Foreign policy is back in the news for all of the wrong reasons. Amid negotiations between the United States and Iran about the latter’s nuclear program, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) sent a letter to Iran’s ruling clerics detailing how any deal will not survive past Barack Obama’s presidency. The letter touched off the usual partisan howling that amounts to political discourse these days – see comments about the Logan Act, treason, etc.

However, there is real a problem beneath the rhetoric: Congressional Republicans seem determined to operate a schizophrenic foreign policy. With respect to Iran, Congress’ refusal to ratify a treaty ensures that any agreement President Obama negotiates is “non-binding.” Yet, Congressional Republicans are quite willing to let Obama prosecute an air war against the latest “existential threat”, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. As Tim Mak and Nancy Youssef of the Daily Beast noted on February 11: “The White House sent a draft war authorization to Capitol Hill on Wednesday, after U.S. and coalition forces had conducted nearly 2,300 airstrikes hitting at least 4,817 targets in Iraq and Syria.” Those numbers are now much higher and the authorization for the use of force is no closer to winning approval from Congress.

Advocates of foreign policy restraint can only look at this state of affairs and express their dismay. Whether it is sending weapons to Ukraine, drawing “red lines” about how the government of Syria fights a civil war, or bombing ISIS, American policymakers refuse to stay out of foreign conflicts. Worse, policymakers cannot even decide which combatants in the Islamic World’s ongoing civil war to back or fight: President Obama, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Secretary of State John Kerry were for bombing Bashar Assad’s forces before they were against it.

The most striking aspect of the recent histrionics surrounding Iran, ISIS, and the Middle East is not the lack of strategic thought shown by hawks, but the faulty arguments made to justify intervention. Those who criticize Obama for “hashtag diplomacy” need to realize that buzzwords, e.g. “leadership” and “credibility”, are not substitutes for policies.

To that point, one pundit in particular requires special address, Mark Steyn. A self-described “old-school imperialist”, Steyn has made a name for himself by melding apt historical analogies with witty writing on domestic and international politics. With respect to the ongoing conflict(s) in the Middle East, he thinks what matters is Western inertia and not which militant groups control certain patches of land. An old order, one built by Great Britain and France and then maintained by the United States, is collapsing before our eyes, and its first victims are those who live in the region. Here is an excerpt from his article “Living History” on February 17:

These people [Libyans, Syrians, Iraqis] ‘could stand to read’ a little history, too. But they don’t have time to read history because they’re too busy living it:the disintegration of post-World War Two Libya; the erasure of the Anglo-French Arabian carve-up; the extinction of some of the oldest Christian communities on earth; the metastasizing of a new, very 21st-century evil combining some of the oldest barbarisms with a cutting-edge social-media search-engine optimization strategy.

Steyn’s argument about the “reprimitivization” of parts of the globe is not without its merits. The growth of Boko Haram in a once functional former British colony, Nigeria, is indeed disturbing. The fact that Nigeria is one of several former British colonies that are now wracked by endemic violence decades after de-colonization, e.g. Pakistan, is also upsetting.

Yet, it is worth asking a question: Why will intervention work this time? Steyn and his fellow hawks have not yet provided a satisfactory answer, and no amount of moaning about the “erasure of the Anglo-French Arabian carve-up” changes that fact.

Successful intervention in foreign conflicts is an incredibly difficult proposition, and one that few statesmen are capable of achieving. And given that Steyn brought up the subject of history, it is worth briefly considering a case study. How did statesmen address a foreign policy issue that once dominated global politics as much as the Middle East does today? For comparison’s sake, let’s consider an issue that played out over the course of a century, the “Eastern Question.”

A fuller explanation of the Eastern Question can be found in Charles Emmerson’s brilliant book, 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War. But to simplify, it started as a classic case of balance of power geopolitics. The decline of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of Tsarist Russia occurred in tandem. Russia’s victory over the Turks in the Russo-Turkish War of 1768 to 1774 began a period of Russian expansion that alarmed policymakers in Western Europe. Britain, the superpower of the time, would spend the next century seeking to check Russian expansion in Central Asia, the Levant, and Southeast Europe. (Readers interested in Anglo-Russian imperialism in Central Asia should read Peter Hopkirk’s classic book, The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia).