Much is made
about how the United States has not fought a war since World War Two, labeling
all the other conflicts “police actions” or a myriad of other excuses. But the reality is that the United States in
the past seven decades has been one of the most bellicose powers the world has
ever seen. In the second half of the
twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty first, America has had
thirteen presidents, and every single one of them have seen American troops on
the ground in foreign nations. The
reason for this militaristic attitude is twofold: first, because of America’s emergence as a
superpower and two, because of the most astonishingly abrupt ideological shift
in the history of American politics.
In the immediate aftermath of the
Allies’ victory in World War Two, which dominated Franklin Roosevelt’s third
term and the first year of Truman’s succession of Roosevelt upon his fatal
brain hemorrhage, the U.S. military was consolidated and reduced. The Department of War, responsible for the
Army, was combined with the Department of the Navy to form the singular Department
of Defense, overseeing the entire military complex. While the bureaucracy of the armed forces was
being sorted out, droves of veterans left the military to return to their
pre-war lives, be it school or work.
While some stayed to make a career out of the military, the mass
departure of the victorious troops left the American military small and
weak.
This shrink in America’s military
might emboldened Stalin to grant the North Koreans approval for their planned invasion
of South Korea. This act of course set
the Korean War in motion. The Truman
administration was deeply divided over whether or not to get involved in the
conflict, some favoring the defense of Western Europe over all other
territories while others saw communist expansion anywhere as a threat. The latter faction prevailed and the “domino
theory” was born, which stated that every nation which falls to communism would
set off a chain reaction, causing other nations to become communist.
The United States mobilized the
fledgling United Nations to provide troops for the effort of pushing back the
North Korean advance. While numerous
nations provided soldiers, nearly ninety percent of the force was comprised of Americans. However, the poorly trained American soldiers
were easily pushed back, until General Douglas McArthur took command of the
U.N. force and quickly equalized the conflict.
When the war finally ended, it had stretched from the middle of Truman’s
second term to the beginning of Eisenhower’s first term.
Eisenhower, as the Supreme Commander
of Allied troops in the European theater of World War Two, was no stranger to
armed conflict and by no means was he done after the end of the Korean
War. While he did resist the urges of
his vice-president, Richard Nixon, to solidly commit to aiding the French in
what was then called Indochina, Eisenhower did send the French substantial
military aid and backed the anti-communist government of Ngo Dinh Diem, despite
the human rights atrocities carried out by Diem’s corrupt government.
While Eisenhower did not contribute manpower
to the looming Vietnam conflict, he did earn the distinction of being the first
president to send troops into the Middle East.
In a largely forgotten conflict, the Muslim population of Lebanon was
upset with the Christian government’s support of the Western nations in the
Suez Crisis a few years prior and thus decided to revolt, hoping to establish a
government which would align with the other anti-Western Arab nations, Egypt
and Syria. After the pro-Western
government in Iraq fell, Eisenhower sent fourteen thousand troops into Lebanon
in defiance of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s threat to retaliate with
nuclear arms should America intervene.
The American forces occupied the country for two months while the government
transitioned to a more moderate position.
After Eisenhower’s two terms were
complete, the American people replaced him with Massachusetts Senator John Kennedy. A veteran of the Pacific theater, Kennedy was
no dove. While some revisionists blame
the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Eisenhower, whom the plan was developed
under, Kennedy was briefed on the plan two days after his inauguration and
three months before the invasion itself, plenty of time to stop it if he
choose. Additionally, Kennedy took the
hard-line approach to Vietnam that many Republicans had hoped Eisenhower would
take. Kennedy tripled the aid to Diem
and put American military “advisors” on the ground to give technical and
strategic advice to the South Vietnamese.
If not for his assassination at the
hands of Lee Harvey Oswald, it is likely that Kennedy would be the president
most blamed for the Vietnam War.
Instead, that distinction fell to President Lyndon Johnson. Hoping to end the conflict before it became
too serious, Johnson flooded Southeast Asia with American troops. As the conflict dragged on with little signs
of an impending American victory, Johnson dug his heels into the ground. In the one hundred ninety years of American
history up to that point, no president had ever lost a war and Johnson was
determined not to become to first to do so.
Vietnam was not the only military escapade
Johnson oversaw. During the Dominican Civil
War of 1965, just under twenty-four thousand soldiers were deployed to evacuate
and secure the American Embassy. While
this operation was a rousing success, evacuating over six thousand civilians and
distributing eight million tons of food, Johnson’s legacy is forever tarnished
by his abysmal Vietnam decisions. In
1968, Johnson decided to not seek reelection, becoming the first incumbent
president who decided not to run since Calvin Coolidge in 1928.
Johnson’s unpopularity led to a drop
in support for Democrats, allowing Richard Nixon to return to the political
spotlight and win the election of 1968.
