Russell Kirk knew that war in the name of democracy could instead create tyranny. In fact, conservatives have debated the value of foreign intervention in the name of regime change since at least the First World War. In the third episode of “Modern Age with Dan McCarthy,” our editor-in-chief explores why wars abroad can worsen the problems they try to resolve.

Selections from the podcast are excerpted below:

The neoconservatives of 2003 had embraced this idea of war as bringing about a revolution for the sake of liberalism and democracy. They were very much influenced by the thought of someone like Francis Fukuyama, a thinker who had promoted this idea that liberalism and democracy were the end of history and were the ultimate endpoint and goal of the development of governments almost everywhere. And there was this idealistic sense that people all around the world naturally have a craving not only for freedom but for freedom specifically as Americans understand it and as it is outlined in our Declaration of Independence.

Now, this is tremendously naïve, and this involves ignoring the history of other countries, ignoring the fact that other peoples around the world, in their own nations, have a perhaps aspiration for freedom, but freedom on their own terms, as they understand it. And if you actually bring democracy to some of these countries, it will turn out to be a very illiberal kind of democracy or democracy that may wind up empowering sectarians and religious radicals as opposed to empowering the kind of secular liberal democrats—with a small L and a small D—that many neoconservatives and many supporters of the 2003 Iraq War thought would be brought to power as a result of U.S. intervention.

So this is the backdrop to the debate today over America’s involvement in the Middle East. And one of the questions is, If America gets involved in further operations against a state like Iran, is it really just a matter of trying to deprive Iran of a nuclear weapons program, trying to deprive Iran of the means of harming Israel? Is there, in fact, a greater ambition here to bring about regime change in Iran, not just because the Iranian regime as it exists now is a revolutionary Islamist regime that is very evil and oppressive but because there is this hope that by bringing about a change in regime in Iran, it will thereby bring about a democratization, a liberalization, and a Westernization of Iranian political culture.

That is the same kind of argument that we saw being made in 2003 in support of the Iraq War, and that’s an argument that conservatives do not buy. Conservatives do not think that if you go in and overthrow a tyrannical government, that the necessary and swift result will be the creation of a free government, because in fact there are a number of other bad outcomes that can happen. You can wind up replacing one tyranny, one despotism with another that’s just as bad or even worse. You could wind up creating a situation of civil war and a bloodbath within the country. The civil strife of the country may wind up being even worse than a dictatorship was.

Russell Kirk is very careful within a book called The Roots of American Order, where he talks about America’s devotion to order, virtue, and stability. He says that order is the first requirement. Order is the first thing that you need in order to have any kind of civilization.

Watch the rest here: