Is a Better World Possible Without U.S. Military Force?
It’s fiction to pretend that the most powerful nation can ever be truly “neutral” in foreign conflicts.
Sitting in front of a world map, U.S. President Barack Obama attends a meeting with the National Security Council at the State Department in Washington February 25, 2016.
Barack Obama attends a meeting with the National Security Council at the State Department in Washington February 25, 2016. Carlos Barria / Reuters
Shadi Hamid Oct 18, 2016 Global
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The eight years of the Obama presidency have offered us a natural experiment of sorts. Not all U.S. presidents are similar on foreign policy, and not all (or any) U.S. presidents are quite like Barack Obama. After two terms of George W. Bush’s aggressive militarism, we have had the opportunity to watch whether attitudes toward the U.S.—and U.S. military force—would change, if circumstances changed. President Obama shared at least some of the assumptions of both the hard Left and foreign-policy realists, that the use of direct U.S. military force abroad, even with the best of intentions, often does more harm then good. Better, then, to “do no harm.”
This has been Barack Obama’s position on the Syrian Civil War, the key foreign-policy debate of our time. The president’s discomfort with military action against the Syrian regime seems deep and instinctual and oblivious to changing facts on the ground. When the debate over intervention began, around 5,000 Syrians had been killed. Now it’s close to 500,000. Yet, Obama’s basic orientation toward the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad has remained unchanged. This suggests that Obama, like many others who oppose U.S. intervention against Assad, is doing so on “principled” or, to put it differently, ideological grounds.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/10/american-intervention-syria/504512/
