And yet the rhetoric has not changed. Stability. Security. Preventing a greater threat. The underlying assumption beneath all of it, the one that never gets named directly is that American military force can contain the violence it unleashes.

That assumption has shaped American foreign policy for decades. The results are not ambiguous.

Vietnam was framed as a fight for freedom against communism. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson told Americans that “the independence of South Vietnam” was essential to the security of the free world. More than 58,000 American soldiers and millions of Vietnamese civilians would eventually die in a war that the Pentagon Papers later revealed successive administrations privately knew was failing.

The same logic returned after 9/11. Bush declared that “freedom and fear are at war” and warned the world that “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” That framing transformed a horrific attack into an open-ended global war with almost no geographic or legal limits. Afghanistan became the first battlefield. Twenty years later, after more than 170,000 deaths and nearly $2.3 trillion spent, the Taliban returned to power within days of the American withdrawal. The Afghanistan Papers, published by The Washington Post, later exposed how deeply U.S. officials had misled the public throughout. One senior official admitted: “We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served under both Bush and Obama, confessed: “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan.”

Yet the war continued for two decades.

For many who lived through the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the current confrontation with Iran carries haunting echoes of that era. On May 1, 2003, President Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln beneath a banner reading “Mission Accomplished” and declared that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended” and that “the United States and our allies have prevailed.” In reality, the war had barely begun. The nearly decade-long occupation that followed killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and destabilized an entire region. The Iraqi state collapsed, unleashing sectarian violence that tore through the country for years. The abuses at Abu Ghraib became a global symbol of torture and impunity. The chaos and power vacuum helped give rise to ISIS. Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates the post-9/11 wars would ultimately cost the United States roughly $8 trillion.

Before the first bombs fell, millions of people had marched against the war in what was then described as the largest coordinated anti-war protest in human history. UN weapons inspectors repeatedly said they had found no evidence that Iraq possessed active weapons of mass destruction. Mohamed ElBaradei, then head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, publicly challenged claims that Iraq was pursuing nuclear weapons. Former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix warned that inspections were still ongoing and that war was not justified.

They were ignored anyway.

Libya followed a similar trajectory. In March 2011, Barack Obama justified military intervention by warning that forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi were advancing on Benghazi, where a massacre of civilians could “stain the conscience of the world.” Gaddafi was overthrown within months. Libya soon descended into militia warfare, political fragmentation, arms trafficking and competing foreign interventions. Obama would later describe the failure to plan for the aftermath as the “worst mistake” of his presidency.

The point is not that every war is identical. It is that American power keeps relying on the same underlying belief: that the United States has the right to reshape other societies through force while imagining itself somehow insulated from the consequences. Scholars often describe this as American hubris, but stripped of the academic language, it is really the conviction that American power is uniquely moral, uniquely necessary and therefore exempt from the rules applied to everyone else.

But I want to be precise about what this pattern proves and what it does not — because the argument matters, and it is worth making carefully.

The empirical case is damning and clear: American military interventions have, with striking consistency, produced consequences far worse than their architects predicted. That case stands on its own. It does not need to be inflated into a stronger claim to land with force.

The stronger claim, that American militarism is a self-perpetuating machine that produces wars by design, is harder to sustain. It is true that even wars widely regarded as failures still expand defence budgets, enrich arms manufacturers, deepen military alliances and reinforce America’s role as the central security actor in the international system. Those structural incentives are real and they matter. But wars also happen because of genuine strategic miscalculation, bureaucratic momentum, domestic political pressure, and sometimes real security dilemmas that do not have clean solutions. The Taliban really did harbor Al-Qaeda. The weapons of mass destruction assessments were not purely invented they reflected intelligence failures and institutions that could not pressure-test their own assumptions. These were failures of judgment and process as much as failures of interest. Treating them as one unified machine flattens what actually needs to be understood.

This distinction is not academic. If the system produces wars mechanically by design, the only solution is to dismantle the entire machine a project so vast it becomes impossible to connect to specific political action. If wars also emerge from miscalculation, institutional failure and compressed decision-making under pressure, then there are concrete levers: stronger constraints on executive war powers, more independent oversight of the intelligence claims used to justify force, more robust international authorization requirements. The argument for those things is stronger, not weaker, when it rests on what is actually demonstrated.

I grew up in Rwanda during the height of the War on Terror, and long before I understood geopolitics, I understood America as the center of the world. It was in the television we watched, the universities everyone was encouraged to admire, the aid infrastructure embedded across African countries, and the entertainment industry that exported American power as common sense. Shows like Homeland framed CIA operations, drone wars and counterterrorism through the lens of morally burdened Americans trying to protect civilization from chaos. Films like Zero Dark Thirty turned torture and the hunt for Osama bin Laden into stories about American trauma and heroism. Even when American wars went catastrophically wrong, American culture still positioned the United States as the main character of the story.

But people in the Global South experience these wars differently, because we live with the consequences long after American attention moves on.

The World Bank warned earlier this year that a wider regional conflict involving Iran could sharply increase fuel, fertilizer and food prices globally, with import-dependent countries likely to be among the hardest hit. That means a war discussed in Washington through the language of “deterrence” or “regional stability” can translate into rising transport costs in Kigali, higher food prices in Nairobi and worsening debt pressures across countries already struggling with inflation, climate shocks and IMF austerity programs.

Vietnam did not stop Iraq. Iraq did not stop Libya. Libya did not stop Iran.

Each intervention was introduced as historically unique. Each one was framed as an unfortunate necessity. Each one arrived wrapped in the language of freedom, security, civilization or humanitarianism. And each time, the people paying the highest price were the ones with the least power over the decisions being made.

That pattern does not require a conspiracy to explain it. It requires only that powerful institutions, operating under political pressure, with genuine but systematically distorted beliefs about what their power can achieve, keep making the same kind of mistake. Understanding why, clearly, specifically, is the only way to argue seriously for stopping it

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