Whenever America has eschewed commitments abroad and turned inward, the results have been disastrous. The most isolationist decade in the country’s history — the 1930s — was followed by World War II. The “Come Home, America” isolationism of the 1970s was followed by the fall of South Vietnam, the genocide in Cambodia, the Iranian hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In the 1990s, the post-Cold War desire to spend the “peace dividend” led the U.S. to turn a blind eye to the rising threat from Al Qaeda. ~Max Boot

For all of these, Boot has relied heavily on the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. The so-called “most isolationist decade” was followed by WWII, but American policies during that decade did not cause WWII, and it was obviously in spite of the general “isolationist” mood that FDR managed to get the U.S. pulled into the ongoing war. Withdrawing from Vietnam and refusing to be drawn back into the conflict did mean that South Vietnam could not successfully resist on its own, which was the disastrous conclusion to over a decade of fruitless, wasteful military intervention. Neither the Nixon administration nor later antiwar members of Congress were responsible for the Cambodian genocide, but it was Nixon’s decision to expand the war into Cambodia that created the conditions out of which the Khmer Rouge emerged. The Cambodian genocide ought to be a warning about the truly horrific consequences that can result from prolonged and unnecessary wars.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was partly a result of the U.S. response to the hostage crisis, but neither of these had anything to do with the withdrawal from Vietnam. Boot is just offering a series of statements that bad things happened after policy decisions with which he disagrees, but he makes no effort to link them together because they cannot be credibly linked together. He absurdly wants to link the post-Cold War reduction in military spending with the growth of a terrorist threat that emerged because of a greatly increased U.S. military presence in the Gulf after 1990-91. It is possible that there would have been a growing terrorist threat in the absence of a huge U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, but it is very unlikely.

Boot reviews the foolish intervention in Somalia, and then says:

It never seemed to register with the public that subsequent forays into nation-building, in Bosnia and Kosovo, were more successful.

Yes, they were more successful than Somalia, but that doesn’t mean they have really been successful. One reason that this hasn’t registered with the public is that neither of these missions has ended, and the U.S. and European governments involved in Bosnia aren’t very keen on drawing public attention to the state of affairs in Bosnia today. David Bosco reported last week from a gathering of experts in the Balkans:

It was all but taken for granted that the expensive and prolonged international involvement in the region had failed. The continuing dysfunctionality of the Bosnian state and the deep corruption in Kosovo were exhibits A and B. Participants also worried about stagnant economic growth and chronically high unemployment across the region.

While it is true that parties to the Bosnian War are no longer fighting one another, even this may not hold without continued outside involvement. The specific mission of nation-building has created corrupt international dependencies in which criminality flourishes. The examples of Bosnia and Kosovo are not at all encouraging if one is trying to persuade a skeptical public that nation-building is effective or necessary.

Of course, Kosovo would probably never have become an independent state had it not been for NATO intervention, so it is an example of a “nation-building” mission that the West foolishly took upon itself. U.S. security interests were never at stake. There was no question of Kosovo being left ungoverned. The U.S. and NATO forcibly ripped it away from the state that was governing it.

One lesson we ought to have learned from the last twenty years of experience is that the U.S. is not particularly good at “nation-building,” and Americans understandably fail to see the point in such open-ended, quasi-imperial missions. That doesn’t mean that we should heed Boot’s advice that the U.S. needs to become better at doing it. A more important lesson is that several of the places where the U.S. has pursued this policy either didn’t need “nation-building” until after unnecessary military intervention destroyed existing institutions (e.g., Kosovo, Iraq) or the “nation-building” in which we have engaged has had little or nothing to do with national security interests. Nation-building may be the unavoidable baggage that comes with military intervention, but that is just one more reason not to indulge the interventionists the next time they urge the U.S. to “do something” by attacking another state.