In 2002, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell famously warned President George W. Bush of the burden his administration would bear if it overthrew Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. His caution became known as the Pottery Barn rule: “You break it, you own it.” It didn’t matter that a spokesperson for the housewares store insisted that when a shopper damaged merchandise, they were not asked to pay for it. The rule had more resonance in foreign policy than in retail and would be invoked for years to come in discussions of conflicts in Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, and, most recently, Venezuela.
More than two decades later, it’s time to retire the Pottery Barn rule. U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration are plainly unmoved by claims that they bear responsibility for the fates of nations where the United States has intervened. This has become clear amid the current bombing campaign in Iran that has killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and sparked a region-wide conflict. Asked whether Trump had a plan for Iran, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham opined on Sunday that that was “not his job or my job.” Graham’s remark came off as callous, but no one—not in the United States, nor the countries it has targeted—wants Washington to assume sweeping control of foreign lands. Recent U.S. efforts to do so have failed to instill stability, while sapping billions of dollars and untold goodwill.
In 2002, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell famously warned President George W. Bush of the burden his administration would bear if it overthrew Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. His caution became known as the Pottery Barn rule: “You break it, you own it.” It didn’t matter that a spokesperson for the housewares store insisted that when a shopper damaged merchandise, they were not asked to pay for it. The rule had more resonance in foreign policy than in retail and would be invoked for years to come in discussions of conflicts in Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, and, most recently, Venezuela.
More than two decades later, it’s time to retire the Pottery Barn rule. U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration are plainly unmoved by claims that they bear responsibility for the fates of nations where the United States has intervened. This has become clear amid the current bombing campaign in Iran that has killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and sparked a region-wide conflict. Asked whether Trump had a plan for Iran, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham opined on Sunday that that was “not his job or my job.” Graham’s remark came off as callous, but no one—not in the United States, nor the countries it has targeted—wants Washington to assume sweeping control of foreign lands. Recent U.S. efforts to do so have failed to instill stability, while sapping billions of dollars and untold goodwill.
The Pottery Barn rule was meant as a deterrent. The prospect of prolonged foreign entanglement was supposed to sway U.S. leaders against unwise adventurism. But with the growing recognition that Washington should no longer seek to “own” other countries, the rule has lost its prudential force. The Pottery Barn rule was the product of a specific time, when the United States was the sole superpower, Washington enjoyed significant credibility, and there was broad faith that democracy could be seeded just about anywhere. In a more contested, zero-sum world, with democracy under pressure, there are few if any simple rules that still apply.
Over the last few days, in the wake of U.S. and Israeli strikes in Iran, many experts have cited a foreign-policy tenet that airpower alone has never achieved positive regime change. The implication is that the Trump administration will either have to deploy ground troops or resign itself to failure. Harkening back to the occupations of Germany and Japan after World War II, the idea holds that societies can only be coaxed back to stability and comity through painstaking, years-long troop deployments and massive investments along the lines of the Marshall Plan. U.S. interventions in Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989 both involved troops to remove a dictator, but also timebound follow-on ground operations that were necessary to set in motion elections and relative law and order.
But more recent examples illustrate how the Pottery Barn rule can lead to dashed hopes. With their long durations, costs in the trillions, thousands of U.S. casualties, and heavy civilian toll, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars showed that taking “ownership” of a broken society does not mean being able to put it back together again. As early as the mid-2000s, polls showed most Iraqis wanted U.S. troops out. And while Afghans initially supported the U.S. presence in their country, that too declined. The domestic toll of the two wars in the United States was crushing, accelerating distrust of government, deepening polarization, creating a generation of physically and mentally injured veterans, and ballooning the national debt.
Meanwhile, the logic of intervention changed. In the Arab Spring, varied levels of U.S. engagement in Libya, Syria, Egypt, and elsewhere in the early 2010s did not correlate with either stability or democratization. The promise of political transformation evaporated by 2012, with few arguing—either during or after the upheavals—that more U.S. troops would have helped. Advanced surveillance and targeting in recent years have also made it possible to depose leaders with lower cost and risk; Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro was captured by a strike force that exited the country virtually unseen, while Khamenei and his lieutenants were assassinated from the skies.
