WHEN HE RAN for president in 2008, Barack Obama promised a new era of restraint in U.S. foreign policy. And in some respects, he has indeed been more restrained than his predecessor. But those looking for a reconsideration of America’s universalist ambitions have been disappointed by Obama’s record. Where it has mattered, there has been no retreat from the revolutionary ends to which George W. Bush committed the United States in his second inaugural address in 2005. Thus Obama (after much agonizing) threw in his lot with those seeking to overthrow Libya’s Muammar el-Qaddafi by force. Thus Obama called for Bashar al-Assad to leave, encouraged “allied” efforts to overthrow him and made negotiations to end the civil war in Syria dependent on his departure. And thus the Obama administration (with the president himself curiously in the shade) played a key role in supporting the Maidan’s overthrow of Ukraine’s elected president, Viktor Yanukovych.

Liberal interventionists, neoconservatives and State Department officials insist that it is America’s duty to support those making revolution in other countries. The United States has often been attracted to that policy since the Reagan administration, though it was only under the younger Bush that it reached full flower. While the public rightly grimaces over the consequences, there is little appreciation by the elites of how unprecedented these doctrines are, both in international law and in the American diplomatic tradition. Given the ill consequences following the breakage of states across the Middle East and now in Ukraine, the time is ripe for reconsidering these newfangled views. As a method of promoting liberty, the strategy of overthrow is deeply counterproductive. The old American lexicon taught that anarchy bred tyranny, whereas the new school teaches that the revolutionary destruction of the old order will produce democracy. The new interventionism has also thrown out the old rulebook for dealing with civil war, substituting a set of policies that in practice provides Western powers with unlimited discretion to intervene in civil conflicts throughout the world.

IN THE LEGAL order birthed by World War II and the United Nations, the right of external intervention was sharply circumscribed; preventive war, in any normal definition of the term, was made illegal. A right of humanitarian intervention might be inferred from the vast discretion given to the Security Council by the UN Charter, but no one thought of inferring that until many years had passed. It contradicted the dominant emphasis in the charter on state sovereignty. The right of self-determination in the charter put the colonial powers on notice that their imperial rule was coming to an end, but states were not deemed to have forfeited their right to put down internal revolts. On the contrary, the state was seen as an indispensable source of order.

When circumstances subsequently arose that seemed to call for humanitarian intervention—as with Bangladesh, Cambodia and Uganda—the intervening states (India, Vietnam and Tanzania) invariably appealed to their right of national self-defense, not humanity, in justifying their military movements across borders. That was because they thought the humanitarian claim would not cut it in the international community, not because they had poor legal advice. Their actions did not cause a change in norms; that came later, with the end of the Cold War and the widespread call that the “sole superpower” should not hesitate to respond, by military force if necessary, to acts that shocked the conscience of mankind. The traditional prohibition against intervention that was consecrated in 1919 and reaffirmed in 1945 was then greatly relaxed, if not entirely abandoned. A whole host of interventions were subsequently pursued or proposed in the next twenty-five years that took, amid the plenitude of justifications offered, the most convenient route to the sea.

The grandest departure from the legalist paradigm took the form of the Bush Doctrine, with its warrant for preventive war and democracy by jackboot. A large portion of the world rejected Bush’s doctrine, but they did not get a voice in the matter, much less a veto. The United States did what it wanted.

A second hole in the legalist paradigm arose from a revived doctrine of humanitarian intervention, now called the “responsibility to protect” (R2P), which asserted a duty to intervene to rescue populations imperiled by gross humanitarian abuses. This view, as it is presented by the R2P myrmidons, is happily cleansed of all special national interests in theory, but deeply bound up with them in practice. Obama is more inclined to this idea than he is to preventive war; in America, R2P has its home on the left and is strongly urged upon him by voices within his own administration. But R2P, since it authorizes uses of force in anticipation of atrocities, as in Libya, has a strongly preventive rationale as well. In the authoritative version of R2P, endorsed by the UN General Assembly and Security Council, external action still depends upon Security Council approval, but that restraint is not accepted in American opinion.

Of course, many of these expansions in what is considered a just war have been contested at home and abroad. The American public is especially opposed to interventions that are purely humanitarian in character; it wants (but has never really gotten) a demonstration of the national interests at stake. In official circles, however, most of these criteria for intervention are seen as legitimate, even if exercised on a pick-and-choose basis, and with greater or lesser degrees of enthusiasm in any particular instance.

The sovereign state still remains the foundation of the international legal order, but there have been so many exceptions and provisos to its customary protections as to leave ample room for intervention whenever states wish to do so. At least, that is true of the West. A much stricter set of rules in practice binds the non-Western powers. Such are the advantages of hegemony.

IT IS THE conjunction of the right of revolution and the presumptive duty of external support for imperiled populations that needs special attention. The interplay between the two is an important phenomenon in its own right, as these doctrines—so potent together—are often considered separately. The interplay between the two is often ignored, but undoubtedly the expectation of external support has recently played a critical role in triggering rebellion.

