The Nation That Loves War

The nation I'm referring to in the title of this post is , of course, the United States. At least it certainly looks that way. This country has the largest military budget of any nation in the world. In fact, we spend more on the military than the next 15 or so nations combined -- around 45% of all military spending of all the world combined. This has given us a large well-trained and well-equipped military (much larger than is needed for self-defense), and it seems like our leaders seem compelled to use that military power as often as possible.

The United States doesn't hesitate to use its military power to threaten, or even to attack, other countries that don't want to fall in line with U.S. policy, or don't want to submit to the greed of U.S. corporations. Many Americans see this as spreading "freedom", but it usually has nothing at all to do with freedom at all. Many in the rest of the world have a more realistic attitude about the American use of its military -- seeing it more as bullying.

How much does the United States love using its military power? Well, in the last 50 years (since 1963) we have averaged using our military power every 40 months -- and that doesn't count the numerous times we just threatened to use it, or only engaged in a minor incident. Paul Waldman, in The American Prospect, has provided a list of the larger military engagements the United States has been involved in. I list them below, along with some of Waldman's comments about them.

1964 - 1975: Vietnam
1965-1973: Cambodia
1965: Dominican Republic
1983: Grenada
1986: Libya
1989: Panama
1991: Kuwait/Iraq
1992-1995: Somalia
1994: Haiti
1995: Bosnia
1999: Kosovo
2001: Afghanistan
2003: Iraq
2011: Libya
2013: Syria

This is a partial list, excluding the dozens of times we've shot down a jet or sent a small number of troops somewhere to help an ally put down a rebellion (here's a much more comprehensive list). It doesn't include the proxy wars we've waged in places like Nicaragua. It doesn't include all the places we're now using drones to pop off the occasional suspected terrorist, like Pakistan and Yemen. And it obviously excludes the lengthy list of places we sent our military in the country's first century and a half.

Some of these operations worked out very well, others didn't. And just to be clear, this history doesn't tell us whether bombing Syria is a good idea or a bad idea. But if you're wondering why people all over the world view the United States as an arrogant bully, reserving for itself the right to rain down death from above on anyone it pleases whenever it pleases, well there you go. It doesn't matter whether you think some or even all of those actions were completely justified and morally defensible. From here, we tend to look at each of these engagements in isolation, asking whether there are good reasons to go in and whether we can accomplish important goals for ourselves and others. But when when a new American military campaign begins, people in the rest of the world see it in this broader historical context.