The Nonintervention DelusionNovember/December 2019 85With the costs so high, and the beneÄts seen as low, the imperative
is obvious to political leaders in both parties: get out o the existing
conÁicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria and avoid starting new ones.
In his State o the Union address this year, Trump declared that “great
nations do not Äght endless wars.” Scores o House Democrats have
signed a pledge to “end the forever war,” referring to the global war on
terrorism and U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan,
Niger, Somalia, Syria, Thailand, and Yemen, as have many o the
Democrats running for president. Joe Biden, the former vice presi-
dent and current presidential candidate, has also promised to “end the
forever wars.” He has described the Obama administration’s with-
drawal o U.S. troops from Iraq as “one o the proudest moments o
[his] life” and has called for pulling U.S. forces out o Afghanistan.
Many experts are o a similar mind. Discussions o “oshore bal-
ancing,” a strategy in which the United States would dramatically
scale back its global military presence and reduce the frequency o its
interventions, were once mostly conÄned to the halls o academia, but
today the idea is garnering new attention.
Faced with such a sweeping political consensus, one might conclude
that Washington should simply get on with it and embrace restraint.
The problem is that such a strategy overlooks the interests and values
that have prompted U.S. action in the Ärst place and that may for
good reasons give rise to it in the future. The consensus also neglects
the fact that, despite the well-known failures o recent large-scale
interventions, there is also a record o more successful ones—including
the eort underway today in Syria.
To assume that nonintervention will become a central tenet o future
U.S. foreign policy will, i anything, induce Americans to think less se-
riously about the country’s military operations abroad and thus generate
not only less successful intervention but possibly even more o it. In-
stead o settling into wishful thinking, policymakers should accept that
the use o military force will remain an essential tool o U.S. strategy.
That, in turn, requires applying the right lessons from recent decades.
GOODBYE TO ALL THAT?
The Ärst sign that the sweeping consensus around “ending endless
war” is more problematic than it Ärst appears is the telling set o
caveats that emerges even among its most ardent advocates. Consider
the many qualiÄcations that Democratic presidential candidates are