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Optimism would also make an established power less likely to use force when confronting a revisionist rival, whose efforts to challenge the existing security order would appear more like acts of self-sabotage than genuine threats. As such, optimistic hegemons take some precautionary measures to ensure that revisionist powers cannot threaten their core security interests, but they focus primarily on inducing smaller states to accept the existing rules of the game. Established powers with long time horizons pay greater attention to rising powers that invest in nonmilitary capabilities, such as soft power, which might pose real risks in the far future.

The 1990s offered a good example of these dynamics. U.S. policymakers imbibed the political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, which posited that there were no longer any universal ideological challengers to liberal, free-market democracy. The international relations theorist Joseph Nye’s argument that the United States possessed an abundance of soft power further brightened the outlook. Faith in democratization and the so-called Washington consensus regarding neoliberal economic development bolstered U.S. confidence, as well. Owing to this optimism, it is not surprising that the United States chose to engage, rather than confront, potential rivals such as China.

Pessimistic governments cannot focus too much on the distant future because they believe they must act in the present to avoid a more dangerous world. Under these circumstances, what matters are so-called kinetic capabilities—instruments of statecraft that can be used immediately to change the facts on the ground as quickly as possible. Leaders of these states will therefore focus most of their attention on existing military and economic resources and active efforts to increase them. Initiatives by other countries to augment their soft power or develop alternative networks or institutions might get noticed by these leaders, but they will provoke less concern. Leaders focused on the here and now will not prioritize such long-term threats.

By contrast, governments with positive expectations about the future have confidence in their continued national ascent. This enables a longer time horizon, allowing policymakers to invest in forms of power that take more time to pay off: global governance, cultural diplomacy, long-standing alliances and partnerships, pie-in-the-sky technological innovations, and so forth. These forms of power require substantial investment and time to develop, but the rewards are significant. Optimistic expectations also mean that these states can apply an ambitious definition of power in assessing others’ capabilities. They will notice what other great powers are doing across many dimensions of power, not just military might. As the sociologist Steven Lukes has explained, “The wider the scope of what, in the view of one’s conceptual framework, is going to count as power, the more power in the world one will be able to see.”

First and most obviously, a good theory should be logically consistent and empirically valid, because a logical explanation that is consistent with the available evidence is more likely to provide an accurate guide to the causal connections that shape events.

Second, a good theory is complete; it does not leave us wondering about the causal relationships at work (Van Evera 1997). For example, a theory stating that “national leaders go to war when the expected utility of doing so outweighs the expected utility of all alternative choices” (Bueno de Mesquita & Lalman 1992) may be logically impeccable, but it does not tell us when leaders will reach this judgment. Similarly, a theory is unsatisfying when it identifies an important causal factor but not the factor(s) most responsible for determining outcomes. To say that “human nature causes war,” or even that “oxygen causes war,” is true in the sense that war as we know it cannot occur in the absence of these elements. But such information does not help us understand what we want to know, namely, when is war more or less likely? Completeness also implies that the theory has no “debilitating gaps,” such as an omitted variable that either makes its predictions unacceptably imprecise or leads to biased inferences about other factors (Nincic & Lepgold 2000, p. 28).

Every policy is a prediction. Tax cuts will boost the economy. Sanctions will slow Iran’s nuclear program. Travel bans will limit the spread of COVID-19. These claims all posit a causal relationship between means and ends. Regardless of party, ideology, or motive, no policymaker wants his or her [their] recommended course of action to produce unanticipated consequences. This makes every policymaker a forecaster. But forecasting is difficult, particularly when it comes to geopolitics — a domain in which the rules of the game are poorly understood, information is invariably incomplete, and expertise often confers surprisingly little advantage in predicting future events.

