Intervention and Nonintervention

Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy, (2002) by Doris A. Graber

The argument that infringements of state sovereignty to achieve humanitarian goals are nonpolitical becomes more difficult to sustain when humanitarian crises are precipitated by political events, as was true in the 1990s for starvation relief in Somalia or rescue of Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo from annihilation. States where humanitarian interventions are taking place generally condemn them. They consider all actions taken by a foreign power on their soil against their expressed wishes as intervention, regardless of the motivation for the action. This is why intervening states, including the United States, often supplement the humanitarian argument by claiming that the action is also undertaken because their vital interests are at stake or because extreme human suffering brings instability that endangers international peace.

While protection of the security of the United States has been the major reason for considering interventions as policy options, additional concerns have influenced specific policy decisions. Foremost, particularly in the early years of the country, was the question of capability to intervene effectively. Intervention usually requires substantial military, economic, and political resources. When the United States lacked such resources or was already using them to their fullest extent, it could not spare them for interventions.

The balance between political gains and political disadvantages derived from the intervention is also important. Intervention by one state may spur counterintervention by another. It may alienate the government and people of the state against which it is undertaken. It may antagonize other members of the community of nations. The chances that it will accomplish the objectives for which it was undertaken may be slim. All these factors are weighed in determining whether a particular intervention is advisable.

Policies of intervention, like other foreign policies, also tend to become entangled with events on the domestic political scene. Political competition for the allocation of human and material resources for various goals may lead to strong opposition to spending resources for a particular intervention. In the years before the Civil War, many interventions were appraised within the context of the proslavery-antislavery dispute. Later, the intervention policy became entangled in the debate over the merits of imperialist expansion. Differences in the appraisal of individual situations also are important. Political leaders often disagreed about whether hegemonic interests were really involved in a particular situation and whether intervention was likely to produce the anticipated results. Considering the high economic and political stakes involved in most decisions to intervene or to abstain, heated debates have been the rule. Political partisanship has also played a part in opposing or supporting particular interventions even though the policy of intervention and nonintervention has never carried a party label. Periods of plentiful and of scarce interventions have been unrelated to the partisan orientation of the government.