The United States has long been notorious for its interventionist foreign policy. Following 9/11, the U.S. has spent over $8 trillion on wars in the Middle East, and in 2023 alone, the U.S. spent around $961 billion on defense—more than the combined defense budgets of 31 NATO allies. These interventions, whether it’s humanitarian assistance or full-fledged warfare, are often justified as efforts to advance democracy and human rights.
History has shown, however, that U.S. interventions have the opposite effect. Intervened regions are left more destabilized than before, and military aid leads to increased corruption and exclusion in recipient countries, all of which in turn contributes to the rise of anti-American terrorism. Numerous interventions were carried out to support repressive authoritarian regimes because they were more favorable to Western hegemony and U.S. business interests. This certainly is the case of the 1954 Guatemalan coup of democratically elected president Jacobo Árbenz, who threatened the profits of U.S. banana conglomerate United Fruit Company.
Despite all of this, the U.S. has increasingly relied on military interventions over diplomacy after 9/11.
This map was created using the Military Intervention Project (MIP) dataset, compiled by researchers at Tufts University. It visualizes the history of U.S. military interventions from the end of World War II to present day. The dataset remains incomplete. The MIP data incorporates confirmed covert operations and low-profile interventions by Special Operations forces, but a combination of U.S. government secrecy and the dataset's scrupulous sourcing standards guarantees that post-9/11 tally is an undercount, according to MIP researchers. It also leaves out significant incidents where the U.S. may have intervened, but not militarily — the 1973 Chilean coup of president Salvador Allende, for example, or the 1965 Indonesian massacres. Finally, it's important to note that the dataset has not been updated with the interventions that have occurred since 2019, such as the ongoing Ukrainian War or the Israel-Palestine Conflict.
You can find the combined case narratives for the MIP dataset here.