Brookings Institution: more military action by USA in future

America and the Use of Force: Sources of Legitimacy

The Stanley Foundation's Bridging the Foreign Policy Divide, June 2007

Many American and foreign observers believe that the painful and so far unsuccessful intervention in Iraq will make the United States more reluctant to go to war in the future. Three powerful factors, however, suggest that, to the contrary, the United States may resort to military action more, not less, often in the future. The character of US foreign policy, manifested over two centuries, is that of a nation willing to use force with relative frequency on behalf of both principles and tangible interests and generally believing in the justness and appropriateness of military action in international affairs. The distribution of power in the world since the collapse of the Soviet Union?-not very different today, despite the rise of powers such as China and India?-invites military intervention by a dominant military power unchecked by the deterrent power of any nation or grouping of nations with roughly equal strength. Finally, the contemporary international system presents an array of circumstances in which the use of force will be seen as both necessary and proper. Indeed, the number of such challenges?-be they to curb proliferation, counter terrorists, curtail gross human rights violations, or counter some other threat requiring military action?-is likely to increase, not decrease, in the years ahead.

These three factors have already produced a 15-year post-ColdWar period in which the United States has taken military action with greater frequency than ever before and with far greater frequency than any other nation during that time. From 1989 to 2003 the United States intervened with significant military force on nine occasions?-Panama (1989), Somalia (1992), Haiti (1994), Bosnia (1995-96), Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (2001), and Iraq (1991, 1998, 2003), an average of one large-scale military intervention every 18 months. This interventionism has been a bipartisan affair?-five interventions were launched by Republican administrations, four by Democratic administrations?-and regardless of often-alleged, but in fact largely mythical doctrinal distinctions. The supposedly "realist" administration of George H. W. Bush, for instance, launched two interventions aimed at purely "humanitarian" purposes (Somalia) or to remove a dictator and effect a change of regime (Panama.) The supposedly "liberal internationalist" Clinton administration carried out three military interventions without the approval of the UN Security Council and two (Kosovo and Iraq in 1998) over the public objections of one or more of the council's permanent members. At least one intervention, in Haiti in 1994, was undertaken explicitly to remove a dictatorship, reinstall a democracy, and effect a change of regime. But its two interventions in the Balkans also aimed in part at undermining the power of Slobodan Milosevic and eventually unseating him, as the Kosovo war ultimately did.