During the early post-Cold War years, Colin Powell laid out a set of conditions the United States should meet before committing to any war: overwhelming force, an exit strategy, a vital national interest, a clear objective, and broad public support. That framework, known as the Powell Doctrine, was designed to prevent exactly the kind of open-ended, escalatory conflicts that have plagued America ever since. Robert D. Kaplan, writing in Foreign Affairs, has argued that its abandonment helps explain why the U.S. keeps repeating the same mistakes.
The Powell Doctrine has been "sidelined in recent years," Kaplan wrote in a Foreign Affairs analysis reported by "Hvylya" - yet it remains deeply relevant. He suggested that the doctrine's ultimate purpose was not simply to avoid defeat but to prevent the United States from sliding into middle-sized wars, conflicts big enough to cause immense destruction but too small to mobilize the full home front.
The doctrine's principles read like a checklist of everything that went wrong in Iraq. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld "envisioned Iraq as another Panama - in and out in a matter of weeks or months, and using only a limited number of troops," Kaplan wrote. But U.S. intelligence on Panama was vastly superior, and Iraq was a far larger and more complex country. The result was a costly middle-sized war that consumed an entire presidency.
Kaplan argued that every U.S. military action, no matter how small, should come with "a fully fledged day-after plan that is constantly updated" and that integrates area expertise from professional diplomats and regional specialists. The biggest American foreign policy failures, he said, happened because policymakers were "obsessed with regional and global consequences they often could not properly manage, and thus ignored critical conditions on the ground."
The Trump administration's current operations - in Iran, Venezuela, and Nigeria - are all being conducted primarily through air and naval power, without the ground commitments that turned past interventions into quagmires. But Kaplan warned that this distinction offers limited comfort. The war in Vietnam also began without significant ground troops and took years to escalate, spanning the Kennedy administration and the beginning of the Johnson years. The absence of boots on the ground today is no guarantee they will not be there tomorrow.
Previously: "We Don't Care What Happens Next": Cochrane Lays Out America's New War Doctrine