Why Interventionism Isn’t a Dirty Word
Whether we want to admit it or not, we’re all better off if America stands tall instead of slumping inward.
Jamie Paul here. This post is by Contributor Johan Pregmo, but my recent piece covering the Israel-Hamas War was republished by Future of Jewish.
I was 13 on September 11th, 2001. My mother walked up to me and said, in an understandable fit of shock-induced hyperbole, that there had been a major terror attack in the United States, and that World War III might break out. Nothing so drastic happened, and my life over in Sweden remained largely unaffected. But the disastrous impact of 9/11 directly led to wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, which saw more than 7,000 US service members killed, over 30,000 veteran suicides, 432,000 civilian deaths, and over 3.5 million indirect deaths — at a cost of $8 trillion. This senseless loss of life over misguided foreign boondoggles, coupled with President George W. Bush’s lies about “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq as a pretext for war, had lasting effects on US foreign policy. Interventionism, a staple of America’s hawkish, Cold War-era modus operandi, had fallen out of style by the time Bush left office in disgrace, and by the populist resurgence of 2016, it had become a dirty word.
Over the course of the 2010s, the progressive left, who had long opposed muscular foreign policy, were joined by many on the right, who ditched neoconservatism in favor of anti-war isolationism. More than that, public opinion across the board has soured on interventionism. According to a 2023 YouGov survey, most Americans still think going to war in response to being attacked is usually justified, but only about half think the same when it comes to protecting allies. The notion of defending US interests abroad is far less popular. Only 25 percent approve of military intervention to stabilize regional conflicts, 24 percent to promote democratic governance, and 20 percent to promote US business interests.
The same survey found that a plurality of Americans think every war and armed conflict of the past 35 years has been the wrong decision, and that the US military has not been successful in a single operation in the past 70 years. Independents, who are a larger group than either Democrats or Republicans, are the most anti-interventionist cohort by a wide margin. Trust in the US military as an institution has also been collapsing. Gallup found that only 32 percent of Americans in 2023 had a “great deal” of confidence in the armed forces, a 22-year low, and just 51 percent in 2022 thought the US military was the world’s strongest, down from 64 percent in 2010.
Gone are the days when the USSR could unite Americans and rally public support. Gone is the image of the United States as the shining city on a hill. Today, saber-rattling and military intervention is as unpopular as it has been in generations. The American people no longer support direct foreign involvement. And it’s not just dovishness, but isolationism that’s on the rise. “We should mind our business and they should mind theirs” is now an increasingly common attitude in US political discourse on both sides of the aisle. Today, with the war in Ukraine ongoing, US support faces staunch opposition from both the right and the left. Opinion polls suggest less than half of US adults (47 percent) support Biden’s aid program while a good 39 percent disapprove, with further skepticism trending upward.
When interventionism becomes controversial and unfavored in a democracy — a system meant to be responsive to the popular will — it’s worth tackling the question head-on: can interventionism ever be a force for good, or is meddling in world affairs always doomed to failure?
To answer that question, we first need to turn back the clocks.
After winning a war of independence against Britain, the burgeoning American republic, separated by geography from all serious geopolitical rivals, traditionally concerned itself with domestic matters and its few neighbors. Isolationist by geography and by nature, the country spent the 19th century as a growing second-rate power, dwarfed in influence by giants like England, France, and Germany. When World War I broke out, popular sentiment was decidedly against intervention. Despite a respectable effort in its contributions to the victory of the Entente — France, Russia and the UK — when World War II began, the American people were once again unwilling to get involved, preferring to sell weapons or send aid to the Allies. Only when the US got a bloody nose in the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor did public opinion change.
At the conclusion of the Second World War, the US, already an economic powerhouse, emerged as the dominant hegemon of the West. Rushing in to fill the vacuum left by a devastated Europe, and fueled by ideological rivalry and nuclear paranoia, the US became the foremost player in world affairs, locked in the Cold War arms race with the Soviet Union. Riding high on their postwar glory, Americans assumed a new and compelling national mythos as the protagonists of the global story — the heroes who saved the world from Nazi tyranny.
Several decades later, the Vietnam war would shake the national ego. Originally a French conflict, it turned into a contest between the communist North and the US-backed South, one the Americans would famously lose. Happening amid the days of peace-and-love hippie movements, the high death toll, along with shocking footage of atrocities like the My Lai Massacre, in which US soldiers slaughtered 500 civilians, made the war an increasingly tough sell. In the public eye, it was hard to justify such brutal attrition, and for what — a nation that poses no real threat? Top advisors might have seen strategic value in trading lives for checking the spread of communism, but the voters increasingly did not, and in a democracy, the government must ultimately bend to the will of the people it’s elected to represent.
A single loss was, of course, not enough to break the US’s power, nor its aggressive posture. But a precedent was set. Overseas wars were no longer something that could be done with the full support of the people. Vietnam shattered the illusion of America’s categorical moral superiority. From that point on, trust in political leaders was never the same. War was no longer automatically just, but rather increasingly seen as a cynical means to enforce US dictates abroad. With the fiascos of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the failed “War on Terror”, whole new generations became as jaded as their still-living Vietnam-era elders, paving the way for narratives about “forever wars” and the rise of mainstream isolationism.
It’s not as if anti-interventionists are wrong in all that they say. Vietnam was a disaster. Iraq cost hundreds of thousands of lives and destabilized the Middle East for generations to come. Afghanistan was an exercise in futility. And what was it all for, exactly? It’s hard to fault anyone for thinking that untold thousands died for nothing. Even the most hawkish neoconservative, if they possess a shred of objectivity, must concede that these operations were ultimately failures, and ones the US would have been better off without. Similarly, there’s nothing wrong with objecting to imperialism and international bullying. The brutal exploitations of past empires, and the profound suffering they caused, are nothing to glorify or return to. That form of interventionism must be opposed on basic humanitarian grounds.
But the anti-interventionist mindset runs the risk of painting with a broad brush. Not every war is Iraq or Vietnam. Not every operation is misguided or evil. Sometimes, intervention is not only justifiable, but positively ethical. Sometimes, standing by and doing nothing instead of lending help can make one the moral monster. The most obvious example, of course, is World War II. Whereas WWI was a clash of moribund imperial powers eager for land grabs and unprepared for the horrors of modern warfare, WWII’s struggle against Nazism and fascism had no such moral grayness. The Holocaust’s death toll alone would have justified intervention — there were clear-cut villains who had to be stopped. And so they were.
What became of these three Axis Powers? Germany is now a free democracy with the strongest economy in Europe. Its pre-eminence was regained the proper way, through peace, negotiation, and economic development. Italy, however flawed, is still a democracy. Japan had the most dramatic transformation, rewriting its constitution and becoming both a liberal democracy and key US ally, its old imperialist ways utterly broken. It’s telling that despite the US killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians, 88.5 percent of Japanese people today have a favorable view of America.
But one could argue that WWII was a special case. The US was pulled into the war, with a public that was initially against it. The Korean war (1950–1953), by contrast, was a more modern-style intervention in which a US-led United Nations coalition reversed the near-complete conquest of the Korean peninsula by Chinese-backed North Korea. The long-term results speak for themselves. North Korea is a human rights hellscape with a totalitarian state that would make 1984’s Oceania blush, while South Korea is a prosperous democracy. Imagine the whole peninsula reduced to the same level of abject tyranny as North Korea. We don’t need to imagine: we can literally see it from space.
Consider also the Gulf War (1990–1991). The leader of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, was as bloodthirsty a dictator as they came. After his futile war with Iran left him short of cash, he threatened neighboring Kuwait, whose oil production depressed Iraq’s own oil-based economy. The ensuing US intervention was so utterly one-sided that it boggles the mind. In a single day, American forces established complete air control, and Iraq was swiftly pushed out of Kuwait. Yes, the US had self-serving economic interests of their own, but that doesn’t make the outcome less moral: a vile, dictatorial bully was sent packing, and peace was restored for a time. Impugning any and all instances of self-interest is a mistake anti-interventionists commonly make. Self-interest can and often does coincide with the morally correct choice: in a globalized economy with free trade, keeping the peace benefits everyone.
There’s also the case of Kosovo. Under the brutal rule of Slobodan Milosevic during Kosovo’s war with Albania, over 100,000 Bosnians were killed in massacre after massacre. A US-led NATO coalition wound up intervening, and a humanitarian nightmare was prevented from escalating into something much worse. This, too, was morally clear-cut — a campaign of tyrannical mass murder was stopped dead in its tracks. As a result, the Kosovoans have an enduring love for President Bill Clinton, who led the NATO coalition — and wouldn’t you, if your people were being butchered and a foreign power stepped in and put an end to it?
To many in recent years, however, the long shadows of failed interventions loom so large that no justification for taking action can be considered. Intervention is written off as unconditionally wrong. Some view it as an intrinsic expression of wicked and self-serving national ambitions unworthy of a moral people. Others see the potential benefits as not being worth the cost of American lives. Still others feel that by meddling in the affairs of others, the US can only make situations worse with their heavy-handed fumbling.
