It’s true that the U.S. has justified some of its more ill-conceived actions as being consonant with its international commitments, but in many cases (especially our big ticket wars), it was the U.S. pushing these institutions in the direction of activism, not vice-versa. The U.S. “forum shopped” the war in Kosovo, settling on NATO only after it failed to win over the U.N. Security Council. The U.S. was not led off to battle under the authority (or persuasion) of an international body. Ditto the second Iraq war, where the U.S. sought legitimation for an action it had already decided upon. Indeed, the entire liberal internationalist argument in favor of global institutions is precisely their ability to lend international legitimacy to actions the U.S. seeks to take in its own interest [bold mine-DL]. ~Greg Scoblete

I appreciate Greg’s response, and he’s quite right that Washington has used NATO and the U.N. as covers for actions it wanted to take anyway. I’m not sure it follows that the wars in Yugoslavia and Iraq would have happened had there not been a major U.S. role in these institutions that provided the pretexts for military action. The practical and political objections to interventionism increase when the President cannot invoke American “leadership,” the “international community” or the “credibility” of this or that institution.

Obviously, the U.N. was not forcing George Bush into Iraq, but the heart of the legal argument for the invasion, such as it was, was that it was necessary for the enforcement of U.N. resolutions and the upholding of the authority of the U.N. Willful misreadings of UNSCR 1441 aside, the U.N. never authorized the use of force in 2003, but had the Bush administration not presented itself as the enforcer of international norms and used the U.N. as a source of legitimation for the invasion it is difficult to see how any first- or second-tier powers could have cooperated in the war.

For example, Britain could not have legally participated in the invasion or occupation, and the same would go for most of the others in the “coalition of the willing.” The invasion was already pretty blatantly illegal, but without the fig leaf of enforcing U.N. resolutions and the pretense that the security of the entire world was threatened the U.S. would have faced the prospect of being almost completely isolated and at odds with virtually every other major power in the world. Bush did not invade Iraq because of obligations to the U.N., but the administration’s spin on those obligations facilitated the invasion in a way that would not have been possible otherwise.

If the U.S. had not been a member of the organization and one of its five most politically important members, it is difficult to see how the U.S. would have ever been taking the lead in punishing and sanctioning Iraq, and it is difficult to see how any administration could claim that Iraqi weapons programs were a matter of national security. As it was, the idea of an Iraqi threat to American national security was hard to take seriously, but the skepticism and opposition at home would have been even stronger had the U.S. not spent more than a decade as an enforcer of a collective security that Iraq no longer seriously threatened.

Of course, there was no legal basis for the war against Yugoslavia, but had the U.S. no longer been in NATO in 1999 it is hard to see how a low-level internal conflict in the southern Balkans becomes an American concern. Had the U.S. not been intent on finding some new purpose for an outdated and irrelevant alliance, it is hard to imagine why so many American hawks would have supported the war. One of the original purposes of NATO was to “keep the Americans in,” and Washington has a made a point of keeping NATO going in order to provide an excuse for America to act as a European power. It was this involvement in a multilateral alliance that put the U.S. in a position of taking an interest in the stability and security of peripheral parts of Europe that had nothing to do with us, and it was this role as a European power left over from the Cold War that put the U.S. on a course to humiliate Russia by punishing its historic ally and client.

As for Bolton and other hawkish critics of the U.N., some of them might welcome the theoretical freedom of action that non-participation would seem to bring, but if what I have been arguing is right the U.S. is much more free to act (and sometimes act abusively) when it is integrated into these institutions and can claim to be acting in the interest of global security. Multilateral institutions do not provide checks on interventionist impulses, and in some cases they can enable interventions that might otherwise not happen. For all of their complaining about ineffectiveness and corruption, hawkish critics of the U.N. are generally quite happy to use the U.N. to legitimize aggressive policies abroad. They would be among the first to lament America’s non-entry into the League of Nations, and they would also be among the first to object to the “isolationist” sentiments of people who oppose their proposed aggressive policies. Despite their “unilateralist” inclinations, they have a considerable amount in common with liberal internationalists, and as we see all the time the difference between unilateralists and multilateralists is to be found in disagreements over the means and the not the end. They are no less interested in global governance than liberal internationalists, but would like to see global governance mostly concentrated in American hands.

It is probably true that there is no ideal arrangement that will keep interventionism in check, and the U.S. was involved in foreign wars and overseas empire-building before the world wars, so there is no guarantee that interventionists would not continue to join and start wars if the U.S. left these institutions. Even so, a reduced U.S. presence in international institutions could make future military interventions more politically and practically difficult to launch, and it might allow our debates over war and peace to focus squarely and solely on American interests. Ultimately, interventionism will survive and thrive for as long as most Americans tolerate or celebrate it. Still, if future administrations cannot hide behind these institutions and the global “leadership” role that goes with them, it will probably be harder at the level of the political class and foreign policy elites to justify the same degree of global military presence and meddling in other nations’ affairs.