The Limits of US Power

The U.S. occupation provided space for Iraq’s Kurdish population to build an autonomous, federated Kurdistan, and millions of Afghan girls were able to attend school during the 20-year occupation (2001–2022)—an opportunity denied them by the Taliban. These benefits are meaningful, but Americans have largely concluded that they were not worth the staggering human and financial costs: $8 trillion (USD); over 1 million direct deaths and more than 4.5 million indirect deaths; and soaring food insecurity, childhood malnutrition, and poverty in Afghanistan, where the U.S. spent over 58 times more on defense contractors than on Afghan development. The United States cannot continue to act as the global enforcer, intervening in conflicts without clear, attainable goals, lest it risk further catastrophe.

While on a war footing under President Bush, the U.S. withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in pursuit of a more pronounced technical advantage in missile defense systems—ultimately sparking a new arms race in missile technology, one that the U.S. is not necessarily prepared to win. The ABM Treaty was seen as a constraint on U.S. power and was consequently abandoned. Similarly, there was no question of propriety when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq: “Either you’re with us, or you’re with the terrorists,” Bush declared. This uncompromising stance led regional actors to either declare the U.S. as “The Great Satan” or drastically reduce their willingness to cooperate in other arenas. This environment created the conditions for a multipolar world to emerge, with regional power centers often pursuing their interests independently of U.S. preferences.

In an effort to avoid the quagmires faced by his predecessor, Obama refrained from reactive military intervention in the Syrian Civil War, even in the face of Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons. Instead, the administration escalated an illegal drone war across the MENA region, resulting in high death tolls that included thousands of unreported civilian casualties. In 2013, the Obama administration released its Presidential Policy Guidance, or “Playbook,” which outlined protocols for conducting drone wars, including operations, target selection, and engagement rules. This Playbook was later emulated by states like Turkey and Iran, who used similar tactics in Iraq, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, killing hundreds of civilians in their own drone campaigns. Rather than curbing the proliferation of UAVs and their use, the U.S. normalized the deployment of unmanned weapons, leveraging its technological superiority at the expense of noncombatants’ rights and safety worldwide.

Both presidents extended U.S. power beyond its appropriate limits. The Bush administration’s gunslinger approach and disregard for international norms buried the United States under trillions of dollars of debt and destabilized a region for a generation. It also diminished U.S. dominance by demonstrating, in the words of Alex Danchev from the University of Nottingham, “that the United States was no longer legitimate as a provider of world order,” and that it “is neither loved nor trusted [by state or individual actors].” Barack Obama inherited the emergent multipolarity born from prior U.S. intransigence. His breach of international norms through protracted drone campaigns had consequences, further reinforcing efforts to establish alternative international regimes capable of countering U.S. influence if necessary.