PRESS RELEASE
Liberal Interventionism Produces Only Chaos and War
Sept. 4, 2016 (EIRNS)—Sumantra Maitra, a doctoral researcher at Nottingham University in the United Kingdom, argues in The National Interest, that today’s liberal interventionists are really little more than mirror images of the Soviet interventionists during the Cold War. Instead of spreading socialism, as the Soviet interventionists wanted to do, today, it’s democracy. Maitra’s particular target is Anne Applebaum, who lamented in an Aug. 28 op-ed in the Washington Post "the consequences of nonintervention" in Syria in 2013.
"Needless to say, the analysis is shallow, vacuous and flawed and without any significant alternative policy suggestion, and wouldn’t be taken seriously in any academic or policy circle, much less get published in any peer-reviewed journal,"
writes Maitra.
"These argumenta ad passiones, that ’babies are dying and we have to do something’ is exactly the kind of policy insobriety that has resulted in the West undertaking misadventure after misadventure in faraway lands where our interests are not deeply implicated. Unfortunately, in the recent past we have tried it all, and none of it has worked."
While Maitra’s identification of the problem, and his solution, may be flawed, he notes correctly that the liberal interventionists never learn. "More importantly, liberal interventionists never provide alternative courses of action, when their theory inevitably fails every time," he writes.
"In a way, they are qualitatively similar to the Marxist apologists, who always claim that socialism never failed, as ’real’ socialism was never properly tried."
