It is always reassuring to be told that soldiers are reluctant warriors. The popular image, too often cultivated by academics with big agendas and little military experience, is that of senior military leaders advocating yet another war. In Stefano Recchia’s careful study of American military interventions in the post-Cold War years, it is the civilian politicians and senior political appointees who are the ones pressing for war and the military leaders looking for reasons to avoid a fight.

Recchia seeks to understand why the United States, the world’s dominant power, endures the political costs of bargaining with problematic friends and difficult foes to gain the approval of international organizations like the United Nations, or even alliances like NATO, for its interventions when the substantive assistance these organizations provide is usually quite limited. It is, he argues, because of the reluctant warriors, America’s military leaders who see interventions as tar pits, absorbing resources and tying down troops in forever occupations. The endorsements of international organizations are their light at the end of the tunnel, the promise of burden sharing.

Some might hope that the scramble for formal international approval as American political leaders consider armed interventions is the internalization of an evolving international norm. The United States might have the military muscle to intervene, but the international community has the necessary legitimacy to dispense. Others might see a concerted effort to get friends and foes to offer their approval for America’s next military action as the attempt to mitigate possible negative issue linkages, such as trade or arms control, that might result from the adventure. Not so according to Recchia. Norms are not being followed and linkages seldom matter much to American political leaders. Rather, it is domestic political support that is being sought, and that comes mostly by reassuring the American military that international partners will take their place, letting them escape yet another foreign hell hole that the politicians have found for them.

Recchia tests his argument in four detailed cases studies of American intervention—Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq. The missions to Haiti and Bosnia had UN Security Council backing, Kosovo gained NATO Council support, and Iraq was a “coalition of the willing” enterprise without the endorsement of any major international body and thus without many non-American military participants. The promoters of the missions were civilians drawn from different ends of the political spectrum. During the 1990s it was the liberal internationalists embedded deep in the Bill Clinton administration who sought the use of American forces in coup burdened Haiti and in the ethnically torn former Yugoslavia. For Iraq it was the civilian neo-cons in the George W. Bush administration who advocated the invasion of Iraq.

The case studies are rich in candid insight, supported as they are by interviews with most of the key officials, both civilian and military. The pattern is clear. During the Clinton years, the military was foot dragging, undermining the administration’s humanitarian interventionist leanings both by stirring up doubts in the Congress and the public and by emphasizing the risks in administration councils. According to Recchia, the Bush administration invasion advocates had much less vocal military opposition in part because the Bush administration had come into office determined to tame the political intransigence of senior military officers, appointing more malleable officers to such positions as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and head of Central Command. The fact that the United States was directly attacked by forces from the Middle East likely also tempered the military’s reaction to their civilian masters’ plans. Recchia admits that serious threats to security make reluctant warriors much less reluctant. These are all wars of choice, but sometimes war is a more obvious and acceptable choice.

There are three problems with Recchia’s reluctant warrior argument. First, he under examines the partisan role in the debates over America’s military interventions. The Republican Party’s political advantage in security affairs, acquired in the domestic turmoil over the Vietnam War, dissipated in importance with the end of the Cold War, allowing for Bill Clinton’s election as president. Republicans sought to make security salient again by encouraging senior military officers to complain publically about Clinton administration plans and programs. The interventionist inclinations of the administration were easy targets as were its support for gay and women’s rights in the military. The return of a Republican to the presidency ended their party’s tolerance for senior officer public dissent.

Second, we do not learn enough about why the warriors were so reluctant to accept the Clinton interventions. Stepping into the middle of an ethnic/religious fight, if only to separate the sides and bring humanitarian relief, is a dangerous and thankless task. Moreover, it was obvious from the British experience in Northern Ireland, the Greek and Turkish conflict in Cyprus, and America’s own experience in separating Arabs and Israelis in Lebanon, that these efforts have a never-ending quality to them. The American military already had its sights on next big thing after the end of the Cold War, the Chinese challenge. Being a constabulary force was for other, lesser militaries. And given the failure of the Europeans to act effectively in Bosnia and its own bad day in Somalia, it is not surprising that the American military did not want to be in the Balkans.

Third, there is a time problem in the argument. The reluctant warriors of the 1990s became the enthusiastic warriors of the 2000s. Counter-insurgency became doctrinally popular in the American military, topping off in the Iraq and Afghan surges. President Obama’s national security team felt sandbagged into growing the “nation building/all-of-government” effort being pushed by the generals. Only the implosions of Generals McChrystal and Petraeus for personal failures saved Obama from making bigger, longer-term commitments in both Iraq and Afghanistan. In the meantime, parts of the military, most especially in the Special Operations Command, have found their life’s work in doing the missions that the military found so distasteful in the 1990s. Reluctant warriors are not necessarily reluctant forever.

Recchia’s basic point stands. The search for approval from international organizations for American interventions is not driven by internalization of norms of international behavior or the desire to protect side interests, but rather by the desire to convince the American military and the American people that the burdens of hanging around in unpleasant places will be shared with other nations. But burden sharing has its own problems as the American military discovered in air war against Serbia that was part of the Kosovo mission. Coalition participants are governed by their own domestic politics, often limiting their willingness to consent to attacking key targets and the ability of the coalition to implement effective military strategies.

The real reluctant warriors may be the citizens of the United States. American war fighting has been continually modified to reflect their reluctance. The use of the atomic bomb against Japan was justified in part by the great unhappiness of the troops who had fought Germany at the prospect of being transferred to the Pacific to be involved in the amphibious assaults against the Japanese home islands. The war had to end soon or else there would likely have been domestic political consequences. The American military gave up conscription after Vietnam. Reliance on an all-volunteer force rules out long wars with high casualties like Vietnam. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were paid for by borrowing, not by taxes; in fact, taxes were cut during these wars, a first, but surely a happy precedent for the next. Now drones drop the bombs to avoid risking the lives of American pilots. The most frequent war cry these days is “no boots on the ground,” hardly the call of a warrior nation. It is not surprising then that American politicians, anxious for a fight abroad, wistfully claim that a broad-based international coalition can be formed to take up cause. Good luck with that.