What tends to get lost in the analysis is that every example of intervention, both the successes and the failures, are judged by their outcomes. Had President Lyndon B. Johnson known that nearly 60,000 Americans would die and that the US would suffer humiliation in Vietnam, he would probably not have entered the war. Likewise, had Korea been a wholesale debacle which landed the peninsula in communist hands, we would likely view the war as an atrocious blunder the US should never have committed to. We make these distinctions in our armchairs with the benefit of hindsight. The people who made those decisions did not.
The consequences of modern anti-interventionist narratives are more than just unnuanced moral confusion — they have been a wellspring of insane conspiracies. Hunter Biden’s laptop, Ukrainian money laundering, and the firing of a prosecutor dominate the discourse about Ukraine, despite President Biden’s measured response to send aid while committing to avoid deploying troops. Merely helping another country defend itself from an aggressor is seen, in the horseshoe-land of the far left and far right, as imperialism. Continued aid to Ukraine is struggling to pass Congress, even though the cost is minuscule in comparison to the gargantuan US economy and federal budget.
Perhaps the most crucial rebuttal of anti-interventionism is as simple as it is ironclad: nature abhors a vacuum. If the US returns to its 19th-century isolationist roots and “minds its own business”, not only will America weaken itself internationally, but that power will be seized by far less humanitarian players.
Right now, that would mean the economically ascendant China, who are effectively at war with their Indian neighbors, who have been charged with genocide of the Uyghurs, and whose insidious debt traps already exert considerable soft power over much of the developing world. China pursues an aggressive expansionist policy, including the seizure of Tibet and aggression toward Taiwan, and their oppressive anti-LGBT laws deny equality to many citizens. As usual, the “equality” promised by communism always equates to even more oppression and starker class divides.
That being said, as potential successors to the US’s role as the world’s superpower goes, China is the more benevolent option to Russia, whose relation to human rights is that of a domestic abuser to his victims. Although not the hegemon it was in past decades, Russia is the single most powerful active threat in Europe. Currently engaged in a bloody war of naked conquest, with a long history of violence and invasion, Russia exists in a perpetual state of autocratic dictatorship and bullying.
Imagine, then, a world where the US had no power to help. Imagine a world where the US has walled itself away, and these rapacious superpowers, unchecked, were free to do to their neighbors everything they pleased. Imagine a divided and fractious Europe having to stand alone against Russia. Imagine Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and India all open to attack from China. Imagine a world where the strongest, most influential powers are merciless, totalitarian imperialists who regard human rights as little more than toilet paper.
I used to laugh at the idea of the US as some kind of “protector of freedom and democracy.” It seemed so childishly propagandistic, particularly from the perspective of a European like myself. Upon reflection, however, I’ve realized that it’s effectively true. Like any great power, the US has its flaws, foibles, and self-interests, but the fact that the greatest superpower in human history is a liberal democracy willing to stand up to autocracy matters. And it’s vastly preferable to any realistic alternative.
What does it mean to recognize that interventionism can be a force for good? What specifically should the US do? First, it’s important to recognize that not all “interventions” must be military inventions with boots on the ground or bombs from above. Intervention encompasses a range of ways a country might exert its power on the world stage, from economic sanctions, to aid packages, to monetary loans, trade deals, diplomacy, and more. To return to Ukraine, for 1.5 percent of the US budget — half of it in the form of pre-existing materiel like tanks, weapons system, and ammunition — the Russian army has been thwarted, crippled, and weakened for years to come. In the modern world, money is often stronger than force of arms — and only China comes remotely close to the sheer power of the US dollar. Soft power goes a long way.
But, of course, the dollar alone is not always enough. Military force, or at least the implied threat of force, is sometimes necessary. He who wants peace must prepare for war — and the US is amply prepared. The US must maintain an international presence, and it must be backed up on the one hand by the power of its economy and on the other by its formidable military. As Teddy Roosevelt said, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Aggressive military intervention should never be a first course of action — but it should never be completely left off the table either. A world in which the United States has categorically sworn off flexing their military muscles is a world that becomes a veritable buffet for harsher, greedier, more ruthless actors.
The United States is an empire of greater power than any that has ever existed in human history, but unlike its predecessors in the Romans, Ottomans, and British, it’s a liberal democracy founded on Enlightenment principles. The US has a moral responsibility to use that power for the values it stands for — not just for itself but for the global good. Liberalism and human rights are in no way guaranteed. The amazing progress of the past few centuries could fall to pieces overnight. It takes active maintenance and a concerted effort to incentivize the better angels of our nature, and who better to fill this role than the United States? There is no preferable alternative. The US is the hegemon of the world — and whether we want to admit it or not, we’re all better off if it stands tall instead of slumping inward.
See also: “Ukraine to the Hilt”
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In a better world, there'd be no hegemony. However, in the one we have, I'll take American over Russian or Chinese any day.
Bollocks!