Regime Change and the Fallacy of Strategic Reasoning: State Capacity, Institutional Continuity, and Strategic Miscalculation in the Middle East

This article investigates why regime change interventions frequently fail to produce stable political orders despite extensive institutional engineering efforts. Existing explanations emphasize implementation deficiencies, including insufficient planning, limited local knowledge, or resource constraints. While useful, these accounts do not adequately explain the structural regularity of failure across diverse contexts. The article proposes an alternative explanation centered on the concept of state continuity disruption, defined as the breakdown of interdependent mechanisms through which administrative coordination, coercive capacity, and political legitimacy are reproduced over time. It argues that regime change does not merely replace formal institutions, but destabilizes the underlying processes that sustain institutional continuity. Drawing on comparative analysis of Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and Iran, the article demonstrates that variation in outcomes is systematically linked to the degree of disruption of these continuity mechanisms. Where disruption is severe, institutional collapse follows; where continuity is preserved, political order remains relatively stable. By shifting analytical attention from institutional design to the reproduction conditions of political order, the article contributes to debates in comparative politics and state-building theory. It argues that institutions should be understood not as transferable organizational templates, but as historically embedded processes of continuity reproduction.

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