These challenges present practical problems for decision-makers in the U.S. government. On the one hand, the limits of imagination create blind spots that policymakers tend to fill in with past experience. They often assume that tomorrow’s dangers will look like yesterday’s, retaining the same mental map even as the territory around them changes dramatically. On the other hand, if policymakers addressed all imaginable threats, the United States would need so large and expensive a national security establishment that the country could do little else. By many measures, it is nearing this point already. The United States has military bases in more than 70 countries and territories, boasts more than four million federal employees with security clearances, and fields 1.3 million active-duty troops, with another million in reserve. According to one estimate, the United States spends $1.25 trillion annually on national security. When it comes to anticipating the future, then, the United States is getting the worst of both worlds. It spends untold sums of money preparing yet still finds itself the victim of surprise — fundamentally ill equipped for defining events, such as the emergence of COVID-19.

I. Modern realism helps us appreciate the impact of the anarchical structure of the international system on the preferences, strategies, interactions, and domestic institutions of states. Modern realist theory provides the strongest and clearest analysis of the peculiar (but not unique) setting in which states interact: the absence of a centralized authority reliably capable of providing protection and the redress of grievances. This political context, in turn, through processes of selection and socialization, has a constraining effect on the strategies that states are likely to pursue and even, at the limit, the preferences that they seek to satisfy in the international domain. In particular, modern realism provides us with the tools to appreciate that states that are co-located in a self-help system will be concerned about their security and their independence and, by consequence, the means by which they can retain some minimally acceptable level of both, or at least mitigate the harm that may be done to one or the other. In addition, modem realism helps us to apprehend the systemic sources of constraints on the amenability of national governments to work together even when they share common interests. Finally, realism sheds light on the observable behavior of many major states to resist rather than to acquiesce in the face of overwhelming power.

Other systems-level theories of international relations-for example, neoliberal institutionalism and social constructivism largely accept this modern realist depiction of world politics as the starting point for their own analyses.3 These approaches put themselves forward as fundamental alternatives to realist theory. However, in the main they do no more than suggest that not all of the inferences put forward by modem realism about world politics necessarily obtain at present, or they need not do so for all time. These alternative approaches are essentially "yes, but" commentaries on the realist understanding of world affairs.4

For human rights still require states to enforce them, just not the same state that is repressing or violating them. But the enforcement of rights by external states or by “the international community” means war. Immanuel Kant warned that peace could not come from forcing a single state that refused to accept even a positive value or policy of the world community to get in line, since that is not peace but war (Kant). Machiavelli warned that republics need a plurality of republics, able to criticize each other, encourage each other to best practices, engage in competition. When all republics fall under a single central power—even a collective one—we find an empire, not a republic. A condition in which the world community was unanimous and forced a recalcitrant state into accepting policies it and its citizens had not approved would be analogous to empire, to that world polity that Arendt likewise warned would not result in a stronger enforcement of rights, but in the greatest threat to them, and one without external recourse for redress (Arendt 298).

Nor are these abstract problems. Mark Mazower has painstakingly shown that the entire conception of international law has always been based on the “standard of civilization” in which certain states were within such a standard, and so legitimized to enforce their conception of international law, while other peoples and states and communities were outside of it, and so vulnerable to having the will of others imposed upon them (Mazower 70). In short, colonialism, neocolonialism, and the current regime of human rights are closely linked, and it is no accident that the countries that find themselves targets of humanitarian interventions under the “responsibility to protect” are ones that are not within the current updated version of the standard of civilization—that is to say, not allies of the United States and often opposed to neoliberalism. Thus, even in shifting from the older national government’s responsibility to its own citizens to a conception that the international community has a responsibility to protect human rights, we find that we have merely changed which fox is guarding the chickens.

The core idea was that the United States must dominate the international community, which was essentially anarchic. After the U.S. won the Cold War with the Soviet Union, hegemony became its central pillar of power for maintaining the international order. Over the years, hegemonic realism has become an unquestioned political dictum in the consciousness of U.S. elites of both major political parties and the majority of the country’s population, thanks to the discourse system of national interests and perceptions that the U.S. has continued to foster. Any country that, for whatever reason, is perceived to pose a challenge to the U.S. cannot be tolerated. The abrupt transformation of China-U.S. relations into a strategic rivalry is the result of Washington’s perception that China’s development poses just such a challenge.

