A new summary of the history of US military interventions

If history is persuasive, the US arguably is militarily aggressive and belligerent. A recent research article, Introducing the Military Intervention Project: A New Dataset on US Military Interventions, 1776–2019 (senior author, Monica Toft), updates the scholarship. The abstract:

While scholars have made many claims about US military interventions, they have not come to a consensus on main trends and consequences. This article introduces a new, comprehensive dataset of all US military interventions since the country’s founding, alongside over 200 variables that allow scholars to evaluate theoretical propositions on drivers and outcomes of intervention. It compares the new Military Intervention Project (MIP) dataset to the current leading dataset, the Militarized Interstate Disputes (MID). In sum, MIP doubles the universe of cases, integrates a range of military intervention definitions and sources, expands the timeline of analysis, and offers more transparency of sourcing through historically-documented case narratives of every US military intervention included in the dataset. According to MIP, the US has undertaken almost 400 military interventions since 1776, with half of these operations undertaken between 1950 and 2019. Over 25% of them have occurred in the post-Cold War period.

The post-Cold War period ended on Dec. 26, 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved. The MIP definition of military intervention is broader than the MID definition. Because of that the MIP analysis shows there have been more military interventions than MID analysis. Data from the two definitions is shown below.

The paper’s conclusion includes these comments:

Preliminary results from MIP show that the US has increased its military usage of force abroad since the end of the Cold War. Over this period the US has preferred the direct usage of force over threats or displays of force, increasing its hostility levels while its target states have decreased theirs. Along the way, the regions of interest have changed as well. Up until World War II, the US frequently intervened in Latin America and Europe, but beginning in the 1950s, the US moved into the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). By the 1990s, it doubled down on MENA and directed its focus to Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia as well.  

We intend that the MIP data set and the analysis that follows provide an important resource to those interested in understanding the dynamics of US interventions historically and into the future. We contend that better data will lead to better theory testing, and ideally better policy formulation, on the subject of US military intervention.

The website for the academic center at Tufts University that created the MIP database makes these comments:

With its extensive defense budget and capabilities, the US remains a military leader in contemporary international politics – but can this military advantage ever become a long-run disadvantage for our foreign policy? According to our data, the US has undertaken over 500 international military interventions since 1776, with nearly 60% undertaken between 1950 and 2017. What’s more, over one-third of these missions occurred after 1999.[2] With the end of the Cold War era, we would expect the US to decrease its military interventions abroad, assuming lower threats and interests at stake. But these patterns reveal the opposite – the US has increased its military involvements abroad.

Perhaps as we exclusively focus on maintaining our military might, we elevate the usage of force over other strategies of international policymaking, to the detriment of our own interests. As it stands, the US seems to operate without any clear guidelines for when it employs force abroad, and the consequences of such interventions remain blurred and contradictory. [3]

In fact, Monica Toft has labeled the current trend of US military engagements as kinetic diplomacy, diplomacy solely via armed force. As traditional diplomacy withers away, growing in its place are shadowy special operation missions, drone strikes, and/or readily utilized conventional military deployments. As of this year, “while US ambassadors are operating in one-third of the world’s countries, US special operators are active in three-fourths.”[4]

Research into military interventions seems to be in flux and immature. Other kinds of analyses of military conflict give different results because they rely on different definitions. For example, this site lists factors that were not included in its 1890-2019 analysis. The list is long and it includes these considerations: mobilizations of the National Guard, offshore shows of naval strength, reinforcements of embassy personnel and military exercises. 

Given the high stakes of a nuclear war that spins out of control, i.e., collapse of modern civilization and death of billions of people, this topic merits more attention than it currently gets.

Q: Is it reasonable to assert that in recent decades, traditional diplomacy has significantly or mostly withered away, and it was replaced with special operation missions, drone strikes, and/or conventional military deployments?

Trump’s takeover of courts has started to sting

The Guardian writes:

In the first televised presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in 2020, the sitting president was asked why voters should re-elect him to the White House. He gave a relatively obscure answer – it was all about the judges, he said.

He ended his single tenure having placed 231 men and women on the federal bench, including three on the US supreme court, 54 on appeals circuits and 174 on district courts.

Last week, the significance of Trump’s hyper-aggressive remodeling of the federal bench lurched into view. Aileen Cannon, who Trump nominated for the US district court for the southern district of Florida in May 2020, granted the former president his desire to have a “special master” handle thousands of documents seized by the FBI from the former president’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.

The ruling was greeted with astonishment by legal scholars who noted how convenient it was for Trump to give the special master control over highly classified materials. Cannon effectively erected a roadblock in front of the justice department’s criminal investigation into how national security intelligence had been illegally hidden in Mar-a-Lago.

