88.

21 Andrew J. Enterline and J. Michael Greig, “Perfect Storms? Political Instability in Imposed Polities and the Futures of Iraq and Afghanistan,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 52, no. 6 (2008): 880–915; Andrew J. Enterline and J. Michael Greig, “Beacons of Hope? The Impact of Imposed Democracy on Regional Peace, Democracy, and Prosperity,” Journal of Politics 67, no. 4 (2005): 1075–98; Jeffrey Pickering and Mark Peceny, “Forging Democracy at Gunpoint,” International Studies Quarterly 50, no. 3 (2006): 539– 60; and Christopher J. Coyne, After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).

22 Daniel Berger, Alejandro Corvalan, William Easterly, and Shanker Satyanath, “Do Superpower Interventions Have Short and Long Term Consequences for Democracy?,” Journal of Comparative Economics 41, no. 1 (2013): 22–34.

23 Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and George W. Downs, “Intervention and Democracy,” International Organization 60, no. 3 (2006): 627–49.

24 Kevin Sieff, “Interview: Karzai Says 12-year Afghanistan War Has Left Him Angry at U.S. Government,” Washington Post, March 2, 2014.

25 Sullivan, “War Aims and War Outcomes”; and Jennifer Kavanagh, Bryan Frederick, Alexandra Stark, Nathan Chandler, Meagan L. Smith, Matthew Povlock, Lynn E. Davis, and Edward Geist, Characteristics of Successful US Military Interventions (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2019).

26 Alexander B. Downes and Jonathan Monten, “Forced to Be Free? Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Rarely Leads to Democratization,” International Security 37, no. 4 (2013): 129. Similarly, for other democracies engaging in regime change, they only succeeded between 5 and 15 percent of the time out of the 20 foreign-imposed regime change operations they undertook.

27 Downes and Monten, “Forced to Be Free?”; Jonathan Monten, “Intervention and State-Building: Comparative Lessons from Japan, Iraq, and Afghanistan,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 656, no. 1 (2014): 173–91.

28 Downes and Monten, “Forced to Be Free?,” p. 121.

29 One example is the pursuit mentioned above of a possible regime change in Venezuela. Even though Venezuela was a functioning democratic state in previous decades, the breakdown of the state under Maduro has weakened institutions to the point where it is uncertain what institutions would look like under a new regime. Moisés Naím and Francisco Toro, “Venezuela’s Suicide: Lessons from a Failed State,” Foreign Affairs 97, no. 6 (2018): 126–38. On preconditions, see Benjamin Denison, “Strategies of Domination: Uncertainty, Local Institutional Strength, and the Politics of Foreign Rule” (PhD dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 2018); and Downes and Monten, “Forced to Be Free?”

30 James Dobbins, John G. McGinn, Keith Crane, Seth G. Jones, Rollie Lal, Andrew Rathmell, Rachel Swanger, and Anga Timilsina, America’s Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2003), p. xxv.

31 Ironically for these arguments, however, the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) reported that the United States had, as of 2014, already spent more money in Afghanistan than was spent on the entire Marshall Plan. John F. Sopko, “SIGAR Quarterly Report to the United States Congress,” July 30, 2014, p. 5, https://www.sigar.mil/pdf/quarterlyreports/2014-07-30qr.pdf.

32 David A Lake, The Statebuilder’s Dilemma: On the Limits of Foreign Intervention (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016), p. 1.

33 Lake, The Statebuilder’s Dilemma; Michael Hechter, Alien Rule (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); David A. Lake and Christopher J. Fariss, “Why International Trusteeship Fails: The Politics of External Authority in Areas of Limited Statehood,” Governance 27, no. 4 (October 2014): 569–87; and Jörn Grävingholt, Julia Leininger, and Christian von Haldenwang, Effective Statebuilding? A Review of Evaluations of International Statebuilding Support in Fragile Contexts (Copenhagen: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, 2012).

34 David. M. Edelstein, Occupational Hazards: Success and Failure in Military Occupation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), pp. 23–24.

35 Paul D. Miller, Armed State Building: Confronting State Failure, 1898–2012 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013).

36 Lindsey A. O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), p. 73. Ironically, O’Rourke further notes that the regime change mission failed to remain covert more than 70 percent of the time.

37 O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change.

38 Albert Lulushi, Operation Valuable Fiend: The CIA’s First Paramilitary Strike against the Iron Curtain (New York: Arcade, 2014), p. 66. For more, see O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change, pp. 137–45.

