AMERICA IS addicted to war—or so goes the increasingly bipartisan indictment of U.S. statecraft in the post-Cold War era. Critics on the Left and the Right, in the academy and in Washington, argue that policymakers have reflexively resorted to force to address international problems that might be better addressed with non-military tools or simply not addressed at all. America, in this telling, has been the proverbial toddler with a hammer that sees every international crisis, every foreign challenge, as a potential nail. This militaristic approach, it is alleged, has produced a disastrous record of strategic failure in U.S. interventions; it has drained the nation’s resources and corrupted its democracy; it has entangled America in costly and counterproductive “forever wars” in the Middle East.

This critique is hardly a fringe position. Pillars of the DC establishment, such as Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates, have deplored the “overmilitarization” of U.S. foreign policy. The last three presidents have lamented America’s propensity for intervention in the Middle East and declared that the “forever wars” must end.

The United States needs a serious debate about how, where, and whether to use force in an era when its resources are stretched. It requires a highly disciplined approach to employing its military power in an age of great-power rivalry. Yet the myth of American militarism is bad analysis that leads to lousy prescription.

That myth is bad analysis in that it exaggerates America’s readiness to reach for the gun, its rate of failure in post-Cold War military conflicts, and the domestic blowback the country has experienced. It makes for lousy prescription by discouraging policymakers from doing the hard intellectual work of strategy—carefully weighing the risks of action versus inaction, determining what dangers merit a military response, assessing what costs America should pay to defend its interests—in favor of a simplistic “bring the troops home” mantra. It’s time for sharp thinking about the role of force in an unruly world—which means that it’s time to ditch the misconceptions and clichés that currently distort the public debate.

THE ARGUMENT that America is addicted to war runs basically as follows. During the Cold War, the reality of Soviet power exerted strategic discipline on U.S. foreign policy, discouraging Washington from using force promiscuously. When the Cold War ended, however, the handcuffs came off. American policymakers were intoxicated by U.S. military dominance and the dream of democratizing the world. Pentagon planners became convinced, wrongly, that a high-tech “revolution in military affairs” could allow Washington to dominate the battlefield without risking many American lives. The rise of the All-Volunteer Force insulated politicians and most citizens from the costs of war, further encouraging military adventurism.

The United States thus began to see force as a weapon of first resort rather than one of last resort. It found itself, particularly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, engaged in an ever-expanding number of military conflicts with an ever-declining rate of success. In so doing, America brought an array of ills upon itself, from strategic exhaustion to the militarization of its domestic politics. The only solution, then, is to wrap up American participation in “forever wars” in the Middle East and Afghanistan, reemphasize diplomacy and soft power, and show far greater restraint in the world. The era of “endless wars and foreign interventions” must end, Gates wrote in 2020.

This critique has become so prominent because the evidence supporting it seems, at first glance, so plentiful. From 1960–1990, the United States fought one major war (in Vietnam) and a handful of smaller, shorter conflicts in the Third World. From 1991 to 2021, America fought several relatively large wars (the Persian Gulf War of 1991, the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars after 9/11) and a host of smaller conflicts in Somalia, the Balkans, Iraq and Syria, and elsewhere in the greater Middle East. In 2011, one political scientist noted that America “has been at war for thirteen of the twenty-two years since the end of the Cold War.” Since then, the United States has continually been fighting some war, somewhere.

Many of these interventions, moreover, have taken on a seemingly perpetual character. America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq turned into generational struggles. As of early 2021, American special operations forces were still active in Somalia, nearly thirty years after U.S. troops first arrived to address a humanitarian crisis. And there are plenty of canonical quotes one can cite to show an apparently militaristic mindset. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s infamous question to Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Colin Powell in 1993—“What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”—tops the list. Dig a little deeper, however, and the thesis of post-Cold War militarism is much weaker than it initially appears. 

CONSIDER, FIRST, the claim that the post-Cold War era has seen unprecedented, hyperactive interventionism. Yes, America has fought more frequently since the Cold War than during it. But the issue is not as simple as militarism run amok.

For starters, rational cost-benefit analysis alone might have led Washington to use force more often once the Cold War ended. A more globalized, interconnected world was also a world that required more active policing. The removal of Soviet power and the collapse of communism in regions such as Eastern Europe unleashed violent demons that it ultimately fell to the sole remaining superpower to suppress. The decline of Cold War tensions, meanwhile, dramatically reduced the risks that any use of force might provoke a superpower showdown. And changes in military technology—as well as medical technology—did make it possible to use force at a far lower price in human lives: American forces have suffered fewer fatalities in all of the country’s post-1990 wars put together than they did in the single worst year of the Vietnam War.