Even William Barr, himself a former Trump appointee as US attorney general, had only harsh words. “Deeply flawed”, he said about the ruling.

But Cannon’s maverick decision is just the thin end of the wedge. From the supreme court down, the impact of Trump’s recalibration of the federal judiciary is now starting to sting.

The consequences of Trump’s three appointments to the supreme court are now well understood by many Americans. The evisceration of the right to an abortion; blocking government action on the climate crisis; rolling back gun control laws are just a few of the seismic changes wrought by the court’s new 6-to-3 conservative supermajority.

Less visible and much less well comprehended are the similarly drastic shifts that are being initiated in the lower courts by Trump-appointed judges like Cannon. “These appointments are not only tilting the law further right, they are starting to erode fundamental democratic protections,” said Rakim Brooks, president of the advocacy group Alliance for Justice.

Biden is doing what he can to push the needle back towards the center. A review by the Pew Research Center last month found that the Democratic president had managed to surpass Trump’s rate at seating federal judges, achieving more confirmations at an equivalent point in his tenure than any president since John Kennedy.

Today Biden has confirmed a total of 81 federal judges (80 if you discount the fact that he nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson twice – first for an appeals court and then as the newest addition to the supreme court). Just how far the current president will be able to go in mitigating the rightward shift under Trump remains to be seen, with much hanging on the outcome of November’s midterm elections.

Apparently, my previous criticism of Democrats being slow about nominating federal judges was wrong. They are doing better than I thought. 

If the Dems lose control of the Senate after the 2022 elections, that will be the end of all Democratic judges being appointed to the federal bench.

Opinion: Democracy is inherently messy

A New York Times opinion piece makes some interesting assertions about the nature of democracy:

We may think that these clashes over the Mar-a-Lago search and over the state of our democracy are an aberration, a Trump thing. But they are actually the latest example — increased in intensity by the internet — of something that has been a permanent part of our politics, what we call the paradox of democracy.

Far more than a bundle of laws, norms and institutions, democracy is an open culture of communication that affords people the right to think, speak and act and allows every possible means of persuasion. That makes every democratic society uniquely vulnerable to the consequences of communication. We may not like it, but something like Jan. 6 is always potentially in the offing.

We ought to avoid the naïveté of liberal fantasy, which imagines we can impose reliable guardrails against dangerous or deceptive speech. Indeed, there’s a whole genre of articles and books arguing that social media is destroying democracy. Because of changes to online platforms around a decade ago, wrote Jonathan Haidt recently, “People could spread rumors and half-truths more quickly, and they could more readily sort themselves into homogeneous tribes.”

But this is precisely what an unwieldy democratic culture looks like. Depending on the communications environment, a democracy can foster reliable, respectful norms, or it can devolve into outrageous propaganda, widespread cynicism and vitriolic partisanship.

And when communications devolve into propaganda and partisanship, a democracy can either end with breathtaking speed, as it did in Myanmar last year, when the military overthrew the democratically elected government, or descend more gradually into chaos and authoritarianism, as Russia did under Vladimir Putin.

Nothing forbids voters in a democracy to support an authoritarian or vote itself out of existence (as the ancient Athenian assembly famously did). The history of democracy is full of demagogues exploiting the openness of democratic cultures to turn people against the very system on which their freedom depends. In France, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte leveraged a celebrity name to run for president on a campaign of restoring order in 1848, only to end the Second Republic with a self-coup to become emperor when his term was up.

According to one poll, only 21 percent of Republicans think the investigations into Mr. Trump should continue. However they arrived at that opinion, that they hold it at all matters. It gives conservatives not just the political cover to subvert the rule of law but also the power to create their own alternative reality.

Since Mr. Trump’s defeat in 2020, Republicans have embraced the “big lie” and tried to restructure state laws to control future elections. You could say this is a brazen attack on democracy itself, but it’s really a glimpse of democracy shorn of liberal restraints.

It would be much better, of course, if democratic politics yielded to the preferences of measurable public opinion and reflected the will of the people. It would be better still if we were guaranteed protection by our civic and legal institutions, binding the rule of law to society with accountability and fairness.

“Yet the truth is,” as the political communication scholar Zizi Papacharissi has written, “we have always lived in imperfect democracies, and we still do. Democracy is not static. It is not a given, it is not guaranteed, and it is not stable.”

Qs: Would it be much better if (1) democratic politics yielded to the preferences of measurable public opinion and reflected the will of the people, and/or (2) we were guaranteed protection of democracy by our civic and legal institutions, binding the rule of law to society with accountability and fairness?

Is it a liberal fantasy that imagines we can impose reliable guardrails against dangerous or deceptive speech, or do some conservatives also want to limit free speech, particularly free speech that is critical of what conservatives want or that conveys inconvenient facts, truths and/or sound reasoning?

