| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Almost every war that America has fought since the beginning of the twentieth century was a war America had determined to avoid. We were neutral in World War I?.?.?.?until unlimited submarine warfare against our trans-Atlantic shipping became intolerable. We resisted entering World War II until Pearl Harbor. We defined the Korean peninsula as lying outside our "defense perimeter," as our secretary of state declared in 1950, a few months before North Korea attacked South Korea and we leapt into the fray. A few years later, we rebuffed French appeals for support in Vietnam in order to avoid involving ourselves in that distant country which was soon to become the venue of our longest war and greatest defeat. In 1990, our ambassador to Iraq explained to Saddam Hussein that Washington had "no opinion on?.?.?.?your border disagreement with Kuwait," which he took as encouragement to swallow his small neighbor, forcing a half million Americans to travel around the world to force him to disgorge it. A year after that, our secretary of state quipped about the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia that "we have no dog in that fight," a sentiment echoed by his successor, of the opposite party, who, demonstrating his virtuosity at geography, observed that that country was "a long way from home" in a place where we lacked "vital interests"-all this not long before we sent our air force to bomb Serbia into ceasing its attacks on Bosnia and then bombed it again a few years later until it coughed up Kosovo.
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