American Interventionist Foreign Policy: One and a Quarter Century of Failure

by F. Andrew Wolf, Jr. Posted onAugust 23, 2024

When Theodore Roosevelt succeeded William McKinley as president in 1901, he realized the US was no longer just a continental republic; with the Spanish-American War of 1898, America now claimed Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines as territories, Cuba a protectorate and annexed Hawaii.

Roosevelt “believed it was the burden of ‘civilized’ nations to uplift ‘uncivilized’ nations,” says Michael Patrick Cullinane. He believed U.S. interests were global interests, and that it was actually good for “civilized” nations to intervene in other countries’ affairs.

Moreover, the 26th president made sure the U.S. played a larger role in international affairs by extending the Monroe doctrine through the Roosevelt Corollary – the United States, henceforth, would protect countries in the Americas from recolonization by European powers, and would intervene militarily if  necessary to do so. It was a foreign policy he described as “speak softly and carry a big stick.” US presidents since Roosevelt have pursued his “big stick” foreign policy agenda.

In the slightly less than a hundred years from 1898 to 1994, the U.S. government (directly or indirectly) has intervened successfully to change governments in Latin America, alone, at least 41 times. That amounts to once every 28 months for an entire century. Overall, while the United States engaged in 46 military interventions from 1948–1991, from 1992–2017 that number increased fourfold to 188.

The “first” Roosevelt era was the beginning of America’s orientation towards interventionism – it would influence America’s interventionist policies for the next one and a quarter century.

In more than 80 countries worldwide, the US manages over 750 military facilities. With such distribution of military capabilities, it has and continues to influence (if not actually intervene) in major and minor conflicts – most recently in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

In May of this year, the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal called for the US to assist the opposition in overthrowing the Iranian regime after the death in a helicopter crash of Iran’s President, Ebrahim Raisi.

And in the “breadbasket” of Europe, former Deputy Secretary of State (and “war hawk”) Victoria Nuland continued to agitate for greater belligerency – urging the White House to help Ukraine strike deep inside Russian territory. Given the recent incursion by Kiev into Russia’s Kursk region, Biden appears to have acquiesced to that view.

The US has since the second world war and especially after the fall of the Wall in ‘89, pursued foreign policy initiatives that foster calls for escalation, rather than diplomatic discourse, in potentially serious geopolitical situations.

In the late 1970s and ’80s, the U.S. funneled billions of dollars to Islamist extremists, including the Mujahideen Muslim guerrilla fighters that resisted the Soviet’s 10-year  invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s. While those fighters eventually expelled Russian influence, they later fought each other for dominance. In the ensuing power struggle (using American weapons), a cadre of those rebels (including Osama Bin Laden) ultimately coalesced into the Taliban, al-Qaeda – and 911.

Since 9/11, America has expended over $8 trillion on wars with “enemies” and “friends” in the Middle East. Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen define the former – Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan the latter. And this while thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of civilians perish in America’s foreign policy interventions to “nation-build” and make the Middle East safe for democracy.

Yet, irrespective of America’s decades-long failed foreign policy initiatives in the region, there are those who remain sanguine about further meddling in the Middle East. America’s history in Iran is a prime example of what we should not have done in the past and should not do in the future.

In 1953, the U.S. CIA along with Britain’s MI6 engineered the overthrow of the democratically elected Iranian leader, Mohammad Mosaddegh. The latter had nationalist leanings and opposed British petroleum companies’ exclusive oil rights in the country. The West further feared (without substantiation) that Mosaddegh had Communist sympathies that might push him to support the Soviets. Following the coup, the U.S. installed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi – a brutal dictator – loyal to the policies of the West.

Decades of the Shah’s repressive rule inspired hatred toward America that culminated in the 1979 Iran hostage crisis and the Iranian Revolution. The Shah was ousted and the government replaced with the theocratic Islamic Republic we have today.

And as we saw earlier, some want the U.S. to (once more) overthrow an Iranian government we were instrumental in bringing to power.

Former Congressman Ron Paul said it very well in 2008: Terrorists “don’t come here and attack us because we’re rich and we’re free. They come and they attack us because we’re over there.”

The wars in Iraq are quintessential examples of American foreign policy initiatives based on shortsighted aims of neoconservative ideology during the George W. Bush years. Personal enmity and faulty (or unpopular) intelligence resulted in thousands of Americans killed based on a false premise. There never were any weapons of mass destruction – just the hatred of an arrogant Iraqi leader and the questionable notion of nation-building in the Middle East.

Today, the wars continue. The US played an integral role in the events that led to the devastating war between Russia and Ukraine. Despite the fall of the Soviet Union in ‘89, NATO remained intact and expanded eastward. Soviet expert George Kennan, a key architect of US Cold War policy, warned such action would be “a tragic mistake” that would ultimately provoke “a bad reaction from Russia.”

For over a decade now, against the warnings of former ambassador to Russia and current CIA Director William Burns, the U.S. has openly advocated for Ukrainian entry into NATO, a hard “red line” for Russia.

Even though Western meddling in the affairs of Ukraine was anathema to the Russians, the U.S. helped engineer a coup to overthrow the democratically elected president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, in 2014. The latter had announced that he would sign an economic agreement with Russia instead of the E.U. This would eventually lead to the Ukraine-Russia war currently in its second year of hostilities.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has disclosed that in 2021 (one year before the Ukraine-Russia conflict began) Russia sent NATO a draft treaty regarding Ukraine. The terms required NATO to abandon any future plans of expansion as a precondition for Russia not invading Ukraine. The West refused. Only then did Russia invade. The invasion, while reprehensible, certainly was telegraphed by Moscow and with no less than due warning.

Recent research by Monica Duffy Toft, professor of international politics at Tufts, is instructive. The US she finds, is indeed engaging in military interventions more often than previously, and for different reasons.

“The rate of interventions has accelerated over time, and since the end of the Cold War, we’ve been pursuing fewer and lower national interests,” says Toft.

Just since the year 2000, Toft’s 5-year research project documents 72 interventions. And in one region of the world, the Middle East and North Africa, the U.S. has been involved in 77 military interventions, mostly since the 1940s.

Toft likens the current state of U.S. foreign policy to a game of “whack-a-mole,” in which the U.S. sees issues popping up and has “only one way of dealing with them, which is the hammer” of military force.

The professor is clear in her assessment: Overreliance on destabilizing sanctions and military force rather than diplomacy, intelligence gathering, economic statecraft, and the powers of persuasion harms America’s reputation abroad, causing itself to be viewed as a threat – diminishing its influence in the process.

America’s current self-imposed role as the “world’s policeman” is a capitulation of US diplomatic leadership. But this is what happens when a great country like the United States allows decades of mediocre leadership to prevail. Political agendas produce foreign policy initiatives (Vietnam, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine) inconsistent with what is in the best interest of America.

US foreign policy should seek two objectives:

Keeping America safe and fostering America’s economic and political hegemony through strategic leadership rather than jeopardizing both by trying to be the “world’s policeman.”

Professor Toft declares against an isolationist position, but neither she says should America’s foreign policy default position be one of military intervention first.

A century of this has failed to produce a safer world for anyone – including America.

I am Director of The Fulcrum Institute, a new organization of current and former scholars in the Humanities, Foreign Affairs and Philosophy, Situated in Houston, Texas, USA. The “Institute”  focuses on the foreign policy initiatives of Europe as it relates to the economic and foreign policy initiatives of the US, UK, China and Russia. Our primary interest is in working towards an economic and political world in which more voices and fewer bombs are heard. (The website-URL will be live by late fall of 2024. The web address will be http://www.thefulcruminstitute.org.).