“Thoughts and prayers,” MAGAs

I know the following is two years old, but man oh man, does the author ever nail it!

 To Trump diehards still defiantly clinging to their nasty sore loser historic disaster shipwreck of the worst president ever, like the crusty barnacles on the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, I feel sorry for you.

I mean that with all due respect, in a sarcastically caustic way, speaking Trumper language. I feel for you. My heart goes out. You are who you are.

You can’t help that as a Trump barnacle, you’re akin to an arthropod in the infraclass Cirripedia in the subphylum Crustacea. Be you. Be best. HuffPo says be whatever you want to be, damn the haters.

But like the barnacle-related crab and lobster that happen upon my dinner plate, roasted or boiled with plenty of butter and lemon with a snip of parsley, I feel tragically for the hardcore, hapless Trumpers:

1.I’m sorry you can’t handle Trump’s overwhelming, humiliating defeat and inability to handle it like the big man he told you he is.

2.I’m sorry you love a sore loser. It makes you sound like a sore loser. Nobody likes a sore loser. (Google “sore losers in sports.” Tragic.)

America especially hates a sore loser when he is the President of the United States and inspires the Senate Majority and the Republican Party to join in the sore losing, to the abject shame of decent Republicans.

3.I’m sorry that as a MAGA you take Trump’s loss personally when it’s really not personal at all.

You think Trump gives a f**k about you? If so, you poor dear. Funny how you never see a MAGA at Mar-a-Lago. Perhaps, hmmm, he might just be “leveraging” you for power and money? Sorry for the reveal.

4.I’m sorry you hate the majority of your fellow Americans who voted against Trump and feel the need to attack them. Just because of their temerity to vote against him because he made America much worse.

5.On a related note, I’m sorry you hatefully refer to Democrats as “DemoRats,” which confirms when you post that on Facebook that you’re slack-jawed stupid and lack the best words we learned in grade school English.

6.I’m sorry you’re ruining America by acting out whatever hates and resentments you harbor about your particular situation. It’s fun and easy to blame the libs, but like Trump you’re making America about you, personal, like the identity politics you hate on HuffPo.

7.I’m sorry you’re so suckered by Fox and the right-wing media and its bottom-feeding internet that is pandering to you for money, just like you think the professional mainstream media is doing to the libs.

8.Relatedly, I’m sorry you still prove P.T. Barnum was right that there’s a sucker born every minute to be taken for money.

9.I’m sorry you don’t know or care about our Constitutional rule of law and checks and balances and systems and processes and democratic norms. Or like your media does, you twist high-school civics into a greasy, sugary Auntie Anne’s pretzel to defend whatever Trump says and does.

10.I’m sorry you agree with, defend and/or salute whatever Trump says or does and his media salutes, like he’s your Fuhrer. Of course he’s not!

11.I’m sorry if you need to spread the smear that the duly-elected president-elect is disabled, demented, corrupt, a socialist tool and whatever other nonsense that pathetic loser hateful Trumpers spread on Trumpy social media. It makes you sound like a desperate loser.

12.I’m sorry that when it comes down to it, you seem to hate democracy unless it elects Trump and Republicans.

13.I’m sorry that I cannot send you real thoughts and prayers. I really tried to understand your mean, nasty, ugly behavior. That was stupid of me.

I don’t respect you anymore. I do not like you in your box. I do not like you with your Fox. I do not like you in a house or with a mouse. I do not like you here or there. I do not like you anywhere. So stay away from Washington.

14.I’m sorry: You are not really patriots. You are the opposite of patriots.

By loving Trump until his bitter end and bowing to whatever he says and does, you not only sound like a Russian troll, you also seem to hate America.

15.I’m sorry that as you wave the American flag in our faces, you spit on it every time you wave your Confederate flags, or accept those who do. I’m sorry you don’t care who you offend — you think it’s fun or funny. I’m sorry you lack basic decency and respect.

Sorry/not sorry if this piece sounds condescending.

But anyone still backing this duly defeated president — who might well stage a military coup to stay in office — deserves much worse than this attempt at bitter humor.

To be honest, I try to use humor to deal with my fear of MAGAs and what their goose-stepping to Trump is doing to the country I love.

https://jeffreydenny77.medium.com/thoughts-and-prayers-sweet-magas-25779a339f12 

 

Taiwan: A short history and the potential for American war with China

This 9 minute video by Al Jazeera (November 2021) explains some history about how Taiwan became the Republic of China. It mentions the possibility of the US getting into a war with China over a critically strategic interest the US has in Taiwan, namely production of critical microchips. At the time of the video, one expert said the possibility of US-China war was low but increasing. 

The video also points out how the Taiwanese people see the situation and what they want to do about it. Most want to leave things just as they are.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to PD for bringing this video to my attention.

