The American Way of War

I've got a short series of posts from awhile back on the American way of war. I decided to add to it with this short conversation with Claude.

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American wars since the collapse of the USSR

Give me a chronological list of the wars that America has been involved in since the collapse of the USSR.

The project knowledge touches on this theme thematically but doesn't provide a factual list. Here's a straightforward chronological account from general knowledge, using 1991 (the USSR's formal dissolution) as the starting point:

Gulf War (1991) — Already underway when the USSR collapsed in December; the US-led coalition expelled Iraq from Kuwait. A short, decisive conventional war.

Somalia (1993) — Humanitarian intervention that escalated into urban combat, culminating in the Battle of Mogadishu ("Black Hawk Down").

Haiti (1994) — Military intervention to restore the elected government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Bosnia (1995) — NATO air campaign (Operation Deliberate Force) in which the US played the lead role, ending the Bosnian War.

Kosovo (1999) — NATO air war against Yugoslavia to halt ethnic cleansing; again US-led.

Afghanistan (2001–2021) — Invasion following 9/11, ousting the Taliban; the longest war in American history.

Iraq (2003–2011, then resumed 2014–) — Invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, followed by a prolonged insurgency. US forces returned in 2014 to fight ISIS and remain in smaller numbers today.

Libya (2011) — US participated in NATO air operations that led to Gaddafi's fall.

Syria / ISIS (2014–present) — Air campaign and special operations forces deployed against the Islamic State across Syria and Iraq.

Iran (2020) — The drone strike killing General Qasem Soleimani; a targeted killing rather than a sustained war, but a direct military act against a state actor.

Yemen (ongoing, indirect)** — The US has provided intelligence, refueling, and arms to the Saudi-led coalition, with direct drone strikes against Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Iran (2025) — You noted in your War Series writing (with a 2026 addendum) that a Trump-era attack on Iran occurred, which fits this list as the most recent major escalation.

A few observations relevant to your own analytical framework: this list illustrates the pattern you describe in your War Series — the post-Cold War redirection of American aggression outward, particularly toward the Arab/Muslim world as the new "Other" following the loss of the Soviet scapegoat. Nearly every conflict after 1993 takes place in the Islamic world, which tracks your 2014 addendum about the "well-crafted Orientalist mythology of the exotic and crazy Arab Other."

Talcott Parsons 1947

At the heart of that War Series is a 1947 essay by Talcott Parsons, “Certain Primary Sources of Aggression in the Social Structure of the Western World.” I read that early in my undergraduate years at Johns Hopkins. I regard it as speculative, plausible but speculative. How would one gather empirical evidence on it? It’s not like any nation ever announces, “We’re going to war to let off some steam and ease tensions at home?”

That's exactly the right epistemological challenge — the mechanism Parsons proposes operates at the level of collective unconscious motivation, which is precisely what makes it both compelling and resistant to direct verification. But there are several indirect empirical strategies that could build a cumulative case.

Quantitative correlational approaches

The most tractable starting point is looking for statistical relationships between domestic stress indicators and the initiation of military action. You'd want to examine whether wars or significant military escalations cluster after periods of elevated internal tension — economic downturns, spikes in domestic unrest, rising inequality, political polarization indices. The null hypothesis would be that war timing is random with respect to domestic conditions; a systematic pattern would be suggestive. Turchin's work on political stress cycles (his "cliodynamics" project) is actually well-suited to this — he's already built quantitative indices of internal instability across centuries, and one could ask whether war-initiation correlates with his stress peaks.

The "rally around the flag" literature

There's actually a substantial body of political science research on this, though it approaches the question from a slightly different angle. The "rally" effect — the well-documented spike in presidential approval following military action — shows that war does relieve domestic political pressure in measurable ways. John Mueller's work on war and presidential popularity is foundational here. The harder inferential step is from "war relieves pressure" to "anticipated relief motivates war-making," but the effect at least confirms the direction of the mechanism.

Elite communication analysis

Parsons' theory doesn't require that anyone consciously decides to go to war for psychodynamic reasons — the motivation can be largely unconscious and rationalized afterward. This actually makes elite rhetoric more useful as evidence, not less. You'd look for patterns in how war is framed domestically — whether war rhetoric systematically spikes domestic us-versus-them language, whether it correlates with reduced internal scapegoating (your Klinkner & Smith thesis about civil rights gains during wartime), and whether the timing of hawkish escalation by elites tracks with rising domestic discontent. Content analysis of congressional debates, newspaper editorials, and presidential speeches across the full arc of conflicts could reveal structural patterns invisible to any individual case.

The comparative/historical method

Parsons' thesis should predict that nations with other mechanisms for handling internal aggression — stronger corporatist institutions, more robust social contracts, functioning scapegoats already in place — should be less prone to foreign military adventurism. Scandinavian nations, for instance, would be a useful comparison class. You could also look at cases where domestic conditions that should predict war didn't produce it, and ask what was different. The comparative method won't confirm the mechanism, but systematic cross-national patterns would be hard to explain otherwise.

The Klinkner-Smith natural experiment

The civil rights thesis is actually the most testable piece, and as you note in your writing, they've already done substantial work on it. Their finding — that Black Americans' civil rights gains cluster tightly around periods of external military threat — is exactly the kind of pattern that's hard to explain without something like Parsons' mechanism. It's not proof of the psychodynamics, but it's consistent evidence that war functions to redirect internal aggression in measurable ways.

The fundamental limitation

None of this gets you to the causal mechanism Parsons actually proposes — that repressed aggression generated by Western child-rearing practices flows through nationalist scapegoating and finds periodic release in war. That specific chain is probably permanently beyond empirical reach, because the mediating variable (unconscious aggressive impulse at civilizational scale) isn't directly observable. What you can do is show that the functional relationship holds — that war operates as if it were serving this purpose — and that alternative explanations (pure rational calculation of national interest, for instance) leave systematic residuals.

Which is, frankly, roughly where Freudian-influenced social theory in general sits: plausible, structurally coherent, supported by functional evidence, but not falsifiable in any clean Popperian sense. The honest assessment is that Parsons is probably tracking something real but operating at a level of abstraction that empirical social science can approach but not fully close.