No Such Thing As A Little War: Liberal Military Intervention

• In Event: Empire, Great Powers, and Methods of External Control

Abstract

Why do democratic great powers sometimes urge liberalizing reforms upon governments threatened by insurgency? Why do great powers continue seeking insurgent defeat when their costs rise? This paper identifies a core belief about national and international security in the literature on counterinsurgency from the post-World War II era to the current period of liberal interventionism. It analyzes how this belief is embedded in U.S. grand strategic thinking and how it distorts analyses of past interventions to shape policymakers' intervention choices. The belief at issue is that long-term domestic political stability and international security require the spread of liberal democracy. This belief distorts analysis of past interventions and shapes policymakers' future intervention choices in three ways. First, the belief that defending a government against an insurgency requires liberalizing, democratizing reforms leads analysts to overstate the level of reforms implemented in past successful counterinsurgency campaigns and correspondingly understate effective but illiberal uses of force against civilians. Second, this distortion of the historical record encourages policymakers to set unrealistically ambitious political objectives for interventions supporting threatened governments. Third, belief in the teleological development of political systems towards the ideal type of the modern, centralized, liberal democratic state means policymakers assume that their values are universal, that the political actors within the target state share their goals, and that if they do not, they can be persuaded to do so. Empirically, however, the degree of political change necessary for counterinsurgent success is low, and non-democratic states can also behave as responsible international stakeholders. Textual analysis identifies this core belief in research on the most-referenced historical and contemporary cases of counterinsurgency, including Malaya, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and traces its policy influence in public and private statements and discussions about the campaigns.

Author

• Jacqueline L. Hazelton, Naval War College