I followed last week’s debate on The Economist about whether or not military intervention was good in Syria.<\/p>\n
On the one hand, some people argued that a forceful intervention was necessary to show Syria that the world is serious about stopping violence and oppression. On the other hand, others argued that military intervention would only encourage the Syrian regime to respond with more violence.<\/p>\n
I was quite surprised to find more than 60% of those who participated thought that military intervention was not the best solution. America is known for using its military might to fight repressive governments, so naturally, I thought that most Americans would support the idea of intervening in a country that constantly murders and oppressed its civilians.<\/p>\n
I clearly made the mistake of assuming that democratic governments, like the U.S., are generally a good representation of what the population thinks. The US government has power that it enjoys to display to the world, but not all Americans support that. Especially after seeing the results unfold in Iraq and Afghanistan, Americans, for the most part, seem to have changed their way of thinking. Military intervention does not always prove to be effective. In Syria in particular, where civilians are responding to the regime with further violence, using realpolitik <\/em>and force simply will not change the mindset of both the Syrian regime and Syrian people.<\/p>\n Americans are showing that they understand this, too. They realize the complications that hasty military intervention can bring. Lastly, I now realize that not every American believes in using realist powers in world politics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I followed last week’s debate on The Economist about whether or not military intervention was good in Syria. On the one hand, some people argued that a forceful intervention was necessary to show Syria that the world is serious about stopping violence and oppression. On the other hand, others argued that military intervention would only […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7398,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[168661],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-democracy-in-the-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/anniejupoli333\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/anniejupoli333\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/anniejupoli333\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/anniejupoli333\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7398"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/anniejupoli333\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/anniejupoli333\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":184,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/anniejupoli333\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions\/184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/anniejupoli333\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/anniejupoli333\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/anniejupoli333\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}