David Rieff is a repentant liberal interventionist whose book At the Point of a Gun traces his disillusionment from the days when he was an advocate of Western intervention in Bosnia.

Here he asks whether calls for intervention in various trouble spots hasn’t become a form of cheap moral posing since those who advocate intervention frequently fail to face up to its likely consequences. His point that intervening in foreign countries ostensibly to protect people from their own governments will often require regime change and all that goes with it, seems often to go unappreciated.