Unipolarity and the Accelerating Pace of US Military Intervention, 1945-2019

• In Event: New Research on Military Intervention

Abstract

Ever since the end of the Cold War, scholars have debated whether unipolar international systems promote peace or induce conflict. Remarkably, there is little empirical work on this question, which has mostly been addressed from a theoretical perspective. We advance this debate by systematically comparing the frequency of U.S. military intervention during the bipolar Cold War (1945-1990) and the unipolar post-Cold War era (after 1990). To do so, we use novel data from the Military Intervention Project (MIP), a comprehensive dataset of all U.S. foreign military interventions from 1776 to 2019. We find that U.S. military intervention accelerated significantly in frequency after 1989, suggesting that unipolarity may prod its hegemon – although not necessarily the system as a whole – into more numerous militarized disputes.

Authors

• Sidita Kushi, Bridgewater State University

• Monica Duffy Toft, Tufts University

• Nils Hagerdal, Tufts University