The use of force is one method that countries use to advance their interests in a competitive world. If the costs of using force go down, as the sensitivity of the international system to instability goes up, then even a relatively prudent hegemon might find military action more attractive.

What’s more, the differences between the Cold War and the post-Cold War era are not so stark after all. The United States did, after all, fight numerous conflicts during the Cold War: Wars in Korea and Vietnam, invasions of Panama (twice) and Grenada, the occupation of the Dominican Republic, two interventions in Lebanon, an undeclared naval war against Iran, and airstrikes against Qaddafi’s Libya. The big wars of the era, Korea and Vietnam, dwarfed America’s post-Cold War conflicts in terms of the sustained intensity of the fighting and the number of U.S. lives lost. Not least, during the Cold War the United States carried out dozens of covert, semi-covert, or limited interventions that don’t always show up in the statistics: CIA-backed coups in third-world countries, proxy wars in places from Central America and Laos to Angola and Afghanistan, counterinsurgencies in El Salvador and the Philippines, and so on. (The United States still engages in certain types of these hybrid conflicts, but often more openly, as in the fight against the Lord’s Resistance Army in Central Africa.) An honest history of the Cold War makes the post-Cold War era seem much less of an aberration.

It’s not clear that the current era really represents a major break from earlier eras in American history, either. During the thirty years between 1898 and 1928, the United States fought two big wars, the Spanish-American War and World War I. It intervened in China during the Boxer Rebellion and Russia during its civil war. It fought a brutal counterinsurgency in the Philippines, intervened twice in the Mexican revolution, and occupied several countries in Central America and the Caribbean. Perhaps the truth is not that America somehow slipped the bonds of restraint after the Cold War, but that it—like many great powers—has long viewed the use of force as a critical, if often regrettable, component of its efforts to shape a world congenial to its interests and values. 

A SECOND tenet of the militarism myth is that America has racked up a fearsome record of failure in recent decades because it has fought so many wars so promiscuously. In fact, the U.S. performance has not been nearly as bad as its critics claim.

The key here is understanding that America has always had a checkered history fighting limited wars because those are the wars in which it has the most trouble translating its massive power into decisive results. U.S. interventions in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Mexico in the early twentieth century rarely left behind lasting stability. American intervention in Russia after World War I was a confused mess. During the Cold War, America achieved only a bloody, disillusioning stalemate in Korea. America’s first intervention in Lebanon, in 1958, was a comedy of errors; its second one, from 1982 to 1984, was a bloody tragedy. Vietnam was the costliest and most counterproductive limited war of all, in human and strategic terms alike.

The point is not that America never succeeds in military interventions. It is simply that intervention for limited aims is inherently a fraught business because the limit on aims leads to both a limit on means and a willingness to accept middling outcomes rather than wage total war in pursuit of total victory. In World War II, by contrast, the United States endured bloody setbacks that eclipse any of the “military failures” of the post-Cold War era, but the stakes were high enough that America stayed in the fight long enough to achieve ultimate victory

Although it’s unfashionable to say so, America’s post-Cold War interventions have produced real successes to go along with some obvious failures. Operation Desert Storm in 1991 achieved a clear strategic triumph in evicting Saddam Hussein from Kuwait and restoring the balance of power in the Persian Gulf for a decade. Interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo ended horrific wars that were threatening to destabilize southeastern Europe. A coercive diplomacy campaign forced out a brutal Haitian junta in 1994, although longer-term political stability has gone wanting. The intervention in Somalia in 1992 ended in an embarrassing withdrawal after the Battle of Mogadishu, but it still accomplished the Bush administration’s initial aim by saving tens of thousands—perhaps hundreds of thousands—of lives. The war against ISIS from 2014 onward was a model counterterrorism campaign, rolling back a Salafist caliphate at an extremely low human cost for the United States. 

This isn’t to whitewash the frustrations and blunders. It is hard to find defenders of the U.S. intervention in Libya in 2011, because the decade-long civil war that followed rightly casts a dark shadow over what initially looked like a low-cost triumph. The war in Afghanistan has been a terrific failure of nation-building and armed stabilization, although perhaps more of a success in narrow counterterrorism terms. Looming over everything, of course, is the Iraq War, with its undeniably appalling toll in lives, strategic distraction, and regional destabilization. Perhaps different policy choices might still have salvaged a decent outcome in that conflict after the surge of 2007–08, but even so, the price would have been far higher than proponents of the war had initially predicted. 

