You Think You Want a Non-Interventionist U.S., Until You Get a Non-Interventionist U.S.

For most of my adult life, the United States has been at war somewhere. I spent a good portion of my own military career in those wars, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I understand better than most why Americans have grown tired of intervention. We have seen ambitious objectives become open-ended commitments, tactical victories fail to produce strategic success, and enormous investments of blood and treasure yield outcomes that were disappointing, temporary, or both. After the debacles of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and two decades of the Global War on Terror, skepticism about American military intervention is not merely understandable. It is healthy. A republic should be reluctant to send its sons and daughters to fight overseas, and the burden of proof should always rest with those advocating the use of force.

But there is a contradiction embedded in much of the current conversation about American foreign policy. We increasingly demand that the United States stop policing the world, stop interfering in other countries’ affairs, stop paying for other nations’ security, stop trying to impose our values abroad, and stop involving ourselves in conflicts that do not directly threaten the American homeland. Fair enough. But when America actually steps back, we are frequently outraged by what happens next.

It seems that these days everybody wants a non-interventionist United States… until they get the results of a non-interventionist United States.

The uncomfortable truth is that American power has never merely caused things to happen. It has also prevented things from happening. Those prevented events are much harder to see. There are no photographs of the wars that did not begin, no memorials to the people who were not killed, and no dramatic headlines announcing that an adversary decided not to invade because the cost was too high. Deterrence is inherently difficult to appreciate because when it works, the most visible evidence of its success is that nothing happened.

For decades, American military, diplomatic, and economic power helped create an international environment in which certain behaviors carried predictable costs. That system was never perfect, nor was it universally benevolent. The United States has made serious strategic mistakes, sometimes with catastrophic consequences. American power did not eliminate war, genocide, terrorism, authoritarianism, territorial conquest, or human suffering. But it frequently constrained them. Carrier strike groups, overseas bases, security guarantees, intelligence partnerships, sanctions, diplomatic pressure, arms transfers, and sometimes the credible threat of American military force shaped the calculations of governments and armed groups around the world.

That influence came with costs, and Americans increasingly question whether those costs are worth paying. That is a legitimate debate. What is not legitimate is pretending that the costs disappear simply because we choose not to pay them.

Power vacuums do not remain vacant. When the United States decides that a region, conflict, or alliance is no longer sufficiently important to justify American involvement, other actors do not necessarily respond by embracing peace, democracy, and international law. They pursue their own interests. Sometimes those interests align with ours. Sometimes they emphatically do not. Regional powers become more aggressive. Smaller states hedge their bets. Allies seek alternative arrangements. Adversaries test boundaries. Terrorist organizations exploit ungoverned spaces. Authoritarian governments discover opportunities that previously looked too expensive. None of this automatically means the United States should intervene.

That distinction matters. Recognizing the consequences of restraint is not the same thing as advocating perpetual war. There is a vast spectrum between invading a country and ignoring it. Diplomacy is intervention. Economic pressure is intervention. Intelligence cooperation is intervention. Security assistance is intervention. Forward military presence is intervention. Arms sales are intervention. Training foreign militaries is intervention. Naval patrols are intervention. Even publicly drawing a diplomatic red line is a form of intervention because it attempts to alter another actor’s calculations.

The meaningful foreign-policy question, therefore, is rarely “intervention or non-intervention.” It is what kind of intervention, at what cost, for what objective, for how long, and backed by what willingness to escalate if the initial measure fails.

Afghanistan offers perhaps the most painful recent example. By 2021, there were compelling arguments for ending America’s involvement. The war had lasted twenty years. Americans were exhausted by it. The Afghan government remained deeply dependent on foreign assistance, and the Taliban remained resilient despite two decades of American and coalition operations. There was no guarantee that another year, five years, or twenty years would produce a fundamentally different political outcome.

So America left. It what was arguably the worst possible way we could. And then America, and the world, received the consequences of leaving. The Afghan government collapsed with astonishing speed. The Taliban returned to Kabul. Afghans who had worked alongside Americans desperately sought evacuation. Images of people clinging to departing aircraft became symbols of the withdrawal. Women and girls who had grown up under a radically different social order suddenly faced a restored Taliban regime. None of that proves that remaining indefinitely was the correct policy. It does demonstrate something more fundamental: ending an intervention does not freeze the situation at the moment we depart. It relinquishes some of our ability to influence what happens afterward.