As nation-building has become discredited as futile and counterproductive, the Pottery Barn rule should shift toward a paradigm connoting less operational responsibility than political and moral accountability for the consequences of U.S. intervention, including on-the-ground developments that will be largely out of Washington’s control. If Khamenei’s ouster unleashes a full-scale regional war, a global terror campaign, or prolonged disruption of energy supplies, Trump will pay a political price. On the other hand, if the population of Iran can seize the attacks to unlock a peaceful political transition, U.S. intervention may be judged favorably. That Washington’s motives have more to do with economic, security, and geostrategic interests than human rights or freedom may not matter to suffocated people finally able to breathe. Early polls suggest that the U.S. ouster of Maduro was highly popular among Venezuelans, even though his party remains in power. Khamenei’s killing, meanwhile, has been greeted with street celebrations.
Both the Venezuela and Iran interventions could well end in shattered dreams for freedom and security. But that does not necessarily mean that the United States will be blamed by the two nations’ populations. In both countries, political leaders, government and military officials, and civil society movements will have hands in determining whether the elimination of brutal leaders can lead to societal reinvention. Venezuelan dissident and democracy leader Leopoldo López, who served as mayor of one of Caracas’s municipalities and was formerly imprisoned by the Maduro regime, is grateful to Trump even though Washington left Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president, in power. In New York last weekend, López said that it is now up to the Venezuelan people and opposition movements to leverage the opening Trump has created and win future elections.
At Pottery Barn stores, the alternative to “you break it, you own it” was to simply write off smashed objects. The broken shards of nations cannot just be swept away. Failed states, ungoverned spaces, and protracted conflicts have devastating human consequences and spillover effects that can destabilize regions, seed terrorism, and spread disease. The beguiling simplicity of the Pottery Barn rule must give way to a more complex calculus factoring in the interests of the United States, the people living under the regimes it targets, regional actors, and the world order writ large. Policy and military planners must game out each set of interests, examining best, worst, and most probable outcomes to determine whether intervention is warranted.
The Trump administration may not have a clear post-intervention “plan,” but amid kinetic conflict, even the best-laid plans are buffeted by others’ reactions, which are never fully predictable. In post-invasion Iraq, the Bush administration quickly installed Lt. Gen. Jay Garner to lead reconstruction efforts. Garner was replaced after just one month, when Washington’s initial strategy, which involved empowering Iraqis and only limited de-Baathification efforts, was rejected in favor of a more controlled and centralized approach—the first in a series of strategic shifts that failed to deliver hoped-for results. In Afghanistan, NATO initially planned to deploy a stabilization force limited to Kabul, before shifting gears when violence and instability across the country prompted a much wider deployment.
A more realistic and appropriate expectation is for a U.S. administration to develop and weigh a full range of scenarios, acknowledging the inherent uncertainties of war. Washington should only move forward when it can communicate a clear-eyed assessment of the risks ahead and has in place contingency arrangements to help avert and mitigate them. There are signs that the Trump administration has failed to exercise that level of broad-ranging foresight. Its conflicting messages to Americans stuck in the Middle East that they should both shelter in place and evacuate immediately (despite most of the region’s airspace being closed) do not inspire confidence.
It is optimistic but not far-fetched to predict that the interventions in Venezuela and Iran could serve U.S. security and economic interests, as well as better the lots of long-oppressed populations. Through a wider aperture, however, the consequences are even less certain. U.S. actions vis-à-vis Venezuela, including Maduro’s capture and regular deadly strikes against alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean, create precedents that are certain to be invoked by other powers seeking to neutralize their own antagonists.
The U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran reinforce this pattern, leaving current interpretations of the international norm against the use of force badly battered. While such normative consequences may seem remote, they can come back to bite. In launching his invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin invoked Western military intervention in support of Kosovo in 1999, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and U.S. attacks on Libya and Syria to turn the tables on Western claims about sovereignty and international law.
The Pottery Barn rule was born of a time when the United States enjoyed great global legitimacy after winning the Cold War. Though shaken terribly by 9/11, Washington looked optimistically to spreading liberal democracy around the globe, even imagining that it could and should build Germany- and Japan-style democracies in the Middle East. Those days are a distant memory. Democracy has proved much less inevitable and far more vulnerable than those in the West once imagined. Americans are focused on trying to hold on to it for themselves, rather than believing they can deliver it to others.
Trump and his officials talk about freedom when it suits them. His administration is certainly willing to go after unpopular, undemocratic antagonists when its version of national interest warrants such action. But as for the outcome of foreign intervention, Trump seems content to let the shards fall where they may. The United States will not own the futures of either Venezuela or Iran. The people of those countries will be the best judges of whether the inheritance of U.S. intervention is worth its potential costs.
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