Since the end of the Cold War, liberal democracies have conducted military interventions on numerous occasions, and with mixed results. During the first half of the 1990s, the military intervention designed to drive out Iraq from Kuwait was an unparalleled success, but Mogadishu and Srebrenica have become symbols of failed attempts to bring peace to war-torn countries and to alleviate human suffering. During the second half of the 1990s, Operation Allied Force, NATO's war on Kosovo in 1999, was unsuccessful. The first humanitarian war, as the British Prime Minister Tony Blair called it, took 78 days. During the air campaign, the Serbs killed more Albanians than in the preceding months. During the operation, the killing of Albanians continued and refugees were used as a weapon. In addition to this, Human Rights Watch confirmed 90 incidents in which between 489 and 528 Yugoslav civilians died as a result of NATO bombing. These included attacks with cluster bombs.

After the horrendous al-Qaeda attacks of 11 September 2001, the United States declared war on terrorism. President George W. Bush decided to remove aligned sponsors of international terrorism from power. As a first step, a US-facilitated coalition removed the Afghan Taliban regime, al-Qaeda's main sponsor. Subsequently, another US-led coalition was remarkably successful in removing the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrated that limited objectives could be achieved quickly, with few friendly losses and with acceptable levels of collateral damage. However, it turned out to be difficult to stabilize both countries after the regime change. In Afghanistan, coalition forces were unable to destroy all Taliban forces and to stop them from controlling parts of Afghanistan. Years after the removal of the Taliban from power, coalition forces were still fighting battles in remote spots of Afghanistan. In 2013, President Hamid Karzai saw no other option but to start negotiations on a power sharing agreement with the Taliban.

In Iraq, after the removal of Saddam Hussein, urban guerrilla fighters loyal to the former regime and Muslim extremists stepped up their campaign against coalition forces. More American soldiers were killed during the stabilization phase than during the regime change operation