Editor's note: Abu Naser Al Farabi is a Dhaka-based columnist and analyst focusing on international politics, especially Asian affairs. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily those of CGTN.

American author Mark Twain wrote, "God created war so that Americans would learn geography." Washington has gotten more involved with military interventions by embracing foreign policy adventurism. A recent study by scholars Sidita Kushi, assistant professor of Political Science at Bridgewater State University and Monica Duffy Toft, director of the Fletcher School's Center for Strategic Studies, has underpinned this understanding.

According to a refined version of the Military Intervention Project (MIP) — a venture of the Center for Strategic Studies at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, the United States, since America's founding in 1776, the country has conducted nearly 400 military interventions. The MIP combines over 200 variables that highlight key insights into U.S. military interventions.

Interventions everywhere

Almost every continent carries the festering scars of U.S. military interventions. Of 392 military interventions, America has carried out from 1776 to 2019, 34 percent were against countries in Latin America and the Caribbean; 23 percent in East Asia and Pacific region; 14 percent in the Middle East and North Africa; and just 13 percent in Europe and Central Asia.

In the early decades of American emergence, its military interventions had concentrated on the American continents, aiming to establish hegemony across its periphery. But with the pace of its more outward assertion in congruence with rising global hegemonic aspirations, its interventionist aggression has engulfed other regions. Until World War II, the United States frequently intervened in Latin America and Europe, but from the 1950s they shifted toward the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia-Pacific regions.

Changing pattern of force and objectives

In the earlier eras, Washington had engaged in military interventions short of the direct use of force such as military threats or displays of force. But with growing military might, boosted by increasing investments in the military-industrial complex, the U.S. has preferred direct use of force other than a short-of-war military posturing. After the Cold War, escalations in using direct military violence have grown, although the U.S. has faced fewer real security threats.

Until the 1860s, the U.S. had usually fought for its hegemonic national interests — expanding its domestic territory and sphere of influence across therir periphery. But after World War II, Washington has intervened in pursuit of fewer vital national interests as geographical rivalries and vital security threats have faded.

Nowadays, Washington more frequently wields its military might as a third-party actor, responding to the existing crisis in the name of humanitarian intervention and pro-democratization. Yet, its military missions have left disastrous long-term and unintended consequences.

Power and propensity

The U.S. propensity to use military force has increased in proportionate to the advancement in its power projection capabilities. The greater the U.S. has accumulated military power, the more its elites have become eager to militarily intervene internationally. According to the MIP database, half of the intervention cases had occurred between 1950 and 2019. And more than a quarter of them have taken place after the Cold War, the unipolar moment America has enjoyed until recently.

America's growing military power has made "the use of force" an inseparable and on-stream spectrum in its foreign policy posturing — what Toft has termed as Kinetic diplomacy, diplomacy by armed forces. Before the Cold War, U.S. military hostility was generally proportional to that of its rivals. But afterwards, the U.S. has escalated its hostilities while its rivals have tried to deescalate such actions. Thereby, the U.S. has relied less on diplomacy to resolve crises and instead Washington is drifting in favor of long-standing wars of attrition that have far-reaching outcomes consumed for years or even decades to follow.

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