Referring to U.S. operations in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan and to Chinese human rights policy, Russian democratization, NATO expansion, and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Mandelbaum wrote: “The United States after the Cold War … became the equivalent of a very wealthy person, the multibillionaire among nations. It left the realm of necessity that it had inhabited during the Cold War and entered the world of choice. It chose to spend some of its vast reserves of power on the geopolitical equivalent of luxury items: the remaking of other countries.”
