Balancing Act: Coercion, Terrorism, and Regime Stability
In this article, Adam Lichtenheld and co-authors examine how perceived terrorist threats shape coercive foreign policy, showing why states may seek to keep adversarial regimes weak but stable rather than push them towards collapse.
- Author
- Adam Lichtenheld
- Date
- 24 July 2026
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Foreign policy instruments such as sanctions, military force and foreign aid are often assessed by whether they change a target government’s behaviour or bring about regime change. The authors argue that this approach can misrepresent what coercing states are actually trying to achieve when they also perceive a terrorist threat within the target country.
The article develops a typology based on two factors: the political relationship between the coercing state and the target regime, and the perceived level of terrorist threat emanating from the target’s territory. When a regime is adversarial and the terrorist threat is high, the coercing state may adopt a ‘balancing’ approach. It applies enough pressure to keep the regime weak, but avoids pushing it towards collapse because extremist non-state actors could exploit the resulting instability.
The authors examine this argument through in-depth case studies of US foreign policy in Syria and Afghanistan. Their analysis combines process tracing with elite interviews, fieldwork, primary and secondary sources, and original data on US aid projects in Syria. The cases show how changing threat perceptions can lead policy to shift between cooperative, bolstering, punitive and balancing approaches.
The findings challenge the common conclusion that sanctions and other coercive instruments necessarily fail when they do not remove a regime or compel major policy change. In Syria after 2014 and Afghanistan after 2021, US policy instead sought to maintain regimes in a precarious position: constrained and isolated, but sufficiently stable to prevent terrorist organisations from gaining more power or territory.
The article contributes to research on coercion, sanctions and counterterrorism by clarifying how the aims of foreign policy instruments can change. It also highlights the political and humanitarian costs of balancing strategies, including their possible effects on human rights, authoritarian repression, civilian governance and the duration of conflict.