Causes of Foreign-Imposed Regime Change: The Signal of Economic Expropriation

• Author: Danielle Villa,Daniel Arnon,Dan Reiter
• DOI: 10.1177/00220027211070604
• Published date: 01 May 2022
• Date: 01 May 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Journal of Conflict Resolution

2022, Vol. 66(4-5) 651–676

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00220027211070604

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Causes of Foreign-Imposed

Regime Change: The Signal of

Economic Expropriation

Danielle Villa

1

, Daniel Arnon

2

, and Dan Reiter

1



Abstract

Why do major powers attempt foreign-imposed regime change (FIRC)? This article

builds on existing security theory, proposing that a major power looks for signals that a

government might exit that major power’s international hierarchy and/or enter an

adversary’s hierarchy. Major powers are more likely to attempt FIRC against states that

signal shifting preferences. The article tests the theory on American FIRC attempts

from 1947 to 1989, covert and overt, failed and successful, proposing that when a

hierarchy member or neutral state engaged in economic expropriation, this signaled

possible exit from the US hierarchy and/or entry into the Soviet hierarchy, making a US

FIRC attempt against that state more likely. It also presents an alternative theory, that

economic special interests drove US FIRC attempts. Using new data on expropriations,

the article supports the security theory, as expropriations by US hierarchy members

made FIRC attempts more likely, but does not support the special interests theory.

Keywords

conflict, interstate conflict, foreign imposed regime change, intervention

An important tool great powers sometimes employ to advance their interests is foreign-

imposed regime change (FIRC), forcible action to replace a country’s national lead-

ership by “alteringthe composition of that state’sruling elite, its administrative apparatus,

1

Political Science, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA

2

School of Government and Public Policy, University of Arizona, AZ, USA

Corresponding Author:

Dan Reiter, Political Science, Emory University, 1555 Dickey Drive, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA.

Email: dreiter@emory.edu

or its institutional structure”(O’Rourke 2018, 14). However, FIRCs are grave gambles,

risking massiveupheaval, costly andfruitless wars, and internationalbacklash (O’Rourke

2018;Downes and Lilley 2010;Peic and Reiter 2011;Downes and O’Rourke 2016).

What conditions cause great powers to take such risks?

Past scholarship proposed that major powers launch FIRCs to advance their security

interests, focusing on American Cold War FIRC attempts (O’Rourke 2018). Continuing

to focus on American Cold War FIRC attempts, this article advances past FIRC

scholarship in two ways. First, it builds on O’Rourke’s (2018) theory that security

factors motivate great powers like the Cold War US to attempt FIRCs. She observed

that during the Cold War, for security reasons the US focused on preventing countries

from going Communist, and sometimes attempted FIRC to prevent states from going

Communist. This was in part to maintain its international hierarchy and to prevent

losses to the rival Soviet hierarchy. From here we ask, what factors caused the US to

suspect that a country might be going Communist, thereby motivating a FIRC attempt?

We propose that a key signal as to whether a state was leaning Communist was whether

its government expropriated private property, and that during the Cold Warthe US was

significantly more likely to attempt FIRC against a potential target if the government

expropriated such assets. The leading competitor to the security proposition is the

argument that the US attempted FIRC during the Cold War to advance subnational

economic interests, in particular interests of multi-national corporations (MNCs). We

propose that if security factors drove US decisions, then all economic expropriations

would make a US FIRC attempt more likely, because any expropriative act, whether of

locally-owned or US-owned property, would signal a shift to Communism and trigger

American security concerns. Conversely, if subnational economic factors drove US

FIRC attempts, then only expropriations of US-owned property would make a FIRC

attempt more likely, as expropriations of US-owned assets would directly threaten

MNC interests, but expropriations of locally-owned assets would not.

We testthe security and economic propositions on a data set of all US FIRC attempts

from 1947 to 1989, overt and covert, failed and successful. To code our central in-

dependent variables, we use a new data set of economic expropriations. The results

show a US hierarchy member was 40–80% more likely to be the target of a US FIRC

attempt during the Cold War if it expropriated economic assets, but that neutral

governments were not significantly more likely to be FIRC targets if they expropriated

economic assets. We also found that expropriation of any assets, not just US-owned,

made FIRC attempts more likely, suggesting that security interests dominated sub-

national economic interests. Together, these results suggest the primacy of security

interests over subnational economic interests, though not that national economic in-

terests were completely irrelevant in US FIRC decisions. They also show that the costs

and benefits of FIRC affected US decisions, as the lesser benefits of preventing a neutral

state from going Communist meant that economic expropriation within a neutral state

did not make a FIRC attempt more likely.

The article makes several contributions. First, it builds out FIRC security theory,

providing a more nuanced perspective of exactly what triggered US security concerns

652 Journal of Conflict Resolution 66(4-5)