That principle applies far beyond Afghanistan. Americans understandably ask why Europeans cannot assume more responsibility for European security. It is a fair question, and European NATO members should carry a greater share of the burden. But if the United States significantly reduces its role in European security, we should expect European states to make decisions based on a world in which American guarantees are less certain. Some may dramatically increase defense spending. Others may accommodate stronger neighbors. Still others may pursue independent strategic capabilities that Washington has spent decades discouraging. A less American-dominated European security system will not necessarily be a more peaceful one. It will simply be less American-dominated.

The same logic applies in the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific. If America reduces its presence, regional actors gain greater freedom of action. That may sometimes be desirable. It may force allies to become more self-reliant. It may reduce American exposure to conflicts of marginal importance. It may prevent us from becoming trapped in another expensive and strategically incoherent war. But it can also mean accepting outcomes we dislike precisely because preventing those outcomes was one of the things American involvement previously accomplished.

This is where the political conversation often becomes dishonest. We want Europe to defend itself, but we don’t want European security arrangements that conflict with American interests. We want Middle Eastern countries to solve their own problems, but we are appalled when their solutions violate our values. We want allies to stop depending on American military protection, but we become uncomfortable when they begin considering the weapons, alliances, and accommodations that genuine strategic independence might require. We want adversaries to fear consequences, while simultaneously insisting that America should never become involved in their conflicts. We want to spend less on maintaining the international order while continuing to enjoy the economic and strategic advantages that order has provided.

In short, we want influence without involvement. But that is not generally how power works.

There is another uncomfortable point that veterans of the post-9/11 wars should understand particularly well: intervention has consequences, but so does inaction. Iraq taught Americans to be skeptical of intelligence, ambitious war aims, regime change, and confident predictions about what comes after military victory. Afghanistan taught us about the limitations of nation-building and security-force assistance. Those are important lessons purchased at extraordinary cost. But “never intervene” is not a sophisticated lesson extracted from those wars any more than “always intervene” was a sophisticated lesson extracted from America’s victories in World War II.

One way of thinking about Grand Strategy is that it’s the business of choosing among imperfect options. Sometimes military intervention will make things worse. Sometimes refusing to intervene will make things worse. Sometimes there will be no good option at all, only different varieties of bad ones. The responsibility of policymakers is not to discover a risk-free choice, because such a choice usually does not exist. Their responsibility is to determine which risks matter most to American interests and which costs the country is actually willing to bear.

A genuinely non-interventionist America is possible. We can reduce overseas commitments. We can close bases. We can narrow alliance obligations. We can stop involving ourselves in distant civil wars. We can tell partners that their security is primarily their responsibility. We can reserve American military force almost exclusively for direct threats to the United States. There is a coherent argument for doing all of those things.

But such a policy comes with a price. The price is not simply that bad things will happen somewhere in the world. Bad things happen even when America is deeply involved. The price is that events will increasingly unfold without regard for American preferences. Other countries will set the rules. Other powers will establish spheres of influence. Allies will make accommodations we dislike. Adversaries will occasionally take risks they would not have taken under the shadow of American power. Humanitarian catastrophes may occur that America possesses the capability to mitigate but chooses not to. And sometimes we will watch outcomes develop that we could perhaps have prevented and have to remind ourselves that preventing them would have required exactly the kind of involvement we decided we no longer wanted.

Maybe that tradeoff is worth it. There are serious arguments that it is. After decades of war, Americans have every right to demand greater restraint, clearer objectives, more equitable burden-sharing, and a much higher threshold for the use of military force. Indeed, those demands may produce a wiser foreign policy.

But restraint has to mean accepting the consequences of restraint. We cannot simultaneously demand that America stop acting like the world’s policeman and then complain every time a crime occurs on a beat we decided to stop patrolling. We cannot insist that other countries determine their own futures and then expect those futures always to conform to our preferences. And we cannot relinquish responsibility while somehow retaining control. We definitely can’t do it when so much of America is divorced from war’s consequences and therefore don’t care how long a war goes on, or who dies in it, because it doesn’t affect them.

The United States should intervene less often, more carefully, and with far greater clarity about what it is trying to accomplish. Twenty years of war should have taught us that much. But those same twenty years should also have taught us something else: there is no option called “do nothing” that carries no consequences.

Sometimes intervention creates the problem.

Sometimes intervention prevents the problem.

And sometimes we only discover which one it was after we stop.

That’s why national interests, and the decisions to protect and project them through war, are so hard.

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Charles served over 27 years in the US Army, which included seven combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan with various Special Operations Forces units and two stints as an instructor at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He also completed operational tours in Egypt, the Philippines, and the Republic of Korea and earned a Doctor of Business Administration from Temple University as well as a Master of Arts in International Relations from Yale University. He is the owner of The Havok Journal, and the views expressed herein are his own and do not reflect those of the US Government or any other person or entity.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.