Why is America obsessed with going to war?

The Bunker – News without the nonsense

Podmasters

Society & Culture, Government, News, Politics

4.6 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 10 July 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The US has a world-class diplomatic corps, yet increasingly its foreign policy is based around war. And while most nations still favour negotiation, Washington seems hooked on force. Today in The Bunker, Chris Jones is joined by Professor David Reynolds, author of Mirrors of Greatness, to find out if the US policy of intervention is working or making things worse? Buy Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the Leaders Who Shaped Him through our affiliate bookshop and you’ll help fund The Bunker by earning us a small commission for every sale. Bookshop.org’s fees help support independent bookshops too. • We are sponsored by Indeed. Go to https://indeed.com/bunker for £100 sponsored credit. www.patreon.com/bunkercast Follow us on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/bunkerpod.bsky.social Written and presented by Chris Jones. Producer: Liam Tait. Audio editors: Tom Taylor. Managing editor: Jacob Jarvis. Music by Kenny Dickinson. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. THE BUNKER is a Podmasters Production. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Are you enjoying our podcasts, but would prefer to listen without adverts getting in the way?
0:05.7	Sign up to back us on Patreon for a smooth, ad-free listening experience.
0:10.8	Follow the link in the show notes to find out how.
0:26.3	Hello and welcome to The Bunker, your dose of news without the nonsense. I'm Chris Jones.
0:32.3	The US has one of the most powerful diplomatic networks in the world, which makes its increasing reliance on military intervention, all the more surprising. You'd be forgiven for
0:37.4	thinking that may be a global
0:39.6	trend, but in many cases it's not. Whilst the US seems to have defaulted to force first,
0:45.5	much of the rest of the world has stuck by diplomacy. So why is Washington behaving differently?
0:50.5	And does heavy-handed intervention ever work? Joining me to discuss these questions is Emeritus Professor of International History at Cambridge
0:58.9	University and author of Mirrors of Greatness, Churchill and the Leaders who shaped him,
1:04.7	David Reynolds. David, welcome to the bunker.
1:06.9	Thanks very much, Chris. Pleasure to be with you.
1:09.2	Let's get started. So I want to start off with a bit of focusing on the US and then moving to the rest of the world a bit more.
1:15.3	Just to start off with, the US Centre for Strategic Studies set up the Military Intervention Project a little while ago.
1:22.6	It found that out of the 393 US military interventions abroad since 1776, over 200 have been since
1:32.5	1945, which seems like a lot to me. Why do you think that the U.S. has been, I guess, more likely
1:40.2	to default to force rather than diplomacy in, I guess, in the modern era?
1:46.1	Well, first of all, 1945 is a good water shed, really, because that was the end of the Second World War,
1:54.7	and it was the Second World War that really got the United States interested in global affairs, committed to Europe and the
2:05.2	security of Europe after the Nazi expansion, and also equally to Asia, because of the remarkable
2:14.7	and often forgotten, blitzkriegs that the Japanese mounted in 1941, 42.
2:20.6	So this was a world transformed and one in which the Europeans, who had previously been
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