Intervention and Nonintervention

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

President James Buchanan's inaugural address in 1857 is an early example of reformulation. He declared it to be the nation's policy never to interfere in the domestic concerns of other nations "unless this shall be imperatively required by the great law of self-preservation." He did not specify the occasions when the law of self-preservation might apply and the ways in which such occasions could be identified. Buchanan also contended that the nonintervention doctrine did not preclude the duty of preventive intervention. When, as happened in Mexico in 1859, a Western Hemisphere country was afflicted by internal unrest that spilled over its borders, it was the duty of the United States to intervene to stop the unrest and thereby prevent intervention by other powers. Congress did not accept this argument at that time. But when the argument was revived and amplified during the closing decades of the nineteenth century, it became an accepted clarification of the scope of the nonintervention doctrine.

Officially, a number of major clarifications were labeled corollaries to the Monroe Doctrine, which had become an icon for the nonintervention principle. Linking interventionist policies to this icon served to maintain the aura that the non-intervention doctrine remained absolute. For example, the Olney Corollary of 1895 asserted the right of the United States to intervene in any conflict between an American and non-American power that endangered the security of the United States. Under the Roosevelt Corollary of 1904, the United States claimed an even broader right and duty to act as policeman of the Western Hemisphere. If any nation in the hemisphere permitted conditions on its territory that might invite intervention by another country, then it was incumbent on the United States to intervene to remedy these conditions and forestall intervention by others. The United States must assume this obligation because the Monroe Doctrine prevented other powers from exercising their right of intervention in troubled Western Hemisphere countries.

During the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, the nonintervention doctrine received yet another interpretation