A Recipe for Civil War

Despite what interveners hope, regime change implemented by outsiders is not a force for stability. More than 40 percent of states that experience foreign-imposed regime change have a civil war within the next ten years. Regime change generates civil wars in three ways. First, civil war can be part of the process of removing the old regime from power and suppressing its remnants. In Hungary in 1919, a Romanian invasion unseated the Communist regime of Béla Kun. His successor Miklós Horthy carried out a “White Terror” that killed roughly 5,000 supposed Communists, communist supporters, or sympathizers. Similar conflicts and purges followed the ousters of Arbenz in Guatemala and Allende in Chile.

Second, regime change fosters civil war because it abruptly reverses the status of formerly advantaged groups. Remnants of the old regime’s leadership or army may wage an insurgency against the new rulers rather than accept a subordinate position. This happened in Cambodia following the Vietnamese invasion in December 1978. The Vietnamese army quickly defeated the Khmer Rouge in conventional battles, but Pol Pot, other top leaders, and many fighters escaped to remote jungle hideouts along the Thai and Laotian borders. Determined to regain power, the Khmer Rouge waged a decade-long insurgency against Vietnam’s puppet, Heng Samrin, and occupying forces. Similarly, after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Sunni Ba’athist ex-soldiers took up arms to eject U.S. occupiers and restore Sunni rule.

Finally, regime change can contribute to the outbreak of entirely new civil wars by reversing popular policies or instituting unpopular ones. In Guatemala U.S.-supported leaders rolled back the signal achievement of the deposed Arbenz administration: land reform that had redistributed property from large landholders such as United Fruit to peasants. President Ydigoras Fuentes also alienated many in the Guatemalan officer corps by allowing the CIA to train Cuban exiles on Guatemalan territory for the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. These resentments contributed to the MR-13 rebellion that erupted in November 1960. Civil war continued in Guatemala in one form or another for more than 30 years, killing approximately 200,000 people. Evidently, the United States had not learned from its prior experience ousting interim Dominican president Francisco Henríquez y Carvajal in 1916, which sparked an insurgency that continued until 1922. One of the major factors that drove the rebellion was land redistribution, which favored U.S. multinational corporations involved in sugar production and deprived many Dominicans in the region of their property.