Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Iraq came down into a deadly insurrection and then a sectarian civil war in its own right. After the departure of the American troops in 2011, The Islamic State terrorist group has prospered And was able to establish its own caliphate – a religious kingdom – before America and its allies returned again to wipe the Islamic State.
Meanwhile, in Libya, Moammar Gaddafi responded to the Arab Printemps in 2011 with a deadly force, killing hundreds of demonstrators. NATO has launched air strikes and Gaddafi has been captured and killed. But three years later, Libya went down to a civil war with three and remains today a failed state.
The toxicity of these escapades in the minds of many Americans is partly why Trump and his republican supporters are so avowed against interventionism.
While the former presidents said, like George W. Bush, that American interests were served by bringing “the hope of democracy, development, free markets and free trade to all corners of the world”, Trump returned to American isolationist instinct of the 1930s.
However, although he has sworn to keep the United States away from “wars forever” in the Middle East and rather focus on the policies of “America first”, he had more difficulty extracting Washington from his role of conflict in Ukraine and in the Palestinian territories.
Before these 21st century hostilities, the Cold War was filled with American attempts to shape geopolitics, from Vietnam to Haiti and Angola in Nicaragua.
But examples of successful regime change are so rare that some researchers say that finding such an example requires returning even further: overcoming the Nazis and the Japanese Empire at the end of the Second World War and finally promoting democratic reforms in Western Germany and Japan.
“Short of that, it is quite difficult to identify successful cases,” said Leslie Vinjamuri, director of the American program and the Americas of Chatham House, a reflection group in London.