Just as the catastrophe of Vietnam dominated debates about American foreign policy for years thereafter, the tragedy of Iraq dominates debates about the efficacy of force in the post-Cold War era. That’s understandable, given the terrible traumas that war inflicted. But it’s also misleading, in that it has made it harder to assess where American intervention has succeeded and failed in the last thirty years. 

IF THE United States has done better than its critics acknowledge, that’s partially because it doesn’t use force nearly as wantonly as they argue. Simply having lots of military power, the thinking goes, makes America search compulsively for opportunities to use it. There is a sliver of truth in this argument. American military might is one of the fundamental realities of world affairs, and the fact that Washington has a military option for addressing many problems ensures that the option will be one of many considered. Yet it is simply not true that the resort to force is America’s default response.

No American president of the post-Cold War era has been cavalier about life-and-death decisions involving U.S. military personnel. On the contrary, presidents are typically loath to have Americans die on their watch and thus reluctant to order U.S. forces into harm’s way. The reflexive first choice is almost always diplomacy, a mix of jawboning, inducements, and pressures applied in hopes of resolving the problem peacefully. When this response fails, presidents typically move on to other non-military expedients, whether economic sanctions or covert action, while deferring a choice to fight for as long as seems prudent. And if the resort to force looks unavoidable, because further delay will damage American interests or force the United States to intervene at higher costs later, policymakers gravitate toward options that reduce the likelihood of U.S. casualties—airpower, strikes from remotely piloted vehicles, or elite special operations forces that can operate with small footprints and carefully managed risk profiles.

Let’s look at the historical record. When the United States has used force, it has usually done so after long periods of delay and repeated efforts to solve the problem through other means. The Persian Gulf War of 1991 followed a months-long national debate over whether to use force at all and a failed effort to compel Saddam’s withdrawal through economic sanctions and coercive diplomacy. U.S. leaders delayed for years before intervening decisively in Bosnia in 1995, and for months before intervening in Kosovo in 1999, in the vain hope that diplomatic pressure might make such intervention unnecessary. In 2014, President Barack Obama waited to use force against the Islamic State until that organization was nearly at the gates of Baghdad and there was simply no alternative to protecting vulnerable civilians and important U.S. geopolitical interests.

Even U.S. interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11 were hardly reflexive or unthinking. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan came only after 9/11 showed that the previous, years-long approach of combating terrorism primarily through diplomacy, sanctions, and occasional one-off airstrikes had failed catastrophically. In Iraq, three presidents had deferred a full-on confrontation with Saddam Hussein for a dozen years after the Persian Gulf War ended, relying on military containment, economic pressure, and covert action instead.

There were reasonable arguments, then and now, about whether Washington should have given coercive diplomacy more time to work against the Taliban in 2001 and Saddam in 2003. In the latter case, the United States probably would have been better off not invading Iraq at all. But in both cases, it is hard to argue that there was truly a “rush to war.”

Then there are all the bloody dogs that did not bark. Bill Clinton refused to use force to halt the Rwandan genocide. Neither Clinton nor George W. Bush intervened to halt the civil war in Sudan or the war in the Great Lakes region of Africa, conflicts that consumed millions of lives. Barack Obama resisted military intervention against the Assad regime in Syria, even declining to enforce his own chemical weapons redline in 2013.

Most remarkably, four presidents (George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama) all went to extraordinary lengths to avoid a military confrontation with Iran and with North Korea. They did so even though each of those presidents declared it a vital U.S. national security interest to prevent those countries from developing nuclear weapons—and even though each of those presidents saw those countries advance their nuclear ambitions during their time in office. When the United States did use force against Iran in early 2020, it did so dramatically—killing Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, a man who had been ordering the deaths of Americans for many years. But again, that step was something that American leaders had been considering, and deferring, for over a decade. And for all its bellicose rhetoric, the Trump administration then went out of its way to avoid a larger war, simply absorbing a multi-missile Iranian attack on a U.S. base in Iraq. 

If the U.S. military is indeed the hammer in search of a nail, it is odd that policymakers so often avoid hammering anything. In reality, American presidents have usually been more reluctant warriors than Manichean militarists; the world’s sole superpower has been more selective, and less war-prone, than its critics charge. 

