Foreign Policy Laws of Unintended Consequences in International Interventions

Midcoast Senior College presents Summer Wisdom, a free speaker series sponsored by Thornton Oaks Retirement Community. The talk will deal with international conflict management, using the speaker’s personal experience and citing case examples from Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, Libya, and now Venezuela. Intervention from the United States led to perversely unexpected outcomes, such as boatloads of refugees from those countries coming to our shores, massive expenditure of human and financial resources, and loss of American influence overseas. Ambassador Larry Butler spent forty years in diplomatic service, working in twelve countries including Afghanistan, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Finland, Iraq, Kosova and Serbia. Prior to serving as President Clinton’s National Security Council staff lead on securing the Northern Irish peace accord in 1995, he was the lead at the American Embassy in Belgrade (then in Yugoslavia) supporting Richard Holbrooke’s achievement of the 1995 Dayton Accords that ended the war in Bosnia. https://midcoastseniorcollege.org/project/summer-wisdom-2026/