In a reflection on American heresies, Peter Lawler writes:
Christians can’t simply reject some of the Puritanical concerns of the Progressive movement—such as worry about the souls of mothers and children, and Christians can’t be so realistic as to see nothing admirable at all in the “Wilsonian” instrusiveness that fuels often misguided American efforts to secure justice for people everywhere [bold mine-DL].
If these overseas efforts are “often misguided,” what exactly is admirable about the meddlesome spirit that inspires them? Being so “often misguided,” these efforts would seem to be informed by false assumptions about politics and human nature. Thanks to these false assumptions, these efforts tend to be imprudent and unwise.
When “securing justice” takes the form of waging large-scale war against other nations that have committed no injuries against our country or people justifying the attack, as it has several times in just the last twenty years, it is doubtful that the effort has anything to do with justice for us or anyone else in the world. If it is an unjust cause, there isn’t likely to be anything admirable about it. Instead, it is most likely an attempt to do evil that good may come, and that is something that Christians are specifically taught to reject.
It’s tiresome to be told of how “well-meaning” interventionists must be, liberal or conservative. Military interventionism requires the killing of innocent people, many of whom would not have died without it. As such, it requires some form of “consequentialist” morality to even attempt a justification. Even if you accept such moral thinking, the interventionist ought to have the burden placed against them to think through the implications of the intervention in great, painstaking detail, and consider the minutest political reality “on the ground”, and then tell all us skeptics why it’s so essential we act even in the face of the potential and likely downsides. A full, unsentimental accounting.
Instead we have the likes of Nicholas Kristof calling the Libyan intervention beforehand a “no brainer”, and then expending barely a word on the effects of the intervention since.