China says this is a misunderstanding and misjudgment; it says it is only interested in developing itself and has no intention of replacing the United States. The United States says there is no misunderstanding or miscalculation, that China has become a superpower with strength approaching that of the United States, that there are increasingly prominent conflicts of interest with the United States over geopolitics and various important issues, that China adheres to a national ideology different from that of the West and that the United States has no greater competitor. Obviously, this sort of thinking rejects China’s theory of peaceful development.

6. The two faces of security – and of peace Security, especially state security, tends to be enacted in contexts of the violently contested political authority. Often it is enacted through violent power, rebranded as legitimate force. Small wonder that some in the development community, including those who drafted SDG 16, hesitate to use the word at all. But although security is a deeply disputed idea, it is also a highly necessary one. Security functions simultaneously as an analytical construct, as a frame for policy and as a moral narrative. It is distinct from the equally ambiguous if less contentious concept of peace. Yet, at the same time, it is often seen as essential to the preservation of peace.

Most of the things that international decision-makers, political and security elites and development practitioners do in security’s name are supposed to protect the safety and welfare of people in a world of multiple challenges and threats. However, there is a tendency to slide from global, to national, to citizen and to human security and back again, without enough serious reflection on how they interconnect and on where tensions and contradictions lie hidden. Development agencies have too often plunged into security policies and programmes, without a clear understanding of where they might lead, who would benefit and how they might go wrong.

Neoclassical realism and global IR This reading of the global IR literature raises the following questions: Can realists address and contribute, from within their paradigm, to the intellectual debate around the discipline’s Western centrism? Can realist theorizing and analysis benefit from this? If so, how and through what avenues?

Some global IR scholars have observed that new realist variants such as NCR have become “more relevant to the non-Western world” because they draw insights from it (Acharya, 2014: 650). As such, realist insights continue to matter for the study of international relations (Schmidt, 2014: 468). Through colonialism as well as through globalization, sustained interaction, and associated processes of (forced and voluntary) socialization, similar patterns of state behavior have spread across the globe. There is then, at a basic conceptual level, a case to be made for the continued inquiry into notions such as power, anarchy, and balance of power from a realist perspective. How realists describe patterns of state behavior originated in a Western canon, but these patterns are not exclusively Western anymore (Schmidt, 2014: 468).

Why do people hate realism so much? It’s a thoughtful question asked by Stephen Walt in Foreign Policy. Walt is a card-carrying foreign policy realist, his work on alliances and his theory of balance of threat influenced the theoretical framework of much such research with major explanatory power. Walt argues that at the time of realism’s triumph, as the theory predicted a conflict in Ukraine, we’re observing a withering attack on the worldview. “Much of this ire has been directed at my colleague and occasional co-author John J. Mearsheimer, based in part on the bizarre claim that his views on the West’s role in helping to cause the Russia-Ukraine crisis somehow make him ‘pro-Putin’ and in part on some serious misreadings of his theory of offensive realism,” Walt writes, adding that “another obvious target is former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, whose recent comments urging peace talks with Moscow, a territorial compromise in Ukraine, and the need to avoid a permanent rupture with Russia were seen as a revealing demonstration of realism’s moral bankruptcy.”

Walt concludes that there are several reasons people dislike realism. Primary among them is the idea that realism is pessimistic. “It’s not hard to understand why many people are reluctant to embrace such a pessimistic view of the human condition, especially when it appears to offer no clear escape from it.” Second, realism is “indifferent or hostile” to ethical considerations, being an amoral framework where power is the chief determinant. “There is a grain of truth in this charge, insofar as realism’s theoretical framework does not incorporate values or ideals in any explicit way,” Walt writes, “for realists, noble aims and good intentions are not enough if the resulting choices lead to greater insecurity or human suffering.” Realists do not consider any country exceptional, as their worldview argues that every country, every power will usually act in a certain way, facing a certain set of variables. That also rubs most people the wrong way, as most people tend to think in group dynamic, and any criticism of their own country’s behavior or dissent and nonconformity to the “current thing” or conventional wisdom, are considered unpatriotic.

