In Financial Times, Samuel Brittan discusses influential foreign policy literature which has warned against "moralistic-legalistic" approaches to U.S. intervention
in other countries. He tips his hat to writers George Kennan (The Realities of American Foreign Policy) and Herbert Butterfield (Christianity, Diplomacy, and War), whose books were published in the 1950s. In the aftermath of WWII, these writers criticized ideological crusades and favored humble approaches to U.S. military interventions, assessments which could be seen as a prophetic warning considering the current American democracy efforts in Iraq.
While Brittan laments that these two books have been relatively forgotten in recent times, he mentions that Christopher Coyne's After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy (2007) picks up where Kennan and Butterfield left off. In his book, Coyne looks at the success rate of 25 instances of installing democracies after U.S. military occupation, defining 'success' as holding free elections, guaranteeing civil liberties, and establishing "institutionalized constraints on the executive." Coyne shows a success ratio of 28% after five years and 36% after twenty years. Brittan writes,
"Prof. Coyne is obviously a dove rather than a hawk. But he accepts the case for occasional intervention for humanitarian reasons or to protect US citizens. His main suggestions are to avoid nation-building types of intervention and adopt free trade, if necessary unilaterally by the US...peace and welfare may depend on how far the next US president accepts the main lines of his analysis — a subject even more important than the current credit crunch."
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