SHAPIRO: How Donald Trump finally buried the Iraq syndrome |
Something crucial happened with U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent actions in Venezuela.
In fact, taken together with his earlier moves abroad, they mark the substantive death of what might be called the “Iraq syndrome” – a paralyzing mindset that has distorted American foreign policy for more than two decades.
The Iraq syndrome emerged after the failure of the Iraq War and the long, costly occupation that followed. In the American mind, it became shorthand for a broader fear: that any U.S. use of force overseas would inevitably spiral into a quagmire. But this was not the first time such a syndrome had taken hold.
To understand Iraq syndrome, one has to go back to Vietnam.
In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, America’s foreign-policy establishment fell into disarray. A new conventional wisdom took hold among elites: the war had not been lost because of bad strategy or domestic unrest but because it never should have been fought at all. From this conclusion flowed a much larger claim – that the United States needed to fundamentally rethink its role in the world.
This worldview, later known as the “Vietnam syndrome,” argued that America should abandon assertive foreign policy in favour of restraint or outright withdrawal, lest it stumble into further disasters.
Underlying this posture was a thinly veiled anti-Americanism: the belief that the United States was not a force for good but a malign presence on the world........