The Governments We Unmade

How many governments has America helped remove, and what happened after they fell?

From Iran and Guatemala to Chile, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, the United States has repeatedly intervened in the political fate of other nations. Sometimes through invasion. Sometimes through covert operations, economic pressure, propaganda, political funding or support for local actors.

The methods changed.

The objective often did not.

The Governments We Unmade is a provocative, evidence-driven history of how regime change became an instrument of American foreign policy, and why Washington repeatedly proved better at removing governments than controlling what came next.

Drawing on declassified records, official investigations, congressional inquiries, government archives and leading historical scholarship, Sage Norden traces the evolution of American intervention across more than a century. From the age of gunboat diplomacy to the birth of the CIA, from Cold War coups to post-9/11 invasions and the subtler instruments of modern political influence, the book asks a deceptively simple question:

When does influencing another country become deciding who is allowed to govern it?

Inside, readers will encounter:

• Iran, 1953, and the operation that helped bring down Mohammad Mossadegh.
• Guatemala, 1954, where a covert success helped produce consequences lasting decades.
• Cuba and the Bay of Pigs, when the machinery of regime change met a government it could not easily remove.
• Vietnam, Chile and Nicaragua, where intervention took radically different forms while pursuing a familiar objective.
• Iraq and Afghanistan, where governments could be removed quickly but stable political orders proved vastly harder to construct.
• Libya, where a mission authorised to protect civilians evolved into the removal of a ruler, with consequences far beyond Libya itself.
• The modern era of sanctions, political funding, information operations and indirect pressure, where the boundary between diplomacy and regime change becomes increasingly difficult to define.

But this is not a catalogue of conspiracy theories, nor does it pretend that Washington controls everything that happens abroad.

Each major case is classified according to the strength of the evidence. The book distinguishes documented operations from strongly evidenced cases, genuinely contested claims and allegations the available record does not support. It also confronts the strongest arguments in defence of American intervention, including Soviet expansionism, local political agency, humanitarian intervention and the terrible consequences that non-intervention can sometimes produce.

The result is more unsettling than a simple indictment.

Again and again, the historical record reveals a fundamental distinction between removing a government and successfully determining what replaces it.

A coup may take days.

An invasion may take weeks.

The consequences can last generations.

The Governments We Unmade is ultimately not a book about whether America is uniquely evil or uniquely benevolent. It is about power, the institutions that exercise it, the assumptions that survive failed interventions, and the extraordinary difficulty of measuring success when the people making the decision have moved on long before its consequences become clear.

For readers of political history, geopolitics, CIA and intelligence history, American foreign policy, international relations and the hidden history of the Cold War and post-Cold War world, this is a challenging examination of one of the most consequential instruments of modern American power.

Governments can be removed in days. History takes much longer to reveal what their removal cost.