America's Five Biggest Foreign-Policy Fiascoes

U.S. soldiers salute during a mass reenlistment ceremony in a U.S. military camp in Balad, Iraq on Nov. 11, 2008. Thaier al-Sudani/Reuters

Mistakes Were Made: America's Five Biggest Foreign-Policy Fiascoes -- Robert W. Merry, National Interest

There were dubious decisions in the nineteenth century, but it was in the twentieth that misguided adventures were really in vogue.

The rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has raised arguments on the part of some, including myself, that this ominous turn of events in the Middle East flows directly from the regional destabilization wrought by President George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, ruled by a brutal thug of a dictator who, nonetheless, was not part of the threat of jihadist Islam facing the West. Certainly, this presidential decision must rank among the five greatest foreign-policy fiascoes in American history.

That raises a couple questions: What are the other top-five foreign-policy fiascoes? And how should they be ranked within the top-five list?

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My Comment: Is the Iraq War as the number one foreign policy fiasco? I am not sure. Iraq has throughout it's history been a place of conflict, war, and destruction .... in this context America's involvement is just a blip in Iraq's history .... and probably America's. But if it was up to me .... I would say that it was the Vietnam War that was the biggest fiasco. Ten times more U.S. soldiers were killed and wounded in Vietnam than in Iraq, the cost (in today's dollars) was far more expensive, and the conflict utterly ripped apart American society that is still impacting it today.