U.S. Interventions Range From Comically Evil To Ambiguous

More on why interventionism is usually bad

It’s not hard to find cases of U.S. foreign policy planners doing things that are so obviously evil that no decent person would ever approve of them. Take what we did in Guatemala under Eisenhower, where we instigated a violent military coup to overthrow a milquetoast, progressive government because it passed land regulations that hurt the profits of U.S. firms. We also discovered no evidence—before or after the coup—that Arbenz, the leader in Guatemala, was a communist, though that was the putative justification. Or take the time Bill Clinton committed a terror attack far worse than 9/11 the same day Monica Lewinsky was testifying, based exclusively on political interests. Or take our decision to launch the war on terror which killed millions of people and increased terrorism globally. Or the time we bombed Laos so heavily we killed ten percent of Laotians—dropping more bombs on Laos than were dropped during the entirety of world war 2. Or even things we’re doing today, like arming the Saudis, who are causing the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, bombing schools, hospitals, and busses, blowing up 5-year-old children, while leaving others to starve to death. I could probably produce 30 or 40 more examples, spanning every U.S. president.

Murdering 10% of a country isn’t just an innocent mistake, nor is enabling the Saudis to kill half a million people in Yemen, while leaving an extra 23 million on the brink of starvation. Nor is committing a 9/11-style terror attack for mild political gains. The U.S. engages in acts of grotesque evil with such utter recklessness; if the U.S. tomorrow started bombing Iran, based on flimsy justifications, and killed a few million people, that wouldn’t be anywhere near the worst thing we’ve done. Hearing the bombs drop on Sudan or Yemen or Laos or Cambodia or Vietnam or Iraq should puncture any fantasies about the U.S. being a generally benevolent force in world affairs who occasionally blunders. We have an abundance of evidence that that’s not the case—both empirical and theoretical—and no evidence that it is. One who soberly assesses the record of the U.S. must give up the fantasy of the U.S. as a benevolent force in world affairs, just as any student of epistemology or physics must stop believing in Santa Claus.

Of course, those who defend the U.S. claim this is cherry-picking. What about Ukraine? Or perhaps the Korean war or intervention in Kosovo or Libya? Surely those are good interventions. You can’t just look at the bad cases or intervention, you have to look at the good cases too.

But this is a pretty lame defense. For one, it is obvious that these examples are cherry-picked. I can’t think of ten examples of post world war two wars that mildly pro-war liberals—Noah Smith, for example—would support. My list would be Ukraine, Kosovo, Korea, Libya, the first Gulf war, and maybe the Berlin air-lift. But this is a pretty pathetic list given how extremely interventionist the U.S. has been. If you engage in 50 or so interventions and all except one fail miserably, often in horrifying ways that result in the deaths of millions of people, it’s really hard to maintain that that’s a good record.

And then you look into the details of those interventions. Take Kosovo, and read Chomsky’s comments on it, for example. He points out that the mass killing in Kosovo escalated dramatically after the NATO bombing. This is not disputed. Now, maybe they would have happened absent NATO’s bombing—that I do not know. It seems complicated. But if you look into even the best cases, they all turn out like this. None of them are slam-dunks—they all are hard-to-parse; it’s never obvious whether even the best U.S. interventions are good.

Or take the example of Korea. In North Korea, during the Korean war, touted as perhaps the best example of U.S. intervention, the U.S. killed about 20% of North Koreans in a bombing campaign of unimaginable brutality:

And there is another misconception, one that Americans might not want to hear but that is important for understanding the hermit kingdom: Yes, much of its anti-Americanism is cynically manufactured as a propaganda tool, and yes, it is often based on lies. But no, it is not all lies. The US did in fact do something terrible, even evil to North Korea, and while that act does not explain, much less forgive, North Korea's many abuses since, it is not totally irrelevant either.

That act was this: In the early 1950s, during the Korean War, the US dropped more bombs on North Korea than it had dropped in the entire Pacific theater during World War II. This carpet bombing, which included 32,000 tons of napalm, often deliberately targeted civilian as well as military targets, devastating the country far beyond what was necessary to fight the war. Whole cities were destroyed, with many thousands of innocent civilians killed and many more left homeless and hungry.

For Americans, the journalist Blaine Harden has written, this bombing was "perhaps the most forgotten part of a forgotten war," even though it was almost certainly "a major war crime." Yet it shows that North Korea's hatred of America "is not all manufactured," he wrote. "It is rooted in a fact-based narrative, one that North Korea obsessively remembers and the United States blithely forgets."

And the US, as Harden recounted in a column earlier this year, knew exactly what it was doing:

. . .

Historians dispute just how important this bombing really was in making North Korea the country that it is today; some say it was formative in shaping the young nation's history, others that North Korea was already on its way to becoming the hermit kingdom and that its leaders merely exploited the bombing to get there.

So two of the best cases of U.S. interventionism involve one case in which killings were hugely scaled up after we intervened, and another in which we murdered 20% of the population of a country with a savage bombing campaign, which is potentially the reason North Korea is so terrible today. With friends like this, who needs enemies?

Or take Ukraine. I think our policy of helping arm the Ukrainians is legitimate—they are defending against aggression. But it’s very plausible that NATO encroachment and U.S. arms sales are a big part of why Russia invaded in the first place—just as we’d be concerned if Mexico was talking about joining a major alliance with China and China was selling oodles of arms to Mexico, so too did NATO encroachment concern Russia. That is not justification for Russia’s actions, but it is an explanation of Russia’s actions. And U.S. actions have stymied a peace settlement and drawn out the war, averting the best prospect for an end to the war, and increasing the odds of nuclear annihilation.

I’m not as familiar with some of the examples of U.S. interventionism—I don’t, for example, know much about Libya. But for every time the U.S. intervened to try to stop mass killing, they’ve backed someone carrying out mass killing—look at East Timor, for example.

So if we examine the historical record, it’s not clear that there are any obviously good interventions since world war two. Every intervention seemed either complicated or bad. With a track record that breathtakingly horrific, and a penchant for killings millions of people, the U.S. should hesitate the next time it’s considering intervention.