The United States has abandoned the pretense of building democracies after toppling regimes. Economist John Cochrane has framed America's emerging military doctrine in starkly transactional terms: destroy the government that threatens your interests, then walk away.
Cochrane articulated this framework during a GoodFellows panel at the Hoover Institution with historian Niall Ferguson and former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, as "Hvylya" reports.
"Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia - do whatever you want in your country, no matter how horrible it is. We don't like it, but we're not going to interfere," Cochrane said. "Unless you start causing trouble internationally. And then we're going to come in and we're going to kick you out of power, and we don't care what happens next."
The logic, Cochrane argued, is practical rather than ideological. "If you're bound to 'we can only do it if we have a plan to restore democracy,' you're never going to do it," he said. The US has abandoned that constraint. "This is not a very moral, ideological, beautiful thing, but it is the way that the US will now be able to fight these little things on the edges of the world scene."
McMaster partially pushed back, warning that one of three possible outcomes in Iran - civil war - would be catastrophic. But Cochrane remained skeptical about endgame planning: "I think we went in not caring, but it matters tremendously," he said, listing possible outcomes: "Kurdistan gets established in the north, ethnic dismemberment of the country, civil war, some horrible part of the IRGC manages to stay in place." He called for clarity on the endgame as the single most important thing to watch in the next five days.