Kevin Drum reads Rachel Maddow’s Drift and basically loses (as she seems to, though I have not read the book) American history before 1945:
So what’s different? I’d say this: it’s one thing to periodically wage brief, smallish military actions. The Dominican Republic occupation of 1965 falls into that category. So do Grenada and Panama. Without getting into the merits of any of these actions, you can at least say that they were limited and isolated.
But the last couple of decades seem quite different. The Gulf War, followed by Somalia, followed by Haiti, followed by Kosovo, followed by Afghanistan, followed by Iraq, followed by Libya and Yemen, and all against a background of drone warfare that now seems all but perpetual, feels very different. It feels like we’re simply in a constant state of military action. In the last 20 years, there have only been three or four in which the U.S. military wasn’t at war. (And I’m not even sure about the three or four.)
So I think that’s a real difference, and the policy drift that Maddow talks about in her book bears a big part of the blame for this.
Oof. I’m not sure I would categorize the 1965 Dominican Republic occupation “limited and isolated” when it came at the moment that the United States was ramping up its effort in Vietnam.
But in any case, Drum’s comment throws overboard anything before World War II. I note this list of American interventions or occupations in Latin America from the period 1898 to the present. From 1898 to 1933, the United States was nearly continuously at war or in occupation of a range of states in the southern hemisphere. Far from “periodically wag[ing] brief, smallish military actions” the United States has throughout most of its history tended to fight a range of simultaneous military actions. Wikipedia conveniently has a list of American military operations in chronological order and I didn’t spot a single year of American history missing in action. I should say, perhaps, missing from action.
The Edge of the American West 
13 comments
April 12, 2012 at 7:14 pm
erubin
I’m more bothered by “Different Than” in the title.
April 12, 2012 at 7:16 pm
eric
Maddow’s book is an NYT best-seller. That means she’s right and you’re wrong.
April 12, 2012 at 7:17 pm
eric
I’m actually curious about the Lippmannesque, or maybe Lipp-esque, associations of the title.
April 13, 2012 at 12:57 am
Dave
Drum seems confused. He concedes the regularity of ‘small’, often non-congressionally-approved military adventures, then ropes in Libya, Yemen and drone strikes as exceptional – these are all the same thing, from where I’m sitting.
He makes a potentially valid point, or rather one of his interlocutors does, in noting that only in the ‘backlash’ of previous large wars has the US pulled in its horns. What we might note as ‘different’ now is that the horns are still out, despite the major costs and durations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
And I understood ‘different than’ to be standard US usage. Barbaric of course, but you’re stuck with it.
April 13, 2012 at 8:51 am
silbey
I’m actually curious about the Lippmannesque, or maybe Lipp-esque, associations of the title.
The post title?
April 13, 2012 at 11:15 am
eric
No, Maddow’s title.
April 13, 2012 at 12:14 pm
silbey
No, Maddow’s title.
Hmm. She doesn’t invoke Lippmann in the book (or, at least, a quick Amazon search doesn’t find it in the book).
April 13, 2012 at 3:24 pm
Margarita
And I understood ‘different than’ to be standard US usage.
More like not-nonstandard. Garner holds that “different from” is to be preferred but allows that “different than” may sometimes avoid awkward constructions. Headlines are essentially lawless anyway, barring ethnic slurs, which are traditionally reserved for comment sections.
April 13, 2012 at 7:04 pm
John Haas
“But the last couple of decades seem quite different.”
Substitute “feels” for “seem” and I’ll sign on. For myself, it’s a function of the internet, and the degree to which my news-addiction has grown since I finished my dissertation, and even more since the 2000 election, 9/11, Iraq.
From 1970 something to 1995 I didn’t even have a TV. I caught NPR now and then, listened to the McNiell-Lehrer show on my college-radio station. Then I got a TV again, and the images were back. Then the internet. Now I read 3 or 4 foreign policy sites DAILY, follow a bunch of blogs, read the NYT and a few others, and it’s all quite oppressive, emotionally.
I can’t stop because my job requires me to be up on what’s happening, and I don’t want to go back to being so out of touch really, but it’s not fun.
Once, way back, I lived for part of a year in a cabin in the Rockies. No running water, no electricity. Kerosene lamp, only. Books. It was difficult in its way, but I’d do it again in a heartbeat if I could.
Of course, I’d probably get tired of it, too.
April 14, 2012 at 12:12 pm
mrearl
There’s also the British “different to,” which means the same thing as “different from,” even though “to” is the opposite of “from.” Fowler himself condoned it and labeled objections as ‘mere pedantries.”
There’ll always be an England.
April 14, 2012 at 5:15 pm
chris
He concedes the regularity of ‘small’, often non-congressionally-approved military adventures, then ropes in Libya, Yemen and drone strikes as exceptional – these are all the same thing, from where I’m sitting.
In one sense, I suppose, what military adventure could be smaller than one in which zero American troops set foot in the theater of operations?
But there may be something wrong with this idea when you look at it closer…
April 15, 2012 at 4:44 am
Dave
Indeed, for by that metric a devastating nuclear strike on the Soviet Union would have been just a day at the office…
April 17, 2012 at 4:54 am
ajay
In one sense, I suppose, what military adventure could be smaller than one in which zero American troops set foot in the theater of operations?
I’m not sure what you’re referring to here, chris, but it’s not Libya or Yemen, both of which have seen US troops involved on the ground.