Among the collateral damage of the war in Ukraine is a school of thought: realism. This intellectual tradition insists that the pursuit of national interests trumps higher ideals, such as the commitment to open trade, the sanctity of international law, and the virtues of democracy. Realists focus on how states, particularly major powers, seek to survive and retain influence in world politics. As such, realism appeared well suited for explaining the imperatives and calculations behind the Russian invasion. Instead, it found itself caught in the crossfire. After realist arguments seemed to excuse the Kremlin’s actions, critics in Europe and North America have variously called prominent individuals associated with realism—and realism itself as a doctrine—irrelevant, callous, and even morally reprehensible.

The political scientist John Mearsheimer drew much of the opprobrium for his claims about the origins of the war in Ukraine. An unabashed advocate of realism, Mearsheimer has insisted that the United States and its allies are at fault for encouraging NATO and EU expansion into what the Kremlin sees as its sphere of influence, thereby threatening Russia and provoking Russian aggression. Criticism of Mearsheimer mounted after the Russian Foreign Ministry itself promoted his ideas in the wake of the invasion. The urgings of another realist, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, exhorting Ukraine to give up territory in order to appease Putin have also led to a barrage of attacks on the tenets of realism.

Realism has a long history and many variants, but its core rests on a straightforward set of ideas. As the name implies, realism tries to explain world politics as they really are, rather than describe how they ought to be. For realists, power is the centerpiece of political life: Although other factors sometimes play a role, the key to understanding politics lies in focusing on who has power and what they are doing with it. The Athenians’ infamous warning to the Melians captures this perfectly: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” Quentin Tarantino couldn’t have put it any better.

For realists, states are the key actors in the international system. There is no central authority that can protect states from one another, so each state must rely upon its own resources and strategies to survive. Security is a perennial concern — even for powerful states — and states tend to worry a lot about who is weaker or stronger and what power trends appear to be. Cooperation is far from impossible in such a world — indeed, at times cooperating with others is essential to survival — but it is always somewhat fragile. Realists maintain that states will react to threats first by trying to “pass the buck” (i.e., getting someone else to deal with the emerging danger), and if that fails, they will try to balance against the threat, either by seeking allies or by building up their own capabilities.

Libya and the 2011 NATO intervention there have become synonymous with failure, disaster, and the Middle East being a “shit show” (to use President Obama’s colorful descriptor). It has perhaps never been more important to question this prevailing wisdom, because how we interpret Libya affects how we interpret Syria and, importantly, how we assess Obama’s foreign policy legacy.

Of course, Libya, as anyone can see, is a mess, and Americans are reasonably asking if the intervention was a mistake. But just because it’s reasonable doesn’t make it right.

After the U.S. military announced in December that its combat mission in Iraq had ended, conventional media outlets, think tanks and social media were quick to compare America’s outcome in Iraq with its failure in Afghanistan. Specifically, they declared Iraq a fragile, if not necessarily a failed, state. However, these blanket labels do not reflect the reality on the ground, where Iraqis are changing their country for the better.

Setting aside the long-debated question of whether the U.S. should have ever invaded Iraq, common perceptions of Iraq as a lost cause are in need of serious revision. The naysayers believe they have convincing arguments. They point to well-meaning leaders, such as Prime Minister Mustafa Kadhimi, for failing to curb government corruption and the rampant violence committed by renegade, Iranian-backed Shia militias — and indeed, Iran’s determination to keep Iraq walking a tightrope between a functioning nation and an economically-dependent client state is certainly destabilizing.

Yet there is more to be said on behalf of America’s two-decade-long effort in Afghanistan than these crude analyses allow. We certainly don’t mean to suggest that the war was a complete success. It was not. Many Americans lost their lives fighting there (and far more Afghans died), and the United States spent trillions in a vain effort to build the Afghan state. Yet here it’s not just the end point that matters but the nature of the curve that led to that endpoint. And there’s a great deal of area under the curve of the Afghanistan war, area one shouldn’t throw away lightly.

