The Sugar High of Unipolarity: Why U.S. Military Interventions Increased after the Cold War

Of the approximately 400 military interventions the U.S. has conducted since 1776, half occurred between 1950-2019, and more than 25 percent occurred in the post-Cold War period. This startling statistic is according to a “new, comprehensive dataset of all U.S. military interventions since the country’s founding” that Sidita Kushi and Monica Duffy Toft unveiled in a recent article published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution.
This dataset contains “over 200 variables that allow scholars to evaluate theoretical propositions on drivers and outcomes of intervention…[and] doubles the universe of cases, integrates a range of military intervention definitions and sources, expands the timeline of analysis, and offers more transparency of sourcing through historically-documented case narratives of every U.S. military intervention included in the dataset.”
Why did the frequency of U.S. military interventions increase after it had defeated the Soviet Union and American safety was at its height during the “unipolar moment?” Do we intervene because we have to - or because we can? Can this militaristic American grand strategy continue as the international system shifts to multipolarity?
Join our conversation with Monica Duffy Toft, Professor of International Politics at Tufts University, and Sidita Kushi, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Bridgewater State University, and John Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. QI Executive Vice President Trita Parsi will moderate.