The Nonintervention DelusionNovember/December 2019 91For all the contributions o U.S. partners, however, more often
than not, only the United States has the will and the capability to lead
successful military operations. France led a successful operation in
Côte d’Ivoire in 2004 and in Mali in 2013, and the United Kingdom
led one in Sierra Leone in 2000, but those were exceptions. Iraq would
not have left Kuwait in 1991 had the United States not led the eort;
mass slaughter in the Balkans during the 1990s would not have ended
without a dominant U.S. role, even though it took place on European
soil. In Afghanistan and Syria, U.S. allies have made it clear that they
will stay as long as the United States does but will head for the exit
otherwise. U.S. friends in Europe have proved decidedly uninterested
in taking matters into their own hands, and when Washington has
declined to meaningfully intervene itself, they have often stood idly
by. In Libya after QaddaÄ’s fall, the Europeans failed to impose secu-
rity even as growing numbers o refugees and migrants set sail across
the Mediterranean. In Syria before U.S. bombing began, they under-
took no military campaign against , even as the arrival o Syrian
refugees destabilized European politics. When U.S. allies do take
matters into their own hands, they can make a bad situation worse.
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates decided to intervene in
Yemen’s civil war, but their brutal and indiscriminate campaign led to
a humanitarian disaster and strengthened the very Iranian role it
sought to eliminate.
The Änal reason most frequently oered for getting out o the
intervention business relates to its costs, both direct ones—the lives
lost and damaged, the dollars borrowed and spent—and opportunity
costs. It is increasingly clear that China and Russia represent the fore-
most challenge to the United States over the long term and that the
competition with them has begun in earnest. I that’s the case, why tie
up scarce resources in less important military interventions?
Here, too, a dose o subtlety is in order. The prospect o great-
power competition should indeed structure the United States’ coming
approach to national security, but a focus on counterterrorism is
required, as well. After all, the George W. Bush administration en-
tered oce hoping to focus on China, only to see its best-laid plans
upended by the 9/11 attacks. Withdrawing prematurely from terrorist
safe havens such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria would threaten the
great-power emphasis necessary in the next phase o the United
States’ global life. A major terrorist attack on U.S. soil, for instance,