How Perpetual War Became U.S. Ideology

Clinton followed through on these policies as president, committing American forces to military action in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Haiti for reasons almost exclusively framed in humanitarian and international legal terms. More importantly, perhaps, he committed to long-term nation-building operations after each conflict. He also greatly expanded the Somalia operation, turning it into a warlord hunting exercise that led to the infamous Black Hawk down incident.

While most mainstream Republicans in Congress and the commentariat bitterly opposed these interventions, Clinton had strong neoconservative allies in Bob Dole, John McCain, Charles Krauthammer, Bill Kristol, and Robert Kagan. While realist Republicans were criticizing Clinton for the follies of nation-building, a bipartisan neoconservative group calling itself the Project for a New American Century issued a statement of principles in June 1997 calling for significant increases in defense spending in order to promote "a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad; and national leadership that accepts the United States' global responsibilities." Among the Republican signatories were Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz.

In the 2000 campaign, George W. Bush, leveraging public frustration with Clinton's long string of interventions, declared that he would pursue a more "humble foreign policy" that eschewed "nation-building" and had as its "guiding question, 'Is it in our nation's interests?'" In other words, he pledged to be a realist president.

But, few readers will need reminding, he took us to war in Afghanistan -- a retaliation for a direct attack on the country and supported by virtually everyone -- but almost immediately turned it into the nation-building exercise in which we are still mired. And, of course, there was Iraq, ostensibly a preemptive strike at a rogue regime building weapons of mass destruction that instead became a years-long nation-building mission.

During his own 2008 campaign, President Obama gave every indication of a realist foreign policy, keeping Robert Gates on at Defense, reversing policies favored by our Eastern and Central European allies in order to improve relations with the increasingly important Russian state, and eschewing unhelpfully aggressive rhetoric about Iran. But the arguments of the liberal interventionists on his vaunted team of rivals -- notably Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, and Samantha Power -- ultimately won the day on Libya debate, overwhelming the more realist caution of Gates and the intelligence leadership.

How Did We Get Here?

While neoconservatives and liberal interventionists have led post-Cold War U.S. foreign policymaking, traditional realists continue to dominate the academic study of security policy and even the rank-and-file military and intelligence communities. But their more ideological brethren are better positioned to win the day politically.

The Cold War not only provided a neat national grand strategy, the prospect that superpower competition could lead to global nuclear annihilation greatly restrained the inclination for adventurism. That may be why, for example, no one seriously suggested a Responsibility to Protect Ugandan innocents from the atrocities of military dictator Idi Amin; Uganda was a Soviet client state. Similarly, a U.S. invasion of Libya to affect regime change after Muammar Gaddafi's 1980s terrorist strikes against our citizens would have been unthinkable. There was simply too much risk of escalating U.S.-Soviet tension.

Those days are gone. Bush senior proclaimed a "new world order" after the quick and decisive victory in the 1991 Gulf War, thinking that a permanent international consensus to enforce norms of decency had been forged. Though that grand vision never came to pass, the notion that the United States and its allies were now free to project power to "do good" has remained intact.

This has coincided with a still-ongoing revolution in global communications technology. With the rise of network news channels that can broadcast far-away violence into American living rooms, and more recently of social media technologies that give voice to oppressed peoples in all corners of the globe, this environment has made it much easier for advocates of humanitarian intervention to make their case.

Realist arguments about national interests, unknown risks, and post-conflict reconstruction have proven far less able to sway Americans than are television images of humans being slaughtered. Whereas the victims of Idi Amin were statistics, those dying in the Arab Spring have faces, names, and Facebook accounts.

The passionate zeal of the liberal interventionists and neoconservatives satisfies an emotional hunger that has been a part of our political system since the emotion-laden days of the Cold War, when the public first came to view U.S. foreign policy as a tool of good to be deployed against evil. Both ideologies use the language of morality and appeal to our shared humanity. People want to do something about tragedy and it's easy to persuade them that doing the right thing will be worthwhile. Realists may often be right, but they are rarely convincing.

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