The truth is that the war actually accomplished a good deal—even if its most ambitious objectives remained ever-elusive. Far from a mistake, the invasion of Afghanistan to topple the first Taliban regime was a necessity in the post-Sept. 11 environment. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a successful counterterrorism campaign in the years that followed Sept. 11 without it. It played a decisive role in dismantling what had become a major and persistent threat to American lives. It provided for a long period of imperfect but nonmurderous government for many Afghans, particularly urban, minority and female Afghans. And it helped to facilitate a long period in which successful foreign-based terrorist attacks on the U.S. homeland simply did not happen.

Conclusion Since the US government indeed has taken action against some countries but not others, the academic and policy community are puzzled with the question of what precipitates US military intervention.24 Previous studies include limited systematic research about the causal factors that underlie the use of the US armed forces abroad, so this study fills the gap. The present research finds that, beneath the greater consciousness concerning promotion of democracy and combating terrorism, human rights abuses emerge as the consistent trait among states that experience US military intervention. This finding therefore lends credence to the Liberal Hypothesis about human rights, especially in contrast to the Realist Hypothesis regarding terrorism. This finding is also in line with the official position of US Department of State: ‘‘The protection of fundamental human rights was a foundation stone in the establishment of the United States over 200 years ago. Since then, a central goal of U.S. foreign policy has been the promotion of respect for human rights, as embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.’’25 The empirical evidence of this study and the State Department statement led us to believe that the United States has a sustained interest in promoting human rights abroad rather than exclusively pursuing its security interests. Of course, our assessment counteracts the widespread popular belief regarding US intervention as self-serving adventurism. It is possible that high-profile interventions that appear linked to adventurism, such as Vietnam or Iraq, have overshadowed the overall pattern.

Conclusions This research marks the first of its kind in studying mass attitudes towards the U.S. mil- itary deployments in their host countries. Surveying over 14,000 people across 14 countries, we find important trends with implications for both foreign policy-making and international relations theory. We argue that U.S. leadership during the post-War era relied not only on government policies, but also on the acceptance of foreign populations. The U.S. military, traditionally considered an instrument of hard power, also plays a part in building soft power and influencing perceptions of U.S. actors. Our results suggest that contact with members of the U.S. military may reduce prejudice against U.S. actors and build more positive perceptions of them. This relationship exists even when taking into account the effect of economic benefits. Interpersonal contact may increase both positive and negative views. Intuitively this finding makes sense—media and historical accounts of the U.S. military’s presence in other countries are full of stories of social ills, including crime, environmental degradation, and more. Our findings also indicate that these negative accounts may suffer from selection bias, and, in line with contact theory, show that interactions with U.S. military personnel correlate with more positive attitudes of U.S. actors. Alternatively, the economic benefits that flow from the U.S. military presence in a state correlate with a reduced probability that individuals express negative views of various U.S. actors, while in some cases also correlating with a higher probability that individuals express positive views. This work represents an important contribution to international relations theory and our understanding of the microfoundations of U.S. leadership and the domestic underpinnings of hierarchical and contractual security relationships. In particular, our results suggest that U.S. military deployments may help build support for the U.S. government and its policies through the transfer of economic resources. Governments and leaders may have slack when negotiating away sovereignty to the U.S. in various areas of foreign policy, but that slack may be substantially reduced when foreign publics hold more negative views of the U.S. and its agents. This analysis represents a critical step insofar as it establishes the correlates of mass attitudes towards U.S. military deployments, but more work is required to better understand how, and when, such attitudes translate into actual pressure on government officials. Large, long-term military deployments represent significant investments by both the U.S. and host-country, and these considerations must be balanced against host politicians’ short-term political realities and the likelihood that initially narrow public grievances may develop into something greater. These findings also have substantive policy implications. Given the centrality of global military deployments to U.S. foreign policy, understanding mass attitudes towards those deployments can aid policymakers in better understanding the sources of support and oppo- sition foreign leaders face among their publics when dealing with the U.S. Fostering positive perceptions of its military personnel could allow the U.S. government to more easily estab- lish favorable basing and status of force agreements with foreign states. Cooley and Nexon (2013) note that the U.S. basing network exists due to common security interests and shared values. Where those interests and values are viewed as lacking, host governments may be more resistant to U.S. wishes. One strategy that the U.S. has pursued is to create stake- holders that go beyond the government. Thus, promoting more positive views of the U.S. among foreign publics may contribute to the creation of favorable agreements. These results stand in contrast with Goldsmith and Horiuchi (2009, 872) who find that high-level U.S. ef- forts at public diplomacy are not effective at countering negative images and news coverage. Our results suggest that lower-level and “unintended” efforts at public diplomacy may yield different results. At present no other state rivals the United States in size and scope of its overseas military presence. As other countries like China begin to expand their military influence abroad they will likely have to deal with many of the same concerns as the United States. Until now, members of the general public in states where the U.S. has had a military presence view China as having economic, not military interests (Interview with Panamanian Journalist 2018). This is likely to change as China expands its global military footprint. As one British Member of Parliament noted during our interviews, regarding British inaction with respect to the Chinese taking control of the port of Piraeus in Greece, “Are we mad? How stupid do we have to be?” (Interview with British Member of Parliament #1 2019). Countries like Djibouti, which hosts military forces from the U.S., China, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan, provide interesting early opportunities for examining how mass attitudes towards foreign military deployments vary by sender country.

