Engdahl has summarized the situation thusly:

In short, virtually every regime which has been the target of a US-backed soft
coup in the past twenty years has involved Gene Sharp and, his associate,
Col. Robert Helvey. Notably, Sharp was in Beijing two weeks before student
demonstrations at Tiananmen Square in 1989. The Pentagon and US intelligence
have refined the art of such soft coups to a fine level. RAND planners call it
swarming, referring to the swarms of youth...who can be mobilized on command
to destabilize a target regime.34