“On what issue or issues (if any!) have you changed your mind in the last 10 years- and why?” Their responses follow.
OVER THE PAST 10 YEARS, my views on the uses of American power have evolved considerably. This should not be terribly surprising because in that time the world situation has changed and my own situation has changed.
Back in 1995, I was only in my mid-20s, and writing primarily about issues like telecom regulation and tort reform for the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. I had generally conservative instincts–anti-Communist, pro-military–but I did not have strong opinions on many specific foreign policy and national security issues facing the post-Cold War world.
Some cold warriors had become isolationists, while others had become realpolitikers with a narrow view of American interests. I was never seduced by the siren song of isolationism, but between realpolitik and what might be called “conservative internationalism”–the doctrine more popularly (if perhaps incorrectly) known as “neoconservatism”–I was effectively neutral.
Should we intervene in Rwanda, Bosnia, Haiti, or Kosovo? Both the realpolitikers arguing against these interventions, and the neo-Wilsonians arguing for them, had good points. I wasn’t sure where the merits lay. Expand NATO to Eastern Europe? Declare war on al Qaeda following the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and some incendiary rhetoric from Osama bin Laden? Decrease the size of the U.S. armed forces to take advantage of a “strategic pause”? I confess that I was ambivalent about all these issues, which divided so many in the foreign policy world. But then, in 1995, I wasn’t part of the foreign policy world.
More recently, I have developed strong views on many of these subjects. What made up my mind? It wasn’t the arrival of regular payments from the Neocon Central Office or the Global Zionist Conspiracy (somehow those checks have never reached my account). It was simply the march of events that was decisive.
The Bosnia and Kosovo missions, for instance, showed how much good “humanitarian” interventions could do, while the slaughter in Rwanda laid bare America’s shame for not intervening. The expansion of NATO was a signal success, while the unwillingness to treat al Qaeda more seriously and to put the American military on a wartime footing was a notable failure. So, too, the quintessentially realpolitik decision to leave Saddam Hussein on the throne in 1991 appeared to be a major blunder.
Based on these experiences–and my own study of our history, undertaken for my 2002 book The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, which showed that the United States has a far more extensive record of foreign interventions than is commonly believed–I have come to argue for an expansive American role in safeguarding global security. You might say, to borrow a phrase, that THE STANDARD was “right from the beginning”; I am right behind.
Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, and a foreign-affairs columnist for the Los Angeles Times.