Today’s restrainers similarly seek to capitalize on the suffering and difficulties associated with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the broader fight against terrorism, when they argue for the withdrawal of the remaining U.S. forces from these and other conflicts.11 Restrainers, however, often conflate the initial decision to intervene at all with how a conflict is subsequently managed or how eventually to withdraw. These are different policy decisions. Indeed, one can be critical of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and how the war was managed – while also believing that Washington should retain a modest U.S. military presence to help prevent a return of the Islamic State and to counter the influence of Iran. Restrainers have also attempted to leverage the Great Recession and the current economic crisis resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic to incite populist passions.12 They do this by falsely suggesting that defense spending is the primary source of the federal deficit and debt.13 Defense spending is near post-World War II lows in terms of percentage of U.S. gross domestic product and percentage of federal spending. Restrainers consistently paint existing and potential conflicts and U.S. military deployments with the same brush, warning of another “forever war.”14 However, not every conflict leads to an interminable quagmire. Even the so-called War on Terror, despite its headaches, so far has helped prevent another major foreign terrorist attack on the United States, which many had predicted to be inevitable after 9/11. The term “forever war” is itself curious. History, unfortunately, is a forever war – the chronicle of states’ struggles with their enemies. To be sure, one can write a truly wondrous history of human achievement. But sadly, as the Spanish writer George Santayana observed, “only the dead have seen the end of war.”15 Restrainers operate under the mistaken assertion that the world would be a safer or better place if U.S. influence would simply recede.16 The 20th century tells another story. As the historian Robert Kagan argued in his 2012 book The World America Made, the U.S.-led world order has heralded a global rise in liberalism and human rights, better education and health, greater wealth, and more access to information.17 Equally puzzling is the notion that the world’s problems and conflicts are of little consequence to the United States.18 What happens abroad inevitably affects Americans at home. Al-Qaeda launched the 9/11 attacks despite America’s best efforts to steer clear of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda was and is based. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor despite Washington’s best efforts to stay out of the fray. Isolationists initially blocked then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt from providing greater support to an embattled Britain, and millions of lives were lost from not confronting German leader Adolf Hitler sooner.19 The best way to protect American interests is to engage internationally and maintain a well-designed, forward-deployed military presence alongside allies and partners. As Jakub J. Grygiel and A. Wess Mitchell have noted, U.S. deployments of varying magnitude along what they call the “unquiet frontier” that stretches from the Baltic Sea to the South China Sea counter the rise of revisionist powers such as China, Russia, and Iran.20 Support for U.S. allies, coupled with a U.S. military presence in forward bases, helps deter gathering threats.21 When Washington plays an outsized role in shaping and maintaining the international rules-based order, Americans and people around the world are safer and more prosperous. That is what the United States has done, for the most part, since World War II. And that leadership role has helped ensure that global conflicts such as the Cold War did not erupt into devastating military confrontations. Admittedly, the U.S.-led international order certainly has not prevented all wars. There have been costly mistakes along the way. But responding to those mistakes by ignoring persistent threats and drawing down U.S. military posture for its own sake would be shortsighted and dangerous. Those who welcome the retreat of U.S. power have yet to fully answer one important question: What happens after the United States goes home? When the British Empire unraveled after World War II, the United States stepped into the void, promoting an international system based on the rule of law. Who will follow the United States? The alternatives are frightening. Russia is far less equipped to become a superpower but would be a particularly predatory, corrupt, and avaricious one under Russian President Vladimir Putin. China, for its part, actively seeks global leadership. The Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian hostility to democracy; weaponization of data;22 human rights abuses;23 support for rogue states such as Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan;24 threats to Hong Kong and Taiwan;25 militarization of the South China Sea;26 and massive theft of intellectual property27 should all serve as warnings about a Chinese-led world order. And let us all dispense with the fiction that the European Union could be an alternative to the United States in defending democracies. U.S. power, therefore, must be retained, not restrained.