To understand this issue properly, we need to go back to some long-standing debates in the tradition of reflection on just war, that sphere of thought dedicated to determining when the use of force is just or unjust. The thought of Hugo Grotius, the putative founder of modern international law, is the most profitable place to begin. During the Thirty Years’ War, in his Rights of War and Peace, Grotius formulated what to our ears must seem to be a surprising doctrine. Grotius made one of the first great statements of the principle of humanitarian intervention, but he simultaneously forbade a population to rebel. The suffering masses had to sit out oppression lest they invite anarchy, it appeared from his curious reasoning, but foreign princes might intervene to succor those selfsame masses when found in awful distress. You might think he had it backwards, and the weight of subsequent opinion would agree. Eighteenth-century publicists reversed the Grotian resolution—they gave greater latitude to the right of revolution, less to external intervention.

Two things are notable about this history: everybody saw the questions as related, and nobody justified both together. The reason, evidently, is that allowing both the right of rebellion and the duty of external intervention would imperil domestic and international order. What could possibly be the rule of limitation if everything could suffice for war?

Grotius opened the door to humanitarian intervention, but he denied the popular right of resistance to an oppressive ruler. In an age of religious warfare and widespread slaughter, his reasons had weight. Grotius was not actually as strict on the question of internal rebellion as his hostile critics, like Rousseau, have alleged; he carved out several important exceptions to his seemingly blanket prohibition against rebellion, such as when a king breaks a contract with his people, which were probably intended to justify the Dutch Revolt against Spain. But Grotius did look with horror on the anarchy that would arise in contests over sovereignty, and he was not alone in that conviction. He was followed by Hobbes, who erected a whole system around the same sentiment. Hersch Lauterpacht, the distinguished jurist and legal scholar, noted:

This frowning upon rebellion and the favouring of authority were in accordance with what were considered to be the essential needs of the times. The horrors of civil war were foremost in the minds of political thinkers. There was not, in this respect, much difference between Hobbes and Bacon on the one side, and Hooker, Gentilis, and Bodin on the other. They discussed in detail the right of resistance; they all rejected it. So, perhaps with less justification, did Pufendorf. At a time of general uncertainty and of loosening of traditional ties of society, national and international, order was looked upon as the paramount dictate of reason.

That view changed in the eighteenth century. Grotius came under much criticism. Locke recognized a right of revolution, as did, of course, the American Founders. Even those who located sovereignty in the people, however, cabined the right of revolution by restricting it to situations in which rebellion amounted to a sort of absolute necessity, which is how the American revolutionaries of 1776 portrayed their own struggle. They sought not to overthrow the existing order but to preserve their ancient liberties. Once independence was declared, they sought membership within the society of states, not defiance of its strictures. The American appeal to “thirteen solemn and sacred Compacts” and to a liberty founded “upon immutable statutes and tutelary laws” made their revolution fundamentally different from that of France. The French Revolution smashed the icons of legitimacy and blew away the past. The subsequent spiral of hostility between revolution and counterrevolution sparked a twenty-five-year war.

IN THE AFTERMATH of the French Revolution, the revolutionary idea fell into disrepute. The thinking world did not relish the demons that revolutionary change had unleashed in France. One American, Edward Everett, summarized in 1834 the attitude of the generation that survived the frenzied wars of the revolution:

The atrocious, the unexampled, the ungodly abuses of the reign of terror have made the very name of the French Revolution hateful to mankind. The blood chills, the flesh creeps, the hair stands on end, at the recital of its horrors; and no slight degree of the odium they occasion is unavoidably reflected on all who had any agency in bringing it on. The subsequent events in Europe have also involved the French Revolution in a deep political unpopularity. It is unpopular in Great Britain, in the rest of Europe, in America, in France itself.

Everett, the quintessential voice of New England Whiggery, went on to declare that the French Revolution was inevitable given the iniquities of the old regime. Still, in this era of disenchantment, observers looked askance at violent revolution as any sort of model of reform and enlightenment, even in republican America.

Europe’s “springtime of nations” in 1848 elicited a tremendous gush of approval in the United States—President James K. Polk commended Germany for seeking to emulate America’s experiment in federal union. When spring turned to fall and reaction set in, Americans were horrified. What to do? The vast majority displayed no inclination to intervene with force, but even those who scorned an entirely isolationist policy were careful, as in the days of old, to consider the right of revolution together with the question of foreign involvement. In a paper prepared with some like-minded fellows, Abraham Lincoln took a fairly advanced view of the matter, affirming in ringing tones the rights of the subject nationalities of Europe to overthrow their rulers but also insisting that “it is the duty of our government to neither foment, nor assist, such revolutions in other governments.” Toward the actions of the Russian government in Hungary, in their brutal suppression of that nation’s bid for independence from Austria, Lincoln took the view later adopted by John Stuart Mill: Russian actions were illegitimate and gave rise to a right (but not really a duty) of counterintervention.

