Sometimes, American intervention works.

Today’s read: 8 minutes.

It’s a common refrain now, among many Americans on both left and right, that when it comes to international affairs, America should just mind its own business.

In the last twenty years, and the last five years especially, the political tides on foreign intervention have shifted strongly. Trust in the military has dropped, and support for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have eroded (though, contrary to popular punditry, Americans are still pretty split on both wars).

In Tangle, I’ve made a bit of a habit of being an anti-interventionist. I struggle to see how bombing another country will liberate it, or how dropping armed foreigners in another land will end well. That wasn’t always my position, but it’s one I’ve come to over time. I am, after all, part of the generation that watched (and was recruited) to go fight in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, each a conflict where U.S. involvement is seldom described as successful.

Recently, though, thanks to Joe Biden’s decisions to pull out of Afghanistan, his plan to leave Iraq, and the happenings in Cuba, I’ve been thinking a lot more about the efficacy of American military intervention, and trying my hardest to challenge some of my own preconceived notions on the issue. We all know about the Vietnam and Afghanistan wars, and most of us recognize them as abject failures. But I decided to think long and hard (and research) some of the times when intervention hasn’t been a failure. In essence, I tried to convince myself of something I didn’t believe: that American intervention has been and can continue to be a good thing for the world.

After a recent back-and-forth with a Tangle reader, I posed this question (with some answers of my own in mind): when has American military intervention actually worked? When has it been a good thing?

The reader’s response, and my own ruminating on the subject, led to this newsletter.

Some parameters.

The first step for this exercise is to set a few parameters. The Tangle reader who I engaged with on this issue suggested these:

1. Occupation/reconstruction must have started with military intervention.

2. The country must have had at least two major, mutually hostile socio-political or ethnic groups at the time of occupation/intervention.

These are pretty good parameters, but I’d like to broaden them slightly. Mine are simpler: the U.S. military intervention must include boots on the ground, and the country it is intervening in must have been in a state of some kind of political turmoil. Also, there must be a reasonable case that the “outcome” was positive, with the outcome being defined as improvements in quality of life, increased freedom, and prosperity, and that outcome being tied directly to U.S. involvement.

Finally, as a caveat anytime this newsletter delves into history, the notes below are not complete. I cannot aptly summarize World War II in a few paragraphs (who can?), nor do I have space to cover all the causes of global conflicts in a few sentences. But I’m trying my best to be even-handed and concise in these summaries. To remedy this, at least in part, I’ve included hyperlinks for each conflict that will take you to a longer explanation.

Some examples.

For most people, World War II (1939-1945) is probably the first example that comes to mind (World War I is a bit more difficult to peg, because U.S. troops were not boots on the ground in a specific nation with two warring groups). The case for World War II as a successful U.S. intervention is rather simple: the U.S. helped stop Nazi Germany and its allies from taking over the world, and you could pretty easily make the case we were not the aggressor (i.e. didn’t go looking for trouble). You’d have to have a separate debate about the end of the war; the moral case for Hiroshima, or how 70 million dead from the war could ever be called a “success,” but post-war Germany and post-war Europe can likely still be defined as successes, with the alternative being a frightening thought.

The Korean War (1950-1953) is another interesting example. The simple contours for an argument that it was a successful intervention are that the U.S. support for South Korea helped usher in a democratic state in the South Pacific free of both Japan’s rule and the North Korean dictatorship. We literally helped free South Korea from Chinese, Japanese and North Korean occupation, and today South Korea is thriving as a constitutional democracy. Our invasion was rushed and disorganized, though, with Seoul changing hands several times during the war and the battle in the air a stalemate for years. It took South Korea decades before it began to resemble the country it is today, and 2 to 4 million people ultimately died in the Korean War.

Of course, the U.S. isn’t responsible for all those deaths, but one could make a strong, reasonable objection to a historical event like that being described as a success.

