Washington wins the coups. History keeps the score

The geopolitical shockwaves of early 2026 serve as a stark reminder of a decades-old truth: in the theatre of foreign-imposed regime change, tactical success is routinely confused with historical victory.

In February 2026, the joint US-Israeli air strikes inside Iran successfully assassinated Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei with the explicit goal of forcing regime change. Yet the clerical government did not collapse. Instead, it consolidated its hold, installed Mojtaba Khamenei as his successor, and tightened its domestic grip on power. 

Similarly, in January 2026, a US military operation abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to face federal drug-trafficking charges. But rather than a transition to a Western-style democracy, Vice President Delcy Rodríguez assumed the presidency, purged Maduro loyalists, consolidated military control to preserve the regime's survival, and renegotiated oil access to satisfy US commercial appetites.

These actions are merely the latest iterations of a sprawling playbook. Between 1947 and 1989 alone, the United States made 72 attempts to alter the balance of power abroad. Of these, 64 were covert operations spearheaded by the CIA, operating with a success rate of about 40%. 

Yet, a retrospective analysis of these interventions reveals a recurring, tragic pathology: while Washington frequently achieves its immediate operational goals, these "victories" almost universally yield long-term democratic decay, immense human suffering, and severe strategic blowback.

As foreign policy analyst Negar Mortazavi sardonically notes, "Destroying a government is far easier than controlling what follows."

Succeeded operationally, failed historically

The template for modern US intervention was established in August 1953, when the CIA and British intelligence (MI6) launched Operation Ajax to overthrow Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh. 

Mosaddegh's nationalisation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was branded by Western planners as a communist-adjacent threat to their commercial interests. The coup successfully restored Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to autocratic power, securing Western oil concessions and aligning Iran with the US for a quarter-century.

Yet, as defence studies scholar Andreas Krieg notes, the 1953 intervention succeeded operationally but failed historically. By permanently branding the Shah's increasingly repressive monarchy as a "US puppet" and crushing local, secular democratic alternatives, the intervention transformed anti-Americanism into the core organising principle of the Iranian opposition. When the Shah's regime collapsed in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, that collapse transformed a vital US ally into one of its most bitter regional adversaries. 

Today, the clerical government still derives its domestic popular legitimacy by casting itself as the defender of Iranian sovereignty against imperialist subversion — a narrative directly rooted in the trauma of 1953.

The covert blueprint: Containment and corporate interests

The apparent ease of the 1953 coup in Iran fostered a dangerous hubris in Washington, establishing a covert blueprint that would be deployed repeatedly across Latin America.

In Guatemala in 1954, under Operation PBSuccess, the CIA orchestrated a coup to depose democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz. The immediate trigger was his Agrarian Reform Law, Decree 900, which sought to expropriate idle land and redistribute it to landless indigenous peasant families. The measure directly threatened the commercial monopoly of the politically connected United Fruit Company (UFCO). 

The coup destroyed Guatemala's "democratic decade" and ushered in a series of brutal right-wing military dictatorships. The resulting repression helped trigger a 36-year civil war between 1960 and 1996, during which Maya communities suffered genocide and more than 200,000 people were killed.

In Brazil in 1964, Washington intervened against the reformist policies of President João Goulart through Operation Brother Sam. US Ambassador Lincoln Gordon forcefully lobbied for direct involvement, secretly recommending that weapons of non-US origin be pre-positioned before any violence through unmarked submarines off-loading supplies at night in isolated coastal locations. 

President Lyndon B Johnson ultimately gave the green light, instructing his aides to "take every step that we can... and stick my neck out a little". Supported by a US naval task force and petroleum shipments, Goulart was ousted, ushering in a repressive 21-year military dictatorship.

In Chile in 1973, the election of socialist President Salvador Allende presented another challenge to Washington. President Richard Nixon famously ordered the CIA to "make the economy scream". Under Project FUBELT, the agency engaged in systematic economic warfare and backed military plotters, culminating in the murder of constitutionalist Chief of Staff General René Schneider. 

