Ankara lets Finns in, Moscow trades butter for guns, and the diminishing returns of US military intervention

(Originally published March 31 in “What in the World“) Turkey finally acceded to Finland’s addition to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, but continues alongside Hungary to oppose Sweden’s membership.

Finland’s addition is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it adds what is reckoned to be Europe’s most Russia-ready artillery to NATO’s strengths and exposes Russia to a new, 1,300km potential front against NATO. On the other, it forces NATO to defend a new, 1,300km potential front against Russia, any incursion against would be an attack against the entire alliance.

It also reveals Turkey as NATO’s own soft underbelly, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan moving from a role as intermediary between NATO and Russia to a questionable ally, despite hosting a U.S. base armed with nuclear weapons at Incirlik. Turkey’s foreign minister will join a meeting in Moscow next month with his counterparts from Russia, Syria and Iran, part of a Kremlin-brokered effort to end the civil war in Syria, where Turkish forces have been attacking Kurdish militias and Iran-backed militias have been attacking U.S troops there working with the Kurds to mop up remnants of the Islamic State.

Russia, meanwhile, is shoring up its alliance with North Korea, offering to trade food for much-needed ammunition and other weapons to refill its badly depleted arsenals. Tensions with Moscow will only rise after it detained The Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich on charges of espionage, a development being heralded as the first of its kind since the Cold War. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken condemned Gershkovich’s arrest as a “hostage-taking.”

As rhetoric to fight this new Cold War on its various fronts grows more heated, along comes a cold, hard analysis of how U.S. military intervention on ideological grounds has become a losing bet. Jennifer Kavanagh at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Bryan Frederick from the RAND Corporation, in a new piece in Foreign Affairs, describe how they constructed a database of 222 global crises since World War II and U.S. military responses.

Their findings were that a) U.S. military intervention (in 50 of the 222 crises) rarely changed the outcome, and b) where the U.S. military was successful was in scenarios where it had accurate intelligence and a limited, achievable goal untrammeled by open-ended ideological commitments. Thus, Vietnam and Afghanistan—which paired broad goals about fighting Communism and supporting democracy with bad intelligence about the reliability of local allies and the capabilities of their adversaries—were abject failures. But limited strikes like those to deny Libya control of the Gulf of Sidra in 1981 and the 1998 strikes on Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Sudan, achieved their more limited, realistic goals.

But Washington’s belief in its role as global policeman and defender of democracy abroad has resulted in diminishing military returns. While before 1945, the U.S. enjoyed a roughly 80% success rate in military interventions (bye-bye Hitler and Tojo!), it managed only 60% success during the Cold War when fighting the nebulous red peril around the globe. Its success since the fall of the Soviet Union turned it into the sole superpower convinced of its own infallibility has dropped even further—to slightly less than even.

Some may believe that losing half your battles is part of the blood with which democracy must be defended. But any taxpayer might reasonably prefer that their government not squander their money and lives on missions whose odds of success are no better than a coin toss. “Washington desperately needs to rethink its relationship to military force,” the authors write. Military intervention “is not a hammer for all nails but a specialized tool best used sparingly and carefully.”

But Kavanagh and Frederick may have missed the real goal of intervention and thus its true measure of success. Just as the journey is the destination, the goal of U.S. military intervention is less about defending freedom than about cultivating a steady stream of foes to feed growing demand for new weapons to “deter” them. By that measure, the U.S. is batting a thousand.