Measuring U.S. Interventionism

Many people have an instinctive sense that American foreign policy has come to rely too much on military action. Now, there's data. Professors Sidita Kushi and Monica Toft of the Military Intervention Project have produced a massive new dataset of nearly 400 cases of the threat, display, or use of force by the United States abroad. We talk about the patterns of intervention, including an acceleration with the end of the Cold War and the emergence of unipolarity. We also dig into the challenges of measuring intervention.

[jamesfee]

The scale of deployed or ordered troops would help with the categorization of conflicts. Plot committed forces across the intervention timeline and you have a good analysis.

[jamesfee]

The arguments on blowback are always circular logic, if you have stated principles and adhere to them the UOF is stated and upfront for adversaries to chose to challenge and risk triggering your actions.

[jamesfee]

Behaviorally it's hard to engage in UOF and take a secondary role, you can't have the confidence of allies if you are holding back.

[jamesfee]

Diplomacy should be the prime and guiding framework, the post Vietnam Weinberger/Powell doctrine is sometimes forgotten for the expediency of results.

[jamesfee]

Commenting as I watch, are you going to scale the interventions? Hati earthquake relief is much smaller then the GWOT etc

[jamesfee]

Does a lower level of National Intrest indicate some altruistic or principled reasoning, for example Human Rights protection i.e. Bosnia in the 90s?

[jamesfee]

Any parallels to how historic hegemonic powers like Rome or Great Britton intervened in their arc of global power. Asking for a friend 😉

[janmyklebust]

Generally US history is about Lebensraum. Right to rule the whole world. .but it is very easy to divide everything into technical terms and measurements of all kinds of foggy language. Which is hiding the real US missions.. a friend commented here.