The growing threat from China

To understand the threat that China poses, one really does need to get some feel for what it is, why it is, and how deep and broad it is. Former director of operations and intelligence at Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, Nigel Inkster, writes in a New York Times opinion piece:

China Is Running Covert Operations That Could Seriously Overwhelm Us

The culture of the Chinese Communist Party has always had a clandestine nature. But as the party has become an even more dominant force in China since President Xi Jinping took power a decade ago, this has metastasized in state institutions. China can best be described as an intelligence state. The party views the business of acquiring and protecting secrets as an all-of-nation undertaking, to the point that rewards are offered to citizens for identifying possible spies and even schoolchildren are taught to recognize threats.

The West cannot fight fire with fire. Mobilizing government, society and economic and academic systems around competition with foreign foes the way China does would betray Western values. But leaders of democracies need to internalize the sea change that has taken place in China and ensure that engagement with Beijing is tempered by a hardheaded sense of reality.

The last state intelligence threat of comparable magnitude was posed by the Soviets. But the Soviet Union was isolated and impoverished. China’s successful economy, on the other hand, is a key engine of global growth, vastly increasing Beijing’s reach.

Barely visible on the world stage 30 years ago, China’s intelligence agencies are now powerful and well resourced. They are adept at exploiting the vulnerabilities of open societies and growing dependence on China’s economy to collect vast volumes of intelligence and data. Much of this takes place in the cyber domain, such as the 2015 hack of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, in which sensitive data on millions of federal employees was stolen. Chinese intelligence operatives also are present in state-owned enterprises, state media organizations and embassies and consulates. China’s consulate in Houston was closed by the Trump administration in 2020 after it served as a national hub for collecting high-tech intelligence.

But Chinese covert operations don’t stop there.

China’s Intelligence Law, which was enacted in 2017, required its citizens to assist intelligence agencies. But this legislation simply formalized a situation that had already been the norm. The wider China challenge comes from organizations and actors engaged in activities that may not conform to normal concepts of espionage. 

Much of this is organized by the United Front Work Department, a party organization that seeks to co-opt well-placed members of Chinese diaspora communities — and whose scope has been expanded under Mr. Xi. China also endeavors to entice other Western citizens. A textbook case, exposed this year, involved a British politician whose office received substantial funding from an ethnic Chinese lawyer who thereby gained access to the British political establishment. One Chinese approach is to patiently cultivate relationships with politicians at the city or community level who show potential to rise to even higher office. Another is known as elite capture, in which influential Western corporate or government figures are offered lucrative sinecures or business opportunities in return for advocating policies that jibe with Chinese interests.

For China, this work is about survival. Technology and business intelligence must be acquired to keep China’s economy growing fast enough to prevent social instability. Mr. Xi has stressed the need to adopt “asymmetrical” means to catch up to the West technologically.

China may be ahead of the game now, but there are tools that Western intelligence and security agencies can bring into play, including providing staff members with the requisite language skills and an awareness of China and the workings of the Chinese Communist Party. But they need help.

Liberal democracies cannot just play defense; political leaders must champion greater investment in offensive intelligence collection capabilities and outreach programs that educate businesses, political organizations and other potential targets about their vulnerabilities. Systems also are needed to assess the national security implications of what otherwise might just seem normal commercial activities by Chinese companies or non-Chinese entities acting as fronts for Beijing.

Western policymakers and intelligence services must innovate and adapt. But they also must ensure that strategies they employ honor the ideals of freedom, openness and lawfulness that pose the greatest threat to the Chinese party-state.

Inkster’s arguments that China needs to (1) steal Western technology to keep up, and (2) subvert democracy to maintain the dictatorship, feel spot on. Western democracies and technology really do pose threats to China’s economy and dictatorship.

Given America’s broken political system and the blatant anti-democratic autocracy that dominates the Republican Party, it does not seem that the US can deal competently with the threat. American radical right multi-millionaires and billionaires fund the GOP. In return for their funding, they demand and are getting weakened civil liberties and governments less able and/or willing to defend democracy. The ex-president was completely serious when he said this in 2018 about Xi Jinping after he became dictator for life in China:

“He’s now president for life. President for life. No, he’s great. And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot some day.”

There you have it. The current leader of the Republican Party publicly wishing the US president had power for life. The GOP did not repudiate that, so they support it by silent complicity. That is similar to the GOP openly supporting and justifying the 1/6 coup attempt by still calling it “legitimate political discourse.”

Anyone who still believes that the Republican Party is a defender of democracy, the rule of law or civil liberties, is dead wrong on all three points. So dead wrong that their ludicrous false beliefs could kill a whole lot of us and put most of us in cruel Christian fundamentalist-capitalist authoritarian misery for the rest of our miserable lives.