The study, titled “Introducing the Military Intervention Project: A New Dataset on US Military Interventions,” states that the United States undertook almost 400 military interventions from its founding in 1776 to 2019, with more than a quarter of them post-Cold War. It is emphasized that US military interventions are “increasingly” aimed at the Middle East and Africa.
“The cumulative impact of what we found from our data collection efforts was truly amazing. We didn’t expect the quantity and quality of US military interventions to be as large as the data shows,” said Sidita Kushi, an assistant professor at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts and one of the study’s authors, in an interview with the Middle East Eye.
Emphasizing the “year-old US hyper-interventionist stance,” Kushi said America’s global military footprint “might surprise Americans. But they hardly surprise the rest of the world.”
The report pointed to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which said that after the incident the United States became the dominant military power worldwide, but this did not lead to a decrease in Washington’s military interventions.
“The post-Cold War era has seen fewer great power conflicts and defenses of vital U.S. interests, but U.S. military interventions continue at a brisk pace and hostilities are intensifying,” the report says. “This militaristic pattern persists in a time of relative peace, one of perhaps the lesser direct threats to the US homeland and security.”
The study said the end of the Cold War unleashed US global military ambitions, adding that even as US rivals scaled back their military involvement, Washington “began to escalate its military activities” leading to a “widening gap between US actions vis-à-vis its adversaries.” .
A study citing the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute says that US military spending is more than $800 billion a year, nearly 40 percent of global military spending.
“The US continues to prioritize funding for its Department of Defense while limiting the funding and roles of its State Department,” said Professor Monica Duffy Toft.
Emphasizing that the US prefers to use military force to “solve its problems,” the report said that the days when Washington threw the full power of its army into the conflict, as it was in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, remote military bases like the $110 million Agadez airfield in Niger are conducting drone strikes out of the public eye across much of the Sahel.
The study also says that the administration of US President Joe Biden earlier this year expanded the US military presence in Africa, reversing the previous decision to withdraw troops from Somalia and establish a permanent military base in the country.
“Given the current intervention landscape and inertia, we expect the upward trend in U.S. interventions in both the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and sub-Saharan Africa to continue,” Toft warned.
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