On September 11, 1973, a military coup brought General Augusto Pinochet to power. His 17-year dictatorship resulted in the execution of more than 3,000 citizens, the torture of tens of thousands and the exile of 200,000 people.

The pattern was already visible: the immediate objective could be achieved with striking efficiency, but the political consequences were rarely so controllable.

Overt warfare and the post-9/11 ledger

With the end of the Cold War, Washington transitioned from covert subversion to large-scale, overt military intervention under the banner of the "war on terror" and "democratisation". The human and financial consequences of these campaigns have been catastrophic.

In 2001, the invasion of Afghanistan, Operation Enduring Freedom, successfully ousted the Taliban. Yet after a 20-year military occupation and an estimated 243,000 direct deaths in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theatre, the Taliban immediately retook complete power when US troops withdrew in August 2021.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq remains an egregious example of strategic blindness. Launched under the false premise that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, the war deposed Hussein but created a profound security vacuum. That vacuum triggered a violent sectarian civil war and enabled the rise of ISIS. 

Furthermore, by removing Saddam Hussein, the US eliminated Iran's primary regional counterweight, inadvertently creating the political space through which the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps built its expansive post-2003 regional network across the Levant.

Similarly, the 2011 NATO-led military intervention in Libya protected civilians but quickly expanded to force the removal and killing of Muammar Gaddafi. Today, Libya remains deeply fractured, divided between rival governments and competing military factions.

The scale of the post-9/11 ledger makes the costs difficult to dismiss as collateral damage. According to the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, the wars across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen produced approximately 940,000 direct war deaths. 

Once indirect deaths resulting from disease, hunger and the collapse of municipal infrastructure are included, the estimated toll rises to 4.5–4.7 million people. The financial cost has been similarly extraordinary: approximately $5.8 trillion in direct US military spending, with another $2.2 trillion projected for veterans' care over the next thirty years.

The democratic deficit

What, then, does a systematic, empirical analysis of seventy years of US regime-change efforts actually reveal?

The answer is more complicated than a simple catalogue of failures. A quantitative study of US-sponsored interventions since 1945 conducted by Daniel J. Savickas provides a striking contrast between the political and economic consequences of intervention.

Measured through the Polity IV Index, which assesses democratic standards including free and fair elections, political participation and institutional constraints, the study found no statistically significant positive impact on democratic reforms in the five years following US intervention. In fact, democracy declined or stagnated in half of all cases. Some countries experienced dramatic reversals: Argentina's Polity IV score fell by 15 points following the 1976 intervention, while Chile's fell by 13 points after the 1973 coup.

The economic picture, however, is markedly different.

When GDP per capita is compared over the ten years before and after intervention, the study found a highly statistically significant positive impact on economic growth. In more than 70% of cases, target nations experienced heightened economic growth following US intervention. 

On average, intervened countries performed 26% better in GDP-per-capita growth rates after intervention than in the preceding decade. The post-war experience of Japan illustrates the scale of the possible effect: its growth was approximately 150% faster under US occupation than during the decade preceding the war's end.

This creates the central paradox of the American interventionist record. The same policies that appear ineffective — or even damaging — when judged by democratic outcomes can produce substantial gains when judged through the narrower lens of economic performance. 

Intervention can therefore appear successful if the ledger is closed after ten years of GDP growth, while appearing disastrous if the account is kept open long enough to capture institutional decay, repression and geopolitical blowback.

Historian Ervand Abrahamian offers one explanation for the contradiction. US-sponsored regimes often collapse because they fail to modernise political institutions over the long run. Planners routinely prioritise short-term economic compliance and autocratic stability over domestic political legitimacy, leaving behind fragile institutions, popular resentment and profound strategic blowback.

The problem, then, may not be that intervention produces no results. It is that Washington has historically been much better at producing measurable short-term outcomes than at building political systems capable of surviving without external coercion.