Getting the U.S. Intervention Addiction Under Control

The U.S. addiction to intervention is one of the major weaknesses of American foreign policy.

Monica Duffy Toft and Sidita Kushi investigate the reasons for the U.S. addiction to military intervention in a new article for Foreign Affairs:

Many American policymakers and analysts had come to believe that Washington’s Cold War interventions had aided the eventual U.S. victory over the Soviet Union. Old habits die hard, and as the self-proclaimed leader of the free world, the United States opted to continue intervening with military force—no longer to contain, roll back, and defeat Soviet communism but instead to protect human rights and advance democracy.

The U.S. addiction to intervention is one of the major weaknesses of American foreign policy. This addiction makes it so that the U.S. keeps getting involved in conflicts in which it has little at stake simply because it can and because global “leadership” demands that it does. The impulse to “act” and to take sides in someone else’s fight comes first and then the rationalizations come later. One day, it will be to support democratic rebels, and on another day it will be to combat terrorists, and later it will be to thwart the malign influence of some other government.

The reasons given don’t really matter to the addicts, and they can switch between them or abandon all of them when necessary. If U.S. troops remain in a war zone years after the original reason for their being there is gone, some new excuse will be found to keep them there. When there is no identifiable reason for keeping them there, the deployment becomes self-justifying: if the U.S. leaves, others will somehow benefit from the departure of our forces.