Impelled by an overwhelming desire to hunt down those who were responsible for the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the United States launched military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, where it toppled regimes that had little or nothing to do with 9/11. There has been a tendency to see these exercises as misguided elements of a coherent plan to establish a liberal world order or to apply liberal hegemony. However, the warring of the post-9/11 period has been a glaring, extended, and highly consequential aberration. During the quarter century before that, the United States pursued a foreign policy that was far more casualty averse. Over the past decade, the country has moved back to--and appears poised to expand on--that tradition after its exhausting 9/11-induced military ventures that ran such high costs for so few benefits. Moreover, public opinion in the United States is not messianic or in constant search of hegemony or of monsters abroad to destroy.
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- United States of America