He originally promised to cut back the troop levels in Vietnam, but escalated
the conflict by sending more troops to the region and waging an aerial bombing
campaign against the neighboring countries of Laos and Cambodia, claiming that
the Vietcong were hiding in those nations.
Despite the widening of the Vietnam
War, Nixon oversaw virtually no other military escapades. This is due primarily to the Nixon Doctrine
which guided his foreign policy. This
doctrine stated that the United States would not take direct military action in
the assistance of allies, instead providing them with aid and making the nation
responsible for its own defense. This
policy could be seen in action during the Yom Kippur War between Israel and
many Arabian nations in which the U.S. merely provided Israel with money and
supplies.
After Nixon’s resignation in the
wake of the Watergate scandal his vice-president Gerald Ford became the
president. Ford inherited a deteriorating
situation in Vietnam as the North Vietnamese was successfully pushing into
South Vietnam and inching closer and closer to Saigon. Ford urged Congress to approve a new round of
aid to the South Vietnamese government but opposition to the war prevented the
aid package from passing. Shortly
afterwards, Ford gave a speech in which he declared that the war was over “as
far as America [was] concerned.” The
process of evacuating Americans and some South Vietnamese citizens began.
Ford’s involvement in the Vietnam
War is of a different variety than Johnson and Nixon’s. While the war continued in his administration,
Ford did not add more troops and successfully withdrew the American forces from
the region. Thus the Vietnam War can
hardly be held against him. Ford did,
however, deploy U.S. military in two instances.
The first instance, known as the Mayaguez Incident, concerned the
capture of an American merchant ship by Cambodian forces. Ford approved a rescue mission, employing the
Marines. This attempt, however, proved disastrous
when the Marines went to the wrong island and forty soldiers died. While the Mayaguez Incident was tragic, the
second instance was strange and silly.
North Korean forces murdered two U.S. military officers and injured South
Korean guards in the DMZ for attempting to cut down a poplar tree which blocked
sightlines from the U.N. Command to a U.N. outpost. Outraged by this brazen act, Ford approved a
massive display of American force. The
U.S. sent twenty three military vehicles, each with sixteen engineers equipped
with chainsaws, to cut down the tree.
These three hundred sixty-eight engineers were escorted by two security
teams comprised of thirty troops each.
Additionally, South Korea provided a sixty-four member special forces company
and the U.S. sent twenty-seven attack helicopters to circle the area while B-52
Stratofortresses escorted by F-4 Phantoms flew high above the helicopters. All to cut down a tree.
After defeating Gerald Ford in the 1976 election, Jimmy Carter was poised
to become the least militaristic president since Herbert Hoover. The first president since Truman to not have
the albatross of Vietnam around his neck, Carter cut the military budget to its
lowest point since before World War Two.
He also removed several thousand troops from the Korean Peninsula. The policy of providing aid to allies
continued, however, as seen in the Afghan crisis of 1979. The Soviet Union, determined to gain access
to a warm water port, invaded Afghanistan as the first step in a march to the
Indian Ocean. Determined to prevent
this, Carter approved a plan to pour arms and money to mujahedeen in the Asian
nation who opposed the invading forces.
However, Carter’s unwillingness to deploy American troops abroad was push
and broken by the Iranian Revolution.
Shortly after Islamist students and extremists stormed and seized the
American Embassy in Tehran, Carter announced the formation of the Rapid Deployment
Joint Task Force. The task force could
quickly be deployed to world crisis areas without the need for approval from
N.A.T.O. Before the task force was
operational, however, Carter approved of Operation Eagle Claw, an Army Special
Forces mission to rescue the hostages held in the embassy. Similar to the earlier Mayaguez Incident,
Eagle Claw was an unmitigated disaster. When
the mission was aborted before it could be completely carried out, two aircraft
involved in the plan crashed into each other over the Iranian desert. Eight Americans died and the Iranian government
recovered the wreckage, compromising American aeronautical engineering secrets.
If Carter was the least militant president in recent history, his
successor, Ronald Reagan, was the most.
Credited with ending the Cold War, Reagan took a hard-line position
against communistic governments around the world. He provided aid for anti-communist militants
in Angola, Cambodia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. The latter two of these aid operations were
especially controversial.
The Nicaraguan aid program was the most maligned of the three, as many
nations and international organizations considered the contras, the anti-communist
force which received Reagan’s aid, as a terrorist group. The contras committed uncountable human
rights atrocities; they decapitated, castrated, and maimed ordinary citizens. Additionally, Nicaragua brought war crimes
charges against the Reagan administration for the U.S. Navy’s mining of
Nicaraguan harbors, a practice forbidden by international law. The International Court of Justice ruled in
Nicaragua’s favor, but the United States simply refused to pay the reparations
the Court ordered.
