How Do We Break the Interventionist Habit?

Supporters of military intervention typically are not very attentive to the “reality on the ground” when acknowledging that reality warrants caution and restraint.

Jennifer Kavanagh and Bryan Frederick caution the U.S. against defaulting to military intervention:

Washington desperately needs to rethink its relationship to military force. Above all, it needs to stop regarding military adventures as the go-to solution for all potential threats. At the same time, however, it cannot view every potential intervention as an inevitable disaster that will divert resources from domestic priorities. The real danger is not military interventions per se but large ones with expansive objectives that are out of touch with the reality on the ground. Those are the ones that gamble with U.S. blood and treasure.

One of the reasons that the U.S. keeps running into trouble when it chooses to intervene in other countries is that it frequently sets expansive objectives that are out of touch with reality on the ground. This happens because policymakers often won’t limit their ambitions for the mission and because they are overconfident in what U.S. military action can achieve. Supporters of military intervention typically are not very attentive to the “reality on the ground” when acknowledging that reality warrants caution and restraint. They are also likely to listen to lobbyists, ideologues, and exiles that tell them what they want to hear about how easy and quick the intervention will be. In practice, when U.S. policymakers weigh potential costs and benefits of a possible intervention they are always too optimistic and don’t take seriously the pitfalls that they are likely to encounter.

As the authors note, “the decision to use military intervention to accomplish broad objectives has become increasingly common since World War II.” The temptation to “go big” often proves impossible for political leaders to resist. They don’t want to settle for limited goals, and initial successes encourage them to become more ambitious. Even when a strictly “limited” intervention is possible, presidents and their allies often have political incentives to get greedy and bite off more than they can chew. The twisted incentives in our political system make it extremely easy for a president to start a war while making it almost impossible for him to withdraw troops even when the original reason for sending them no longer exists.