Lincoln declined to depart from America’s own “cherished principles of non-intervention” in this case, but he pointed to the logic that would subsequently be adopted when the noninterventionist disposition was ultimately overturned in the twentieth century. In essence, that was to see aggression as a fundamental threat to the legal order and to posit the necessity of counterintervention if the legal order was to be salvaged from certain ruin. But Lincoln’s thinking on this question also displayed a conservative bias toward order. He conceded to the Southern states, for example, the natural right of revolution under unbearable oppression, but also denied that secession from the government could be a legal remedy under the Constitution.

Like the older writers on the law of nations, Lincoln was aware of the potentially incendiary character of revolution. He laid down a strict duty of nonintervention on the part of outside powers. He was emphatic that outsiders were not to foment revolutions elsewhere. In this respect, Lincoln followed Jefferson and the widespread American consensus on these points. That consensus differed radically from the liberationist doctrines that France proclaimed in 1792 in a universal war to sweep despotism from Europe.

THE CONCEPTION that Lincoln held in the mid-nineteenth century is not the one the United States holds now. On the contrary, today the United States has fomented and assisted—indeed, often played a starring role in—a fair number of such revolutions. It has learned that to make omelets, you must break eggs. From a self-consciously conservative power in the early years of the Cold War, dedicated to containment as a middle path between rollback and surrender, the United States has fully emerged as a revolutionary power in the twenty-first century. No sooner were Iraq and Afghanistan put on the back burner than Libya, Syria and Ukraine flared up, and in each case the United States supported the side that wanted to overturn an existing government by violent means.

One feature of this giddy revolutionary fever is especially remarkable. A large part of the identity of the West in the twentieth century consisted of its justified aversion to the consequences of revolution, as they played out in Russia (1917), China (1949) and Iran (1979). All these venues featured plenty of hair-raising episodes that made the prospect of revolution as big a downer for the Cold War generation as it had been for Everett. During most of the Cold War, America was concerned with shoring up despotic allies, not throwing them out, and in its own mind it was often seeking balance with, rather than domination of, the Soviet adversary. Partly due to the memory of revolution’s rocky road, it supported order without a guilty conscience.

The experience of 1989 had the effect of pushing these traditional images of revolution into the shade, awakening the idea that what was coming to be called “peaceful revolution” would make further inroads just about everywhere. What had formerly connoted the seizure of power in anarchic conditions, producing totalitarianism, was now suddenly symbolized by enormous but peaceful crowds collectively discovering the sheer force of “people power” against autocrats. Because the Russians surrendered their empire in the West with hardly a shot, because Ferdinand Marcos fell to a jubilant crowd, because F. W. de Klerk relented, it came to be the expectation that revolution would be peaceful. 1989 ensured that we would make it our mission to support it.

Certainly, violent methods have sometimes brought about good results in human affairs. In the abstract, it would be difficult to completely disavow a right of revolution, but we also need to be aware that, concretely, revolution can mean a human disaster so immense that nothing good can possibly come out of it. The breakages of the state in Iraq, Libya and Syria are all testaments to that danger. They have loosed anarchy upon the world.

Even with a reluctant public mood, the United States remains a genuine revolutionary force, preaching a commitment to “democratic revolution” that in theory celebrates peace but in practice consists of lighting fires that it doesn’t know how to put out. The conjunction of its two legitimating doctrines—nearly unprecedented in international history and repudiated by the most eminent jurists in the Western tradition—has had an incendiary effect on the international system.

Such hyperactivity, under such a revolutionary spell, is dangerous to American security, because it keeps us in blood rivalry with nations and terrorists across the globe. It is also hypocritical, because it endorses methods of political change—by huge mobs or armed rebels—that we would never sanction at home. The Wall Street Journal will cheer a million-man march in Ukraine but would have you arrested for littering if you dropped a gum wrapper in Zuccotti Park. The U.S. and Western preference for unruly crowds overturning constitutional procedures is strictly for export, not for home consumption.

There are precedents for a reconsideration of the doctrines examined here. Notes historian Richard Tuck, summarizing the sober outlook of the writers who came after the religious wars: “Scared by what their continent had done to itself in the name of humanitarian intervention—for we must remember that this was how the Wars of Religion and the Thirty Years War appeared to their participants,” they became yet more restrictive in the latitude they gave to external intervention. Tuck calls that new outlook isolationism, but it might as well be known as prudence. Contemplating the mangled bodies and deranged minds produced by war, especially civil war, many thinkers continued to affirm that the maintenance of civil order was a paramount dictate of reason. It is by no means obvious that they were wrong.

David C. Hendrickson is a professor of political science at Colorado College. He is the author of Union, Nation, or Empire: The American Debate over International Relations, 1789–1941 (University Press of Kansas, 2009).

Image: Wikimedia Commons/"1989 Libertate Roumanie" by Denoel Paris. CC BY-SA 3.0.