America’s Long Arc of Military Failures

To “secure its national interests”, America went to war multiple times over the past several decades, yet all of the wars ended in stunning failures with wide ranging implications for the countries involved.
It is said that national interests triumph over every other consideration in the realm of foreign policy. The idea of national interest varies for different countries, depending on their history, politics, economic development, and relationships with their internal and external actors. The nature of interests, Hans Morgenthau contended, changed over time. In contemporary times, state actors resort to a variety of means to secure their national interests. In today’s time, coercive measures seem to have acquired a particularly strong currency among leaders. Among coercive measures, war, which was deemed to be the measure of last resort when everything else failed, has now emerged as the first option.






