There was a time not too long ago when President Donald Trump and his allies criticized Democratics for their supposed penchant for war. "KAMALA WILL SEND YOUR SONS TO WAR," Trump aide Stephen Miller posted on social media during the 2024 presidential campaign. As a candidate, Trump claimed many times that if he won he would end the war between Russia and Ukraine in a day, perhaps even before officially taking office.
After his inauguration, Trump boasted about ending wars and even made an unsuccessful bid for a Nobel Peace Prize—before later accepting someone else's. But in year two of his presidency, with US missiles raining down on Tehran, the president's time as self-described peacemaker appears to be over. Instead Trump has taken the United States into the kind of foreign entanglement he once decried.
Yes, Iran's leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is now dead. And few, if any, commentators in the United States appear to be sorry about that. Yet the implications of the quick decapitation of Iran's leadership remain unclear. As history shows, when it comes to forcibly changing the government of a foreign adversary, an initial victory can frequently be illusory.
Below are six notable cases of attempted regime change through military intervention. In each case, the result was years or even decades of unintended consequences.
Ukraine, February 2022. Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his military into Ukraine in a full-scale invasion, arguing that the government there posed a threat to Russia. Years earlier, Ukrainians had ousted a Russian-backed president, and the country was veering further from Moscow's sphere of influence. When Russian tanks and aircraft poured over the Ukrainian border in a massive show of force, the United States feared a rout and offered to evacuate President Volodymyr Zelensky. The Russian advance fizzled, however, and images of its tanks charred and abandoned spread on the internet. Four years later, the two countries remain locked in a stalemate, with no clear end to the war in sight.
Libya, March 2011. As Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi's forces bore down on rebels in the city of Benghazi, the United States and allies began airstrikes to stall the assault and prevent a humanitarian crisis. Gaddafi had threatened to show "no mercy" to his enemies. The UN Security Council called for a no-fly zone over Libya and passed a resolution authorizing "all necessary measures" to protect civilians. "We will deny the regime arms, cut off its supply of cash, assist the opposition, and work with other nations to hasten the day when Gaddafi leaves power," former President Barack Obama told an audience after the US air barrage had begun.
The strikes changed the trajectory of the civil war in Libya and led to the downfall of Gaddafi, who was found in a drainage pipe by rebels, brutalized, and killed. Gaddafi had been a long-time antagonist of the West. Under his rule, Libya had been a prominent supporter of terrorism, including the Lockerbie bombing that blew a Pan Am jetliner out of the sky. His government had once tried to build nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs. But Gaddafi's downfall—which came just seven months after the US intervention—did not lead to lasting peace. It led instead to years of civil war and instability that contributed to conflicts in other countries.
Despite US efforts, Obama told The Atlantic in 2016, "Libya is a mess."
Iraq, March 2003. Following the 9/11 terror attacks, the George W. Bush administration began a long push to make the case that Iraq—which had no known connections to the al Qaeda attacks—also posed a grave risk to the United States and the world. The administration branded Iraq as part of the "axis of evil," along with North Korea and Iran. Though UN inspectors had been painstakingly dismantling Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs before the 2003 invasion, the Bush administration argued that Iraq's efforts had continued. On March 17, three days before the US assault began, Bush gave Iraqi President Saddam Hussein 48 hours to leave the country.
The operation to crush Saddam and his military proceeded quickly; within weeks Baghdad was in control of allied forces. In a notoriously embarrassing moment, Bush gave a speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier in front of a giant "Mission Accomplished" banner. The mission, of course, wasn't accomplished. Far from it. The war soon morphed into an Iraqi insurgency. The year 2007 proved to be the deadliest for US troops, with 900 deaths. The security situation in Iraq remained tenuous for years. In 2014, three years after US troops had left the country, the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist group captured a large swath of Iraq, incorporating it into a so-called caliphate. Though US airstrikes and support to Iraq sent ISIS into retreat, to this day, security in the country remains a challenge.
Afghanistan, October 2001. Bush sent US forces to Afghanistan to topple the Taliban regime that had ruled the country since 1996 and provided a haven from which Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda plotted the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. "The Taliban must act and act immediately," Bush told Congress. "They will hand over the terrorists, or they will share in their fate." The Taliban didn't comply with Bush's edict, and a US-led coalition that included anti-Taliban fighters in Afghanistan attacked. Within two months, the Taliban surrendered its last stronghold, and the "war in Afghanistan seemed to be coming to a surprisingly rapid end," as The New York Times wrote. But then a deeply flawed US-backed government took power and what followed was a seemingly endless conflict that saw 2,300 US military deaths from 2001 to 2021, a small fraction of the 179,000 Afghan civilians, national police, nongovernmental organization staff, allied troops, and others who died. The war ended for the United States when former President Joe Biden ordered a withdrawal of remaining US forces in 2021, allowing the Taliban to rapidly retake power.
"I will not repeat the mistakes we've made in the past—the mistake of staying and fighting indefinitely in a conflict that is not in the national interest of the United States, of doubling down on a civil war in a foreign country, of attempting to remake a country through the endless military deployments of US forces," Biden said at the time.
Afghanistan, December 1979. The Soviet Union sent thousands of troops to Afghanistan, occupying Kabul and large parts of the country in an attempt to install a friendly, socialist government that could withstand an Islamic insurrection. Before the invasion, the fractious Afghan government had been seeking to bring communist reforms to Islamic tribal areas, fueling a rebellion. The Soviets intervened to prop up the government—including by killing and replacing its leader. While Moscow envisioned a limited role, it increasingly found its troops involved in fighting. "Soviet leaders did not expect a protracted and costly involvement in Afghanistan when they approved the Soviet military intervention in December 1979," Artemy Kalinovsky, an expert on the Soviet Union at Temple University, wrote in a 2009 paper in the Journal of Cold War Studies, adding that "the months following the invasion were key in turning the intervention into a decade-long war."
In the end, The Soviet Union spent billions of dollars in a war that cost millions of lives, according to a US State Department history. The Red Army had not been able to defeat the Mujahideen insurgents and pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989. It left a "shattered country" that was ripe for the Taliban takeover a few years later.
Bay of Pigs, Cuba, April 1961. There are cases when regime change operations seem to go smoothly at first. The Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba—orchestrated by the US Central Intelligence Agency after Fidel Castro's movement toppled dictator Fulgencio Batista—was not one of these cases. Well before the invasion, Castro's government learned that US-backed counterrevolutionaries were training in Florida and Guatemala. From early on, the secret plan was not so secret. Part of the plot involved American planes made to look like those of Cuban defectors to obscure the role of the United States. Pilots were to use them to neutralize Castro's air force ahead of the invasion. But after the bombing runs, the US ambassador to the United Nations, attempting to exonerate his country, showed off photos of the planes, inadvertently revealing that they were American. Castro's planes had different nose cones. When the invasion forces landed in the swamps of southern Cuba, Castro's army was there to meet them, thwarting the counter revolution before it even began. The fiasco had the effect of drawing Castro's island regime closer to the Soviet Union. A little over a year later, the United States and the Soviet Union faced off in the Cuban Missile Crisis after the Soviets stationed nuclear missiles on the island to prevent another invasion and US spy planes discovered them. Today, Cuba is the midst of severe economic crisis, but the heirs to Castro's revolution remain in control of the island nearly 70 years after the Bay of Pigs.
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The US-orchestrated regime-change operation in Cuba in 1961 known as the Bay of Pigs invasion ended in a failure that only strengthened Cuba's ties to the Soviet Union, the opposite of the hoped-for result. Credit: Miguel Vinas via Wikimedia Commons.