Aid to El Salvador’s military government has also been criticized due to
the human rights violations committed by its forces. The El Salvadorian security forces were
regularly accused of the torture and murder of ordinary citizens. According to those who survived, the torture
included beatings, sexual abuse, disorienting chemicals, mock executions, and
the burning of skin via sulphuric acid.
However bad these aid programs may have been, in none of them were
American troops on the ground. However,
Reagan did intervene in a direct military capacity in four instances during his
administration. When the small Caribbean
nation of Grenada began to cooperate with the communist government of Cuba,
Reagan claimed that this represented a direct threat to the United States and
sent over seven thousand soldiers to invade the island. The superior American force easily won the
conflict within days and occupied the nation until a constitutional democratic government
was installed.
Under Reagan the United States became entangled in the long-running
Lebanese Civil War as part of a U.N. mission to ensure security in Beirut. Over four hundred Marines were sent along with
French and Italian soldiers as the U.N. peacekeeping contingent. Shortly after the foreign powers arrived in
Lebanon, a suicide bomber drove a truck with six tons of TNT into the American
barracks, killing over two hundred forty Marines. In response to this attack, the U.S.
mobilized its navy to the coast of Lebanon and began bombing suspected militant
hide-outs. The lack of public support
for the endeavor eventually forced Reagan to withdraw the American presence
from the nation.
On an April night in 1986, a bomb exploded in a West Berlin nightclub,
killing a Turkish woman and two American sergeants and injuring over two
hundred others. After intelligence led
the Reagan administration to believe that the attack was carried out by Libyan
agents, Reagan prepared for a counterattack.
A week later, at two in the morning Libyan time, the American Air Force
dropped sixty tons of munitions on Libya resulting in the death of forty-five
Libyan soldiers and officials as well as the death of fifteen Libyan civilians. With the exceptions of her closest allies,
the United States was widely condemned by the international community for what
was deemed a grossly disproportionate response.
The action is still viewed today as an example of America’s itchy
trigger-finger regarding military retaliation.
Finally, during the Iran-Iraq War which spanned Reagan’s entire tenure in
the Oval Office, the U.S. military saw action for exactly one day. After the USS
Samuel B. Roberts struck a mine in the Persian Sea, U.S. naval divers
discovered numerous other mines dotting the Sea. In retaliation, Reagan authorized a single
day of bombing against Iranian targets. The U.S. sank five Iranian naval
vessels and damaged one more, as well as damaging two Iranian oil platforms,
causing fifty-five fatalities. As
typical of military actions under Reagan, the bombing was condemned by the international
community and ruled illegal by the International Court of Justice.
Reagan’s vice-president, George H. W. Bush, followed him in the White
House, easily winning the 1988 election.
Bush Sr. immediately made a show of American military power when the Panamanian
government under Manuel Noriega refused to accept the results of a democratic
election which removed him from power by deploying over twenty thousand troops
into Panama to forcibly remove Noriega. The
mission was a success and also marked an important milestone: it was the first large-scale American
military operation in forty years to not be related to the Cold War.
This fact was important, for it created a precedent for the United States
to intervene in foreign affairs without a Soviet connection. This precedent was vital due to the impending
collapse of the U.S.S.R. While Reagan is
often credited with defeating the Soviet Union, it did not formally dissolve
until 1991 during Bush’s administration.
Bush Sr.’s non-Soviet related military policy continued after Saddam
Hussein ordered the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
Bush rallied a large international coalition and intervened in the
defense of Kuwait. The conflict was
looked at with a keen eye, as it represented the first time since Vietnam that
the American military would go head-to-head with a large, national
opponent. The United States surprised
many international commentators with the ease with which the American military routed
Hussein’s forces. The Gulf War cost the
American-led coalition just under five hundred lives while costing the Iraqi
military almost thirty-five thousand.
Despite this success, Bush Sr. lost the 1992 election due to an economic
downturn as well as the perception among Americans that, in the wake of the
Soviet Union’s collapse, foreign policy no longer mattered. This hurt Bush Sr. as foreign policy was his
strongest area, as well as the weakest of his Democratic opponent, former
Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, who lacked any foreign policy experience.
Clinton had the opportunity to reel in American military predominance
with the absence of a substantial geopolitical foe, but he did not. Instead, he added more troops to the U.N.
mission in Somalia dedicated to preventing warring factions from stealing aid
meant for those living in poverty. After
the “Black Hawk Down” incident, Clinton initially sent more troops to the
region before public pressure forced him to withdraw the American presence in
the Horn of Africa. The failure of the Somali
mission is often cited as the reason the Clinton did not intervene in the genocide
in neighboring Rwanda. Remaining in
Africa, after the 1998 terrorist attacks by al Qaeda on American embassies in
Kenya and Tanzania, Clinton ordered the bombings of several sites in Sudan and
Afghanistan which were believed to be terrorist training camps and supply
depots.