WHAT ABOUT the claim that American militarism has led to disastrous domestic outcomes?

Whatever the domestic ill—underperformance of the economy, rising deficits, sharp partisan polarization, bitter social divisions, and so on—some enterprising analyst has drawn a causal connection back to America’s “endless wars.” Critics of Cold War-era foreign policy made similar arguments that the United States could not contain the Soviet Union without also destroying its economy and political liberties. They were wrong then—America prevailed in the Cold War while also enjoying tremendous prosperity and dramatically advancing civil rights at home—and the link between foreign wars and domestic troubles is similarly tenuous today.

Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost trillions of dollars, but they have hardly starved a welfare state that has expanded considerably—through Medicare Part D, Obamacare, the Biden administration’s child tax credit, and other reforms—since 2001. Those conflicts have been financed principally through borrowing, but their fiscal impact has been modest compared to the expansion of social programs, the spiraling cost of Social Security and Medicare, and the tax policies pursued (wisely or not) by presidents and their allies in Congress over the past twenty years. The U.S. economy has grown for most of the post-Cold War era, interrupted only by shocks—the dot com bust, the global financial crisis, Covid-19—that had nothing to with the country’s military presence overseas. Meanwhile, the march toward greater domestic equality has continued, with major steps forward on marriage equality and other issues, not to mention the election of the country’s first Black president and vice-president.

To be sure, America is as polarized and divided in 2021 as it has been in at least half a century, and that is truly alarming. But one has to construct a Rube Goldberg-worthy string of improbable connections to pin the blame on foreign wars. After all, domestic strife worsened during Donald Trump’s tenure even though he correctly boasted that he was the first president since Jimmy Carter not to start a new major military intervention overseas—and even though he zealously sought to abandon the commitments he inherited. The Trump years confound the theory that military restraint abroad leads to domestic harmony at home.

It is also intellectually lazy to attribute domestic terrorism and white nationalism principally, or even substantially, to blowback from post-9/11 wars, given that both problems significantly predate 9/11 and previously spiked during the 1990s. 

When it comes to militarized policing, the reality is admittedly complex. It is surely true that war veterans who went into law enforcement brought some of their training with them, and that the availability of surplus Pentagon gear made the up-arming of the police a cheaper and easier choice than it otherwise might have been. But the resulting just-so story—endless war abroad leads to endless war at home—gives no agency to criminals, who have their own incentives to seek heavier firepower, or domestic law enforcement, who likewise have ample reason to want to overmatch the criminals. 

Nor have counterterrorism and other military interventions ushered in a twenty-first-century garrison state. The response to 9/11, particularly the Patriot Act and related intelligence innovations, did cause the pendulum to swing away from the libertarian vision of individual freedom. Yet the fact that the most visible intrusion most Americans face is increased airport security demonstrates that the American way of life has hardly been destroyed. If anything, infringements on civil liberties would probably have been worse had the United States not used its military power to keep terror groups on the run and instead hunkered down in a defensive posture. The “go live your lives” ethos the United States adopted after 9/11 was the counterpart to the proactive military posture it assumed. 

Even the claim that America’s wars have left the public strategically exhausted has to be scrutinized carefully. The U.S. presence in Afghanistan may not have been popular during its later years, but there was never a groundswell of public opinion demanding its immediate end—mostly because that presence was quite small and the casualties it produced were quite limited.

In the early 2010s, frustration with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan arguably contributed to a larger desire for retrenchment that delayed the U.S. response to growing Chinese and Russian assertiveness. But that’s not the case today: In fact, many critics of American military intervention argue that Washington is behaving too confrontationally vis-à-vis rival powers. 

This isn’t to say that military intervention has no negative domestic consequences; no war leaves the society that fights it unscathed. Yet for America to have a serious debate about the cause of its domestic problems, it must do better than simply blaming the wars it has waged. 

IF MILITARISM is the problem, then building up and relying more on non-military tools must be the answer. This argument, at least, is half-right.

Non-military tools will play a larger role in American statecraft in the next twenty years than they did in the last twenty years. During the global war on terror, kinetic military action was often the most effective tool America had for disrupting jihadist groups that were based in inaccessible, hostile settings. Tactical military success—killing terrorists and frustrating their plots—produced a sort of strategic success in protecting the homeland. Over time, the American political class quietly concluded that suppressing the threat with force was actually cheaper than seeking to transform the underlying political and socio-economic conditions that gave rise to terrorism. Add in the fact that civilian agencies such as the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) were often unable to operate in austere settings without military protection, and of course, the Pentagon played an outsized role in the post-9/11 period. 

