The Indispensable Nation—Post-Cold War Interventionism and the Squandered Peace

This episode examines the 1990s—not as a decade of peace but as a decade of intervention that set the stage for the forever wars. We trace the choice of American hegemony over republican restraint, the Gulf War’s false lessons and devastating sanctions, Somalia’s thirty-three-year ongoing war that most Americans don’t know exists, Yugoslavia’s precedent for humanitarian intervention without UN authorization, NATO expansion despite explicit warnings from every Cold War expert, and the neoconservative blueprint that awaited only its “new Pearl Harbor.”