Homeward bound?

• Author: Eland, Ivan
• Position: US military

BOTH U.S. political parties--the Democrats and the Republicans--compete to see who can be more interventionist in world affairs. Although many liberal Democrats emphasize working through international institutions and organizations, such as the United Nations, and many conservative Republicans focus more on unilaterally employing U.S. power, they all end up trying to meddle in the policies of other nations and peoples, often using military force. Both parties want to fix the Middle East and Afghanistan, aggressively advance democracy and human rights around the world, attempt to stop the drug trade and international crime, and so on. For example, the candidates of both parties would have the United States become more involved in the affairs of Myanmar, Pakistan, Iran, Georgia and Zimbabwe.

Neither party has shown much interest in returning to the original inclination of the nation's founders toward military restraint overseas, as epitomized in Washington's Farewell Address--and practiced, with a few exceptions, from the founding all the way up to the Korean War. The foreign-policy disaster in Iraq should have spurred a long-needed national debate that could lead to such an urgently needed policy switch--but so far, this has not been reflected in the 2008 presidential race.

Perhaps this is because elections are usually decided on the basis of domestic issues; foreign policy seems more remote to the daily concerns of the general public than do bread-and-butter issues at home. This maxim has been recently demonstrated even during wartime, when bad economic news pushed out the Iraq War as the dominant issue in the 2008 presidential-election campaign.

In addition, there have been far-fewer mass protests in the United States against the drawn-out Iraq War than its Vietnam counterpart because the domestic consequences are much lower. Although the monetary costs of the Iraq War have exceeded the Vietnam War, the cost in lives is much lower (forty-one hundred at this writing versus fifty-eight thousand in Vietnam) and those fatalities are volunteers, not people yanked off the street involuntarily and into a conflict by conscription. People do act in their self-interest, and young people and their parents are more apt to become active, rather than passive, opponents of a war in which they or their loved ones have a higher probability of fighting and dying. But if the public--almost two-thirds of which believe that the Iraq War was not worth fighting--cannot stop the most-celebrated foreign-policy fiasco of our time, they are much less likely to stop, or even be inclined to stop, lesser-known interventions in foreign countries (for example, U.S. assistance to the Ethiopian invasion and continued occupation of Somalia) that don't seem to have much immediate impact on their daily lives.

Perhaps this could be explained because the average American believes that increased U.S. activism--especially maintaining a large military footprint in the greater Islamic world--is necessary to make the country safe by "promoting freedom" and waging the "war against terror." President Bush has echoed both of these sentiments. But let's disassociate slogans from empirical results.

First, Christopher Coyne, a professor of economics at West Virginia University, has studied U.S. efforts to bring liberal democracy to various countries around the world at gunpoint. He concluded that since the late 1800s, countries in which the United States has intervened militarily have achieved some semblance of an institutionalized democracy only 28 percent of the time ten years after the intervention, only 39 percent of the time after fifteen years and 36 percent of the time after twenty years. Moreover, Coyne uses a fairly low standard for achieving institutional democracy--a level slightly better than today's Iran. And even these percentages may overstate the success rate because in some cases the U.S. intervention may have had little to do with the change for the better. Coyne noted that as the length of time passes between the U.S. intervention and progress toward the creation of a liberal democracy, the effect of the former on the latter becomes more cloudy. He uses the examples of Lebanon and the Dominican Republic achieving his modest threshold fifteen years after U.S. interventions in 1958 and 1965, respectively. In the case of Lebanon, the progress unraveled in a civil war, which began two years after the fifteen-year mark in the mid-1970s. (1)

Second, the "offense is...