America also contributed troops to the N.A.T.O. missions during the
numerous conflicts in the Balkan Peninsula.
Clinton troops to Bosnia and Herzegovina to ensure that the Dayton
Accords, which were to end the conflict between Bosnian Serbs and the minority
Croats and Muslims. Additionally,
Clinton approved the bombing of Yugoslavian sites during the war over Kosovo’s
independence.
In a mission closer to home, Clinton sent troops to overthrow a military
coup in Haiti and to reinstate the democratically elected president who had
been ousted. The operation involved very
few casualties and was overwhelmingly successful. The forces remained on the island for several
months after the president was returned to office in order to ensure that a
second coup was not attempted.
After Clinton’s second term ended, George W. Bush won the White House in
one of the closest elections in American history. Bush was poised to challenge Carter as the
least militant president since the end of World War Two, pledging early in his
first term that American involvement in nation-building and small-scale
military operations would face a sharp decline.
However, this all changed after the September 11th terrorist
attacks. American foreign policy
radically shifted to stamping out terrorism, resulting in the invasion of Iraq
and Afghanistan.
Because President Bush and President Obama are virtually
indistinguishable in terms of foreign military policy, they can be condensed
into one mention. Bush radically
expanded covert operations around the world to eliminate al Qaeda, sending special
forces into Africa and the Arabian Peninsula to eliminate splinter groups. Obama has echoed this effort with the substantial
expansion of drone strikes on militants with little regard to the nation in
which they reside. American soldiers
violated the sovereignty of Pakistan in the operation which resulted in the
death of Osama Bin Laden. Indeed,
America today is as belligerent as it has ever been in the wake of the Second
World War.
The ideological shift I mentioned earlier goes back to the immediate
aftermath of World War Two. In the forty
years before that conflict, America was the most strictly isolationist nation
in the world. With a literal ocean of separation
between the U.S. and Europe, the epicenter of armed conflicts at the time, most
Americans saw no reason for the country to involve itself in affairs which did
not impact the States. In fact, the
slogan which carried Woodrow Wilson to a second term in 1916 was “He kept us
out of war!” However, with growing
support for the British and French side of World War One, Wilson took the
nation into the war, effectively ending it.
With the war behind it, America returned to an isolationist
viewpoint. Republicans refused to ratify
the Treaty of Versailles which would require the United States to join the
League of Nations. Such potential
entanglement in foreign squabbles was unacceptable to the Republican majority
of America. Even when the American
government did involve itself with European powers, it was strictly against
war. The Washington Conference, which
sought to limit naval fleets among the nations of the world, and the
Kellogg-Briand Pact, an international treaty to ban war, were key examples of
this. Additionally, after the stock
market crashed, plunging the nation into the Great Depression, isolationist fervor
reached a new height, as Americans wanted the government to focus on fixing the
economic woes before concerning itself with international affairs.
Even during the build up to World War Two, Americans saw little cause for
American involvement abroad. The
Japanese invasion of Manchuria, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, and the
Spanish Civil War all hardly registered on the consciousness of
isolationists. When events begin to
signify that the conflict was about to break out on the European continent,
Congress continued to resist President Roosevelt’s pressure to involve the
nation. Congress passed the Neutrality
Acts which prohibited the government from taking sides in the conflict and even
went so far as to ban Americans from sailing on a ship with the flag of one of
the warring nations.
However, as the American public saw the sinking of U.S. naval ships in
the Battle of the Atlantic, as well as Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease Act, they turned
towards the viewpoint that they had a moral obligation to defeat Nazi
Germany. Of course, anti-war sentiment
virtually disappeared in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack, ensuring that the
United States would join the war. When
Roosevelt came to Congress to ask for a declaration of war, every single member
of Congress except for Montana Representative Jeannette Rankin voted in favor
of the war.
At the end of the war, some Republicans returned to their isolationist
standpoints, but the American public left them behind. While public sentiment shifted away from
remaining neutral and towards embracing the new dominant role the United States
occupied in world affairs, these Republicans, led by Ohio Senator Robert Taft,
continued to view internationalist policies with deep suspicion. Taft and his fellow isolationist Republicans
attempted to block the Marshall Plan and N.A.T.O. to no avail. As more and more Republicans abandoned
isolationism, Taft continued to support it.
Despite Taft’s reputation as one of the most powerful senators in
American history, he could not stem the tide of international interventionism
which seized the collective consciousness of the American people.
This ideological shift, not by a single party but by the whole of
American society, delivered the deathblow to American peacetime. Citizens of the United States became more
willing to accept military involvement in foreign affairs, provided that they
remained limited in duration and scope, thus explaining the eventual opposition
to the Vietnam War and the Afghan War. As
long as American power is supreme in the world, it is unlikely that peacetime
will exist for the United States.
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