Oman and Bahrain likewise have suffered from civil strife. Though never under Ottoman control, but for decades under British influence, Oman’s Sultan Qaboos had to defeat a major rebellion in the country’s Dhofar region. Likewise, Bahrain’s minority Sunni leaders have come under tremendous pressure from the state’s Shia majority, and faced virtual open rebellion in 2012–2013. Nevertheless, none of these states has collapsed into chaos, in part because traditional rulers, as opposed to strongmen, command (and often buy) more loyalty among their naturally conservative populations, and in part because other regional Muslim states are prepared to spring to their assistance. Most notably, Iran provided forces (as did Britain) to help Sultan Qaboos quash the Dhofar rebellion, while Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates dispatched forces to come to the aid of the al-Khalifa regime in Bahrain. It is one thing for a Muslim state to come to the aid of a beleaguered fellow Muslim regime. It is quite another if a Western state does so, especially in large numbers. This was not the case with British support for the sultan of Oman, which was limited to its small but highly effective Special Air Service units.

THE MIDDLE EAST IS HARDLY UNIQUE as a venue for artificial states drawn by European bureaucrats that are at best unstable and at worst collapsing entirely. Much of Central Africa reflects a similar history, with similar results. Instability, dictatorship and outright warfare have predominated both in what was once French West Africa and in the former Belgian colonies along the Great Lakes and the Congo River virtually since France and Belgium departed Africa at the beginning of the 1960s. Both European countries, and especially France, have intervened on the continent since granting independence to their former colonies; the French intervention in Mali last year was only the most recent of numerous such interventions.

For decades, Washington recognized that it was wiser to stand back and merely assist the Europeans who sought to stabilize their former African colonies. This was the case with France’s numerous interventions in Chad, Britain’s intervention in Sierra Leone in the 1990s and NATO’s actions in Libya in 2011 (though in the Libyan case American military involvement was far more significant than was publicly acknowledged). Elsewhere, however, Washington has often attempted regime change by inserting troops on the ground, yielding mixed results over the long term.

America’s 1993 intervention in Somalia’s civil war did not prevent that state from falling apart. Nor is this all. Multiple interventions in Haiti, including one in the early 1990s, have yet to yield stable and viable governance of that impoverished state. The 2003 invasion of Iraq has not been a success. Afghanistan may yet prove to be a failure as well, unless one may term achieving the objective of troop withdrawal by the end of 2014 a “success,” regardless of its consequences for the future of that state. But this would be tantamount to a student declaring to his parents that he has succeeded on a test by fleeing the examination room before it concluded.

Where Washington has successfully intervened, it has almost invariably been because the venue was in its own Western Hemispheric backyard, with its more familiar culture and shorter logistics lines. Moreover, with the notable exception of its support for the contras during the 1980s, the United States has tended to focus on providing arms, training and occasional aerial support to governments under pressure, rather than supporting opposition groups seeking to overthrow the government. In most cases, where it did insert general-purpose forces, they would quickly depart the scene of their operations. Where American forces remained in a country for a considerable length of time, as in El Salvador or Colombia, they played a supporting role, providing training and aerial intelligence for local troops rather than leading operations against insurgents. Finally, the United States has generally refrained from seeking to overhaul Latin American societies and governments, partly because, at least nominally, they share similar roots in a European-based political culture.

Washington also intervened successfully in the Balkan wars of the 1990s. But both in the case of the Bosnian civil war and that of the fight for Kosovo’s independence, American involvement in combat operations did not include the insertion of land forces. Rather, America employed its overwhelming airpower in both Bosnia, a state roughly the size of West Virginia, and Kosovo, which has a smaller area than Connecticut. Even then, only when cease-fires were negotiated did the United States commit its forces to larger, multinational units. Unlike in the cases of Iraq and Afghanistan, American forces did not constitute the majority of those units, nor did large numbers of American land forces remain in theater for an extended period. Finally, the United States did not take the leading role in promoting good governance, much less nation building, in either Bosnia or Kosovo; that daunting task was left to the Europeans.

IT IS PAST TIME FOR WASHINGTON to recognize a fundamental truth, which is that it cannot mold other states in its own image and that its attempts to do so through force are actually counterproductive. American greatness is not enhanced by engaging abroad willy-nilly. Instead, it is undermined. Indeed, if America is truly exceptional, then, by definition, other states cannot be made into knockoff Americas. It is ironic that President Barack Obama seems less inclined to intervene in other states than those for whom exceptionalism is an article of faith. His motivations may be entirely misplaced—he appears committed to avoiding entangling foreign commitments that will undermine his ability to pursue his primary objective of “nation building at home”—but his instincts regarding intervention are very much on the mark.

America’s attempts at nation building have rarely succeeded. Its greatest successes have been in countries with fairly homogenous populations—Germany, Japan and Korea—and in which it has stationed troops for more than half a century. The states that are the primary sources of instability today, and that tempt some policy makers on the right and the left to intervene in order to “set things right,” are unstable precisely because they are not homogenous. Forcing nationalities with ancient communal hatreds to live in harmony is a difficult mission at the best of times. For American forces, whose knowledge of foreign—particularly non-European—cultures and languages is for the most part rudimentary at best and whose sense of history is measured in decades rather than centuries, such a mission is virtually doomed to failure from the start.

In addition, in the aftermath of the Iraq and Afghan wars, few Americans would be willing to commit troops to unstable or failing states for as much as a decade, or even longer. Yet development experts argue that only in such extended time frames can nation building succeed. Indeed, it is remarkable that the American public was willing to tolerate both of those lengthy conflicts; the country’s previous two wars, in Kuwait and the Balkans, both involved the relatively brief commitment of American forces. Moreover, public pressure led to the withdrawal from Somalia in March 1994, less than eighteen months after the initial humanitarian intervention was launched in December 1992.

A case might have been made in the early part of the past decade for supporting America’s intervention in Afghanistan and its subsequent efforts to undertake nation building in that country, despite the length of time that such activity was expected to require. After all, the American intervention in 2001 was highly popular, since it removed the hated Taliban regime. Refugees came streaming back to Afghanistan from Pakistan in particular. Small businesses began to sprout throughout the country. Al Qaeda was on the run, as was the Taliban.

Moreover, despite its ethnic diversity, Afghanistan has a long history of nation-statehood. Its people have a strong sense of national identity. It has been termed the “graveyard of empires,” for good reason—its people have historically found ways to defeat invading superpowers, whether they were the ancient Greeks of Alexander, the armies of the British Empire or those of the Soviet Union. Building upon a legacy of governance, though it involved a delicate balance between a relatively weak central government and powerful provincial leaders, was nevertheless a potentially feasible task.

However, Washington essentially turned away from Afghanistan to prosecute its war with Saddam Hussein. Until America came to realize the extent to which it had withheld the military, civilian and financial resources required to help rebuild (not build) Afghanistan, the Taliban was able to regroup and exploit the corruption that was endemic throughout the country.

Nevertheless, America’s second major intervention in Afghanistan as the Iraq War began to wane might have been successful. It still might be. It has been seriously hampered, however, by the administration’s premature signal that it planned to withdraw the bulk of American forces in 2014, come what may. That announcement vitiated the effectiveness of the surge, which was announced in December 2009. It provided the Taliban, other insurgent groups, Afghanistan’s neighbors and the Afghan government a timetable for planning for dealing with an Afghanistan that lacked a significant American presence. As a result, the American intervention in Afghanistan is unlikely to realize U.S. objectives, despite the loss in combat of thousands of American lives and the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars.