We recently passed the 25th anniversary of 9/11, which invites some reflection. While the event itself was a tragedy (albeit one I am too young to remember), America’s back-to-back invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in response were tragedies of their own. It was logical for the U.S. to hunt down al-Qaeda, and insofar as the Taliban were refusing to turn them over, it made sense to fight any of them who would stand in the way, but looking back now we committed way too hard and ended up accomplishing little. In fact, after the ensuing destabilization of Iraq and the rise of even more radical groups like ISIS, U.S. troops are still in Iraq to this day1. Ultimately, it seems like 9/11 itself backfired on the terrorists (who were fighting U.S. involvement in Muslim areas only to intensify said involvement to this day) while in the ensuing response many more people died on both sides, trillions of dollars were spent, and little lasting change was brought about.
More generally, it seems like foreign interventions often not only don’t have the intended effect, but can produce the opposite effect. Regardless of the extent to which Saddam had WMDs, his removal resulted in even worse conditions for people in Iraq and bred even more extremists. The Taliban now controls more of Afghanistan than they did before the 2001 invasion. You can probably think of other interventions which meet these criteria: Vietnam, the Soviet-Afghan war, Libya, and the list goes on. Some actions appear to be successful — an incomplete list includes the defense of Kuwait, the Korean War2, and the destruction of ISIS — but it is difficult to predict that success in advance. The only possible indicators appear to be limited objectives and broad multinational support.
I read two books recently for a science fiction book club that deal with this problem in the far future but come to different conclusions. The first is The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks, and the second is Hard to be a God by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Broad spoilers ahead: while both stories depict highly technologically and morally advanced societies interacting with more primitive ones (the less developed societies are both rather comically evil), Banks’ story has the advanced society directly intervene in the interest of preventing suffering while the Strugatskys show the advanced society’s agents taking much more minor actions like saving a few important individuals with any attempted major interventions misfiring at best and backfiring at worst. While I agree with the latter’s point that history is a fairly chaotic system and it is therefore hard to have godlike control over things, it seems a bit too pessimistic to conclude that nothing at all can be done, especially given that you have god-like technology. Even barring the existence of superhuman AIs like those in The Player of Games who have a much better idea of whether their actions achieve their desired ends, some actions seem pretty unambiguously good. You could imagine a kind of “guardian angel” that rescues people when they are about to be killed, cures them when they are sick, and gives them the option to leave their current society and join yours/their own if they want. If super advanced aliens could do that for people now I would love it3, and the best part is, they could always just put you back and leave you alone if you didn’t like it. Unless you think that doing anything at all will somehow lead to an equal amount of negative consequences anyway through some mysterious anti-karmic force, in which case I guess we should all just give up and stop trying to help people.
Footnotes
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although they are scheduled to be removed before the end of the year. ↩
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unless you think Kim Jong Un would do a better job than the current South Korean government. ↩
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there may be privacy concerns, but in this scenario I assume the aliens would be ethical about this, and if they weren’t, I wouldn’t like it but it’s not like I could really do anything. ↩