On October 4, four U.S. Special Forces soldiers were killed amid an ambush by Islamist insurgents in Niger. In grief and shock, Americans are starting to ask why the United States is so extended abroad, even to places like Sub-Saharan Africa where our geopolitical interests are unclear. Something went wrong in Niger. It is incumbent on both the press and Congress to seek out answers as to what happened. Without jeopardizing it, American voters deserve to have a fuller understanding of the U.S. mission in North Africa. Some, however, have used these deaths to vindicate their preexisting antipathy toward American troop commitments abroad. The impulse to posture scandalized about U.S. forward positioning is not just logically flawed; it is reflective of a misunderstanding of America’s role in a post-9/11 world.

With tones ranging from sorrow to anger, non-interventionist opinion-makers on the right and left seem bewildered by the idea that the United States has a troop presence in Niger at all. The New York Times editorial board on Monday mourned America’s active military commitments in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, to say nothing of semi-active battlefields in places like Niger, Jordan, Pakistan, and Thailand. Though they burdened their argument with perennial dovish complaints about the forward basing of U.S. troops in allied nations and the Pentagon’s $700 billion annual budget, it would be folly to dismiss the editorial board’s warning that the Trump era could yield new military commitments in places like North Korea or Iran.

The Times was only joining in a familiar lament on the non-interventionist right. The libertarian-leaning Reason Magazine’s Sheldon Richman provided a classic example of the genre. He fretted how the real burning issue exposed by the ambush in Niger is the intolerable notion that American soldiers are in North Africa at all. “Patriotic media companies have no wish to expose their audiences to the idea that jihadists would be no threat to Americans who were left to mind their own business,” reads just one faulty construct in a piece replete with them.

These familiar and genuine, albeit rote, grievances were buttressed by the fact that even U.S. lawmakers seemed unclear of the purpose of U.S. deployments to places like Northwest Africa. Sens. Bob Casey and Chuck Schumer seemed surprised to learn of the U.S. presence around Lake Chad. When asked what legal authority allows the United States to deploy to places like Niger, Senator Lindsey Graham cited the 2001 authorization to use military force that was passed in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

I have joined others in contending that the 2001 AUMF is dated and insufficient for authorizing the use of force against Islamic State forces in places like Syria. There, the United States has deployed troops to a sovereign nation without that government’s permission and has engaged in direct hostilities with forces loyal to that government. Congress has abdicated its authority to authorize that campaign. There is, however, no comparison between offensive operations directed against state and non-state actors in Syria and training and policing missions in states like Niger, where the United States is deployed at the invitation of the host government.

This is the reality that critics of America’s extroverted foreign policy refuse to confront; that is, at least, until they are inaugurated President of the United States. The last three consecutive presidents have campaigned on the notion that the United States was overextended abroad. The last three consecutive presidents have (so far) ratified the status quo they inherited and, in one way or another, even extended America’s foreign commitments. For all the huffing and puffing about the ideological rigidity of military interventionists, the ideologically blinkered position is one that demands wholesale retrenchment independent of the facts on the ground. The open secret is that America’s current force posture abroad is as close to the bare minimum as the nation can afford.

The New York Times lamented that, of the approximately 2 million Americans in uniform, just over 240,000 are deployed to almost 172 countries and territories around the world. The editorialists are also forced to concede that the number of troops deployed abroad has “decreased considerably” over the past 60 years while “the military’s reach has not.” That is because the American armed forces are qualitatively better able to execute their mission, which is to neutralize threats before they necessitate larger deployments. Richman bemoans the fact that the U.S. deployment in Niger is really a response to jihadist activity in neighboring Mali, which was facilitated by Barack Obama’s Libyan intervention. In citing the Libyan debacle, he makes the neoconservative critique, which was that the Obama White House wanted to accomplish too much in North Africa with too little.

The Libya campaign is illustrative of a broader criticism of America’s conduct of post-9/11 conflicts, which is that most of its mistakes were the result of the White House’s fear of committing the number of troops necessary to see a mission accomplished successfully and expeditiously. President Obama explicitly ruled out “regime change” when approving an air campaign to punish the Gaddafi regime. When the regime’s collapse came, there was no plan for the day after–no vetted partners on the ground and no viable government in exile to restore order.

Critics of America’s ability to control the course of events would cite the Iraq War as an example of how the best-laid plans don’t survive first contact with the enemy. It’s hard to argue a counterfactual but, in the absence of the Iraq War, it’s safe to say that there would still be American advisory deployments to states like Niger, which struggle with an indigenous Islamist terrorist threat. There would still be kinetic actions against hostile insurgencies in semi-functional states—those were ongoing before the 9/11 attacks, and they continued after Iraq was supposedly “sovereign, stable, and self-reliant” and American troops were fully withdrawn.

Currently, most American troops are deployed abroad to deter aggression from states and non-state actors. Only a small number make contact with enemy combatants, and the majority of those encounters are defensive and do not require congressional authorization. That is a relatively modest commitment for a nation seriously concerned with its national security. This reality doesn’t satisfy political constituencies cultivated by reckless lawmakers who go about calling their colleagues “warmongers,” but it has the value of being honest.

It must be frustrating for non-interventionists to watch politicians as varied as George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump adopt the so-called “neoconservative” position as the pragmatic status quo. At some point, that frustration should give way to cautious introspection about why non-interventionist policy preferences are apparently so impractical that they can never be fully implemented. Don’t hold your breath.