Foreign Affairs published an article by two leading scholars analyzing why military interventions in foreign conflicts fail to advance U.S. interests.
Jennifer Kavanagh, senior fellow in the American Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and her colleague Brian Frederick, chief political scientist at the RAND Corporation, began their joint article by saying that the United States has been deploying troops abroad almost continuously since World War II ended, but that its "most famous foreign interventions" — in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq — have been large, long and costly.
Apart from those interventions, there have been dozens of other instances in which the United States has deployed its military forces, many of them smaller, shorter in duration, and their objectives have varied between deterrence and training.
Failures
Overall, the record of some of these operations has been mixed, such as Operation Desert Storm in 1991, which "expelled" Saddam Hussein's forces from Kuwait and largely succeeded in achieving their goals, the researchers said.
Other operations, such as those in Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere, have either been disappointing or have failed.
Yet U.S. decision-making circles remain heavily aligned in favor of military intervention, as Kavanagh and her colleague Frederick argue in their article.
To verify how well these interventions are making progress toward their goals, the researchers built a database of conflicts and crises involving U.S. interests between 1946 and 2018, using the Conflict Data Project, a data-collecting program on organized violence from Sweden's Uppsala University, as well as an international program that monitors behavior in crises.
The researchers concluded that of the 222 conflicts and crises that occurred from 1946 to 2018 related to U.S. interests, the United States chose to intervene in 50 of them and opted not to intervene in 172. The findings turned the conventional view upside down, as evidence shows that U.S. military interventions always achieve few of their intended goals.
Washington needs to rethink its relationship to military power, and it should stop viewing military adventures as the best solution to all potential threats.
They also believe that the real danger lies not in military interventions per se, but in large interventions with expansionist objectives that are far from reality on the ground.
Reasons for the failure of military force
Their research shows that small-scale, short-term interventions with narrow goals and a well-suited use of military force can be successful. The most prominent evidence of this is Washington's thwarting of Islamic State's attempts to take control of the Gulf of Sidra in Libya, and the United States struck cruise missile targets in Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998 "in response to al-Qaeda's bombing of its embassies in Kenya and Tanzania."
But when military force is used in "wrong" conditions, interventions can fail catastrophically, the article says, adding that large-scale interventions are particularly risky.
Military force can topple dictatorships, but it cannot establish an effective and democratic alternative, nor can it stabilize long-running civil wars or overcome old ethnic divides.
The United States should never deploy its military without first asking whether doing so can alter the local balance of power quickly and enough to enable its forces or partners to achieve their goals. If the answer is "no" or "maybe," then policymakers should favor non-military alternatives.