The secret history of regime change—and why Venezuela fits the pattern

Regime change is often sold as precision engineering. Remove the leader, manage the transition, restore order. Clean. Surgical. Final.

Lindsey A. O’Rourke’s Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War exposes why this story almost never survives contact with reality.

Between 1947 and 1989, the United States launched 64 covert regime-change operations. Most failed. Even the “successful” ones rarely delivered loyalty, stability, or legitimacy. Power did not dissolve nationalism; it inflamed it. Installed leaders discovered that domestic politics does not disappear simply because Washington prefers a different outcome.

The canonical cases are well known, yet their lessons remain unlearned. The 1953 overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran produced not durable compliance but revolutionary backlash. The failed 1958 effort to unseat Sukarno in Indonesia exposed the limits of proxy manipulation in a postcolonial society. 

The 1963 coup in South Vietnam, intended to strengthen American influence, resulted instead in the unintended assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem and deeper instability. In Angola, decades of covert support for rebel groups neither secured victory nor legitimacy. 

These episodes reveal a consistent pattern: secrecy may enable action, but it corrodes accountability and strategic foresight. Regimes propped up from the outside either collapsed under popular pressure or turned hostile once they confronted the same social forces that undid their predecessors.

The most uncomfortable finding is also the clearest. The U.S. did not export democracy; it often replaced elected governments with authoritarian ones. Dependency, not shared values, produced compliance—and dependency bred fragility, resentment, and revolt.

This is why Venezuela matters. Not because it is unique, but because it is familiar. The belief that “this time will be different” accompanies nearly every failed intervention in the American record. History shows otherwise.

O’Rourke’s book is not anti-American. It is anti-illusion. Power cannot substitute for legitimacy. Secrecy cannot override society. And fear-driven interventions accelerate decline rather than prevent it. The Cold War may be over. Its covert reflexes are not.