The present era will be different. Technological, ideological, and economic competition will be every bit as important as military deterrence in shaping the U.S.-China rivalry, which means that there will naturally be a reweighting of American bureaucratic capability. We are already seeing this, through investments in the International Finance Development Corporation and other non-military entities. The idea that Washington must bulk up in these areas is right on the money. 

Yet there are limits to how much rebalancing America can prudently do. It is attractive to say that the real answer to terrorism involves empowering State and USAID to deal with the root causes of the threat. In reality, however, doing so would require major, long-term investments in stabilizing conflict-ridden societies—investments that still might not pay off unless U.S. military power holds immediate threats at bay. Put differently, Washington might theoretically prefer to turn the problem of a failed state in Somalia over to the diplomats and development specialists. Without sustained military pressure on al-Shabaab, the result would probably be a disaster.

Force will remain indispensable in other areas, too. Diplomacy and economic statecraft will only be at the forefront of the U.S.-China relationship so long as military deterrence holds. Here there is bad news for those hoping to take an axe to the Pentagon budget: The United States is presently in a desperate race to shore up its military position in the Western Pacific before China is able to invade Taiwan, and winning that race will probably take more money even if the Defense Department spends its existing dollars more wisely.

Indeed, on a whole range of issues, from deterring Russian aggression in the Baltics to responding to Iranian provocations in the Persian Gulf, non-military tools will only get America so far. Force, like it or not, is still the ultima ratio regum. If America suffers from not having a robust enough non-military toolkit, how much will it suffer when it brings a demarche to a firefight? 

THE MYTH of American militarism is analytically vapid. It is also strategically damaging. For if America is simply addicted to war, the obvious prescription is to quit cold turkey. In reality, however, the use of force remains very much in the realm of prudent strategy, so braying for an end to endless wars threatens to drown out sober policy debate about how and where the American military might be employed. 

It is fair to argue that Washington overinvested, for years, in combating terrorism and related problems such as rogue states in the Middle East, and that it must use force quite selectively in that region as it devotes greater attention to great-power challenges. As a general rule, violence should be a tool of later, rather than earlier, resort. 

Yet it is less helpful to argue that America should simply walk away from ongoing, relatively economical commitments in the Middle East. Carrying out such a withdrawal might well produce an uptick in the threats those commitments are meant to address. The critical debate involves questions of how much risk of renewed terrorist attacks Washington should be willing to accept as it limits its military engagement in the region and how much force it should still be willing to use to keep that risk at an acceptable level. That debate requires intellectual nuance and sophistication, qualities that the most condemnatory statements about forever wars do little to produce.

The same goes for great-power rivalry. Everyone should hope that the U.S.-China competition stays peaceful. But one of the most urgent questions America faces is what interests it should be willing to defend with force—and how—if they are attacked. And one of the most urgent imperatives Washington confronts is strengthening deterrence of China by convincing Beijing that it can and will fight effectively if those interests are challenged. To suggest, as some analysts have, that the fundamental problem in the U.S.-China relationship is America’s desire for military primacy—or even that it was “tragic” that America intervened against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II—is simply to abandon the hard intellectual work of strategy by arguing that the proper choice is never to wield the military tool.

The United States has a mixed record with the use of force, as one might well expect of this most demanding aspect of statecraft. Yet its choices over the past thirty years have been wiser, its restraint and selectivity have been greater, and the domestic blowback it has suffered has been smaller than many critics allege. There are cases, alas, where the use or threat of force will be necessary in the future. There will be instances when choosing not to intervene now forces policymakers to contemplate higher-cost military interventions later. In addressing these challenges, policymakers will need something better than the Magic Eight Ball of restraint, which always answers “my sources say no” when asked for guidance on hard choices. Prescription begins with diagnosis. Busting the myth of American militarism is the first step toward positioning America, intellectually and strategically, for success in a dangerous future.

Hal Brands is the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a Bloomberg Opinion columnist.

Peter Feaver is Visiting Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford University, on leave from Duke University, where he is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy and directs the Program in American Grand Strategy.

Image: Flickr / U.S. Army Page