39 Dov H. Levin, “When the Great Power Gets a Vote: The Effects of Great Power Electoral Interventions on Election Results,” International Studies Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2016): 189–202.

40 Dov H. Levin, “A Vote for Freedom? The Effects of Partisan Electoral Interventions on Regime Type,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 63, no. 4 (2018): 839–68.

41 Levin, “A Vote for Freedom?,” p. 846.

42 Goran Peic and Dan Reiter, “Foreign-Imposed Regime Change, State Power and Civil War Onset, 1920–2004,” British Journal of Political Science 41, no. 3 (2011): 453–75.

43 Alexander Downes, “Catastrophic Success: Foreign Imposed Regime Change and Civil War,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association, New Orleans, 2010.

44 Hechter, Alien Rule; and Jeremy Ferwerda and Nicholas L. Miller, “Political Devolution and Resistance to Foreign Rule: A Natural Experiment,” American Political Science Review 108, no. 3 (2014): 642–60.

45 O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change, p. 92.

46 Stephen R. Weissman, “What Really Happened in Congo: The CIA, the Murder of Lumumba, and the Rise of Mobutu,” Foreign Affairs 93, no. 4 (2014): 14–24; and Lise Namikas, Battleground Africa: Cold War in the Congo, 1960–1965 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015).

47 Bethany Lacina and Nils Petter Gleditsch, “Monitoring Trends in Global Combat: A New Dataset of Battle Deaths,” European Journal of Population 21, no. 2–3 (2005): 145–66.

48 Reed M. Wood, Jacob D. Kathman, and Stephen E. Gent, “Armed Intervention and Civilian Victimization in Intrastate Conflicts,” Journal of Peace Research 49, no. 5 (2012): 647–60; and Dursun Peksen, “Does Foreign Military Intervention Help Human Rights?,” Political Research Quarterly 65, no. 3 (2012): 558–71.

49 O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change, p. 95.

50 Dov H. Levin, “Voting for Trouble? Partisan Electoral Interventions and Domestic Terrorism,” Terrorism and Political Violence (2018): 1–17, https://doi.org/10.1080/09546553.2017.1383243.

51 Neta C. Crawford, “United States Budgetary Costs of the Post-9/11 Wars through FY2019: $5.9 Trillion Spent and Obligated,” Costs of War Project, November 14, 2018.

52 Denison, “Strategies of Domination.”

53 Leslie H. Gelb and Richard K. Betts, The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 1979), pp. 86–92.

54 Andrew J. Gawthorpe, To Build as Well as Destroy: American Nation Building in South Vietnam (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), pp. 50–55.

55 Specia and Sanger, “How the ‘Libya Model’ Became a Sticking Point in North Korea Nuclear Talks.”

56 As O’Rourke states, “unlike most foreign policy strategies, regime change offers the possibility of altering the underlying preferences of a foreign government” so as to not rely on constant renegotiation or disputes over foreign policy goals. O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change, p. 5.

57 Aaron Rapport, Waging War, Planning Peace: U.S. Noncombat Operations and Major Wars (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015).

58 Dominic D. P. Johnson, Overconfidence and War: The Havoc and Glory of Positive Illusions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).

59 Dominic D. P. Johnson and Dominic Tierney, “The Rubicon Theory of War: How the Path to Conflict Reaches the Point of No Return,” International Security 36, no. 1 (2011): 20.

60 Jennifer Mitzen and Randall L. Schweller, “Knowing the Unknown Unknowns: Misplaced Certainty and the Onset of War,” Security Studies 20, no. 1 (2011): 2–35.

61 John Esterbrook, “Rumsfeld: It Would Be A Short War,” CBS News, November 15, 2002, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rumsfeld-it-would-be-a-short-war/.

62 Melissa Willard-Foster, Toppling Foreign Governments: The Logic of Regime Change (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), p. 39.

63 O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change, p. 6.

64 Joel D. Rayburn and Frank K. Sobchak, eds., The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, Volume 1: Invasion, Insurgency, Civil War, 2003–2006 (Carlisle Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, United States Army War College Press, 2019), p. 35. For more on Chalabi and the “Future of Iraq” program, see Nora Bensahel et al., After Saddam: Prewar Planning and the Occupation of Iraq (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2008), pp. 31–33; and Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2006), pp. 56–57.

65 For an articulation of how nonintervention and other tools of foreign policy could promote these same interests, see Coyne, After War, pp. 181–93.