American Militarism Is a Myth

AMERICA IS addicted to war—or so goes the increasingly bipartisan indictment of U.S. statecraft in the post-Cold War era. Critics on the Left and the Right, in the academy and in Washington, argue that policymakers have reflexively resorted to force to address international problems that might be better addressed with non-military tools or simply not addressed at all. America, in this telling, has been the proverbial toddler with a hammer that sees every international crisis, every foreign challenge, as a potential nail. This militaristic approach, it is alleged, has produced a disastrous record of strategic failure in U.S. interventions; it has drained the nation’s resources and corrupted its democracy; it has entangled America in costly and counterproductive “forever wars” in the Middle East.