She points out The only just wars, liberals believe, are those in which the United States has no stake.Page 210.
As long as US blood and treasure is for a nonsense war, they will support it.
Conservatives know Haiti is never a US interest. It has nothing we want, including its people trying to flee here. As long as we use the Coast Guard to intercept them and send them back, we are just fine with Haiti. Let Haiti solve its own problems. We tried before and all Clinton did was restore a crooked communist ruler.
How to explain the amazing transmutation of Cold War and Gulf War doves into Haiti and Balkan hawks? The crucial and obvious difference is this: Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo were humanitarian ventures--fights for right and good, devoid of raw national interest. And only humanitarian interventionism--disinterested interventionism devoid of national interest--is morally pristine enough to justify the use of force. The history of the 1990s refutes the lazy notion that liberals have an aversion to the use of force. They do not. They have an aversion to using force for reasons of pure national interest.
And by national interest I do not mean simple self-defense. Everyone believes in self-defense, as in Afghanistan. I am talking about national interest as defined by a Great Power: shaping the international environment by projecting power abroad to secure economic, political, and strategic goods. Intervening militarily for that kind of national interest, liberal internationalism finds unholy and unsupportable. It sees that kind of national interest as merely self-interest writ large, in effect, a form of grand national selfishness. Hence Kuwait, no; Kosovo, yes.