It's alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
If there is one lesson for U.S. foreign policy from the past 10 years, it is surely that military intervention can seem simple but is in fact a complex affair with the potential for unintended consequences.
My view of foreign policy is that we need to be careful and circumspect about United States intervention in any foreign nation.
The U.S. has intervened more often in more countries farther from its own shores than has any power in modern history.
No one would argue that it's in the United States' interest to have independent knowledge of the plans and intentions of foreign countries. But we need to think about where to draw the line on these kind of operations so we're not always attacking our allies, the people we trust, the people we need to rely on, and to have them in turn rely on us.
New terms used like, 'overseas contingency operation' instead of the word 'war' - that reflects a worldview that is out of touch with the enemy that we face. We can't spin our way out of this threat.
Whether I'm trying to figure out what the U.S. military is doing in Latin America or Africa, Afghanistan or Qatar, the response is remarkably uniform - obstruction and obfuscation, hurdles and hindrances. In short, the good old-fashioned military runaround.
Intervention continues to be a prominent dimension of the post-cold war world.
I've been to many countries and watched a number of conflicts or their residue, and I've served in the military.
There are lots of countries that are having these kinds of internal civil wars in other parts of the world and nobody is talking about intervening.
You know that we are not in the regime-change game. We are against interference in domestic conflicts.