Unsurprisingly, Max Boot thinks Rubio is right to support “nation-building”:

The Bush administration learned that for itself: It came into office prejudiced against “nation-building” which Republicans wrongly viewed as a Clinton project. As a result the administration failed to prepare for nation-building in either Iraq or Afghanistan, allowing insurgencies to develop. The Obama administration repeated the same mistake in Libya where it did no nation-building after the fall of Qaddafi. The result is that Libya is now in the grip of rival militias and ISIS is gaining strength there. As Rubio rightly put it, the alternative to nation-building is chaos.

As the Iraq and Libya examples clearly show, the real alternative to “nation-building” is to refrain from overthrowing the existing government. The Iraq and Libyan wars were unnecessary for U.S. security, but the U.S. opted to topple the old regimes in these countries anyway. The chaos that has resulted and continues to result from these horrible decisions would not be happening in Iraq, and it almost certainly would not be as bad in Libya as it is today. Acknowledging this doesn’t help to remedy Iraq and Libya’s serious problems, but it is a necessary first step in realizing that the U.S. needs to reject launching wars of choice and not just the costly “nation-building” part that sometimes follows. The case of Afghanistan offers a different lesson. Even when the U.S. is justified in taking military action, it doesn’t have the relevant knowledge or understanding to succeed at creating an effective, functioning government to replace the previous one. Rubio isn’t “conveying a hard truth” with his endorsement of “nation-buildng.” He is confirming that he is wedded to the faulty assumptions of a bankrupt ideology.

The solution for the future is to stop waging wars for regime change. “Nation-building” is an answer to a question that the U.S. shouldn’t even be asking. It assumes responsibility for improving the governance of other countries that the U.S. understands poorly at best, and it assigns our government a task for which it is woefully unsuited. Boot’s argument that the U.S. should “get better” at doing this is just as unpersuasive as it was when he made it three years ago. The U.S. isn’t going to “get better” at doing this, but “getting better” at “nation-building” isn’t something that Americans should aspire to do in the first place. No less important, Americans aren’t interested in embarking on “nation-building” projects that are necessarily going to be decades-long undertakings. The experience of the last fourteen years has understandably soured Americans on “nation-building,” which was never all that popular to begin with, and with any luck “nation-building” will be discredited for a generation or more.