Kuwait and the Gulf War (1991) come to mind, too. In 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait to resolve oil disputes, and the U.S. responded alongside dozens of other nations in what would become the Gulf War. Kuwaiti forces were largely responsible for the actual liberation of Kuwait City, but their odds were improved significantly by the U.S. Air Force and presence on the ground. Saddam Hussein ordered Iraqi forces to retreat from Kuwait, and U.S. forces spent days securing the Kuwait International Airport and helping liberate the country.

The end of the Gulf War and Kuwait intervention was messy — with Kurdish leaders attempting a coup and expecting American support that never came. But the intervention as a whole preserved Kuwait. And it was a classic example of the U.S. sending boots on the ground to the Middle East to help resolve a conflict that, in retrospect, most historians and politicians view as a win. The simple case: the U.S. helped defend a smaller nation from its authoritarian neighbor, and rallied the world alongside it to do so.

The invasion of Grenada (1983) almost certainly qualifies as an example for some, given that it led to the democratization of Grenada. It was an example the aforementioned reader included in his email to me. Most of what I remember about Grenada from history class was that hundreds of U.S. students were on the island and key to Ronald Reagan’s decision to invade, saying they were in danger. But the more I read, the more I felt it was probably one of the most acute examples of a successful American intervention — with one major caveat.

Grenada had gained independence from the United Kingdom and was living under the rule of Maurice Bishop. In 1983, Bernard Coard, a Marxist leader, had Bishop executed and then took control of the island through a coup, suspending the constitution and watching as government forces clashed with civilians in the streets. The U.S. was petitioned by a group of Caribbean nations to step in and help, and they did. The occupation took four days and included 6,000 U.S. soldiers. A few hundred soldiers on each side died in the fighting, but Grenada has had a politically stable representative parliamentary government ever since.

The caveat here — and it’s not a small one — is that the U.S. invasion was probably illegal. Many historians regard Reagan’s decision to invade as little more than a political calculation (he did not want to risk another Iran Hostage Crisis and a U.S. military installation had just been blown up in Lebanon, killing 240 troops). Of course, he was also moving to counter Cuban and Soviet influence in the region. Some Americans on the island have also said they were never in immediate danger and it was almost certainly a violation of international law.

While we’re in the Caribbean and talking about coups, we might as well mention the Dominican Civil War (1965). This one has similar contours to Grenada: U.S. civilians on the island, military coup overthrowing an elected leader, the establishment of a somewhat functioning democracy. It’s a little tougher for me to swallow, though, given the United States’ long and checkered history of involvement in the Dominican Republic — much of which could be seen as contributing to its Civil War.

Still, 22,000 U.S. troops alongside the Organization of American States helped resolve what was unambiguous political chaos in the streets, and in a matter of a few months installed a conservative, non-military government. To this day, the U.S. invasion has been condemned as another example of America using its military power to determine the future of a Latin American nation, but it’s not hard to make the case that the island is better off with what it has now than what it may have had otherwise.

Reaching a little further back into history, you might come up with The Philippine-American War (1899-1913). This was another example the reader proposed, though I’m not sure I’d count it myself. The basic case for it is that Spain controlled The Philippines already, and when the Treaty of Paris transferred Philippine sovereignty from Spain to the United States, Filipino leaders rejected the deal. American politicians tried to create a civil government for the Philippines, and the goal was always to guide the country toward independence. After years of bloody war, Americans eventually extinguished the opposition. In 1946 the Philippines became an independent, sovereign nation.

Now, the case against it strikes me as a bit easier to make. The U.S. was trying to form a government when Filipinos had already declared independence in 1898. They were essentially being passed from one colonizer to another, and there was plenty of American opposition to our involvement (from Mark Twain to Andrew Carnegie). The war essentially took place because the Phillipine Republic did not recognize U.S. sovereignty over the island (who could blame them?) and the U.S. didn’t recognize their independence, even though they claimed that independence was their primary long term interest. 200,000 civilians ultimately died in combat, or of hunger or disease, and 4,300 Americans died, too.