Systemic Dimensions: The Varying Prevalence of Competitive Intervention

The framework articulated above not only provides a comprehensive account of the duration effects of competitive intervention on civil wars—it also highlights a candidate explanation for the recent decline in the prevalence of intrastate conflict. Insofar as state decisions to aid combatants are consistent with competitive state policy-making, temporal variation in geopolitical competition between states should affect trends in the prevalence of competitive intervention. Variation in the prevalence of competitive intervention should in turn affect temporal trends in the prevalence of internal conflict through the duration effects described above.

Let me unpack these points further. A degree of skepticism is warranted about the extent to which realist policies of restraint and offshore balancing would be conducive to international order, and not a series of protracted proxy wars. As a recent study on proxy wars notes, “If the United States does less, it must rely on others to do more” (Berman and Lake 2019, 3). Inversely, however, if the United States does less, its proxies must also rely on the United States for more support, and when allies and partners engage in conflict for their own interests, for instance, they likely will call for support in terms of kit, including heavy arms, finance, training, and perhaps air support, even while US “boots on the ground” are denied. Where crises emerge and allies and strategic partners become unstable or engaged in a local or regional conflict, a realist-guided US foreign policy would be inclined to support US partners and allies as proxies for US forces. Because the use of US forces would have a higher threshold, but because realists also advise maintaining the material balance of power, a realist-guided US foreign policy would become more easily persuaded to engage in proxy wars. Furthermore, because it is a “cheap” way to balance, the United States could engage a wide number of proxy wars simultaneously, almost indefinitely. This strategic environment would also tempt the United States to trap Russian or Chinese forces in costly protracted wars against US proxies, along the model of Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, as a strategy to drain the power of China and Russia and limit their ability to engage in other conflicts.

The potential for a wide number of proxy wars could potentially condemn the twenty-first century to the miseries and suffering of a series of protracted proxy wars waged with ever-more sophisticated weapons technology. Proxy wars are an immense source of international disorder because they tend to be protracted, devastating the countries in which they are waged. They are also generative of regional consequences including humanitarian and refugee crises, as well as new military groups operating across borders, whose long-term alignment with the United States is not always ensured. The Syrian civil war, for example, evolved into a proxy war with immense loss of life and consequences for regional stability (Hughes 2014). It involved embedding of US forces in proxy forces against Russian-supported government forces. At the same time, the diminishing presence of the United States in the region and inconsistent US support for key partners has been a critical contributor to the intensity, duration, and regional involvement in the Syrian conflict (Phillips 2020). Realists rightly suggest diplomacy is required to unwind the conflict in Syria, yet, where the United States withdraws its presence, as realist policies advise, proxy wars will tend to continue and emerge without diplomatic breakthroughs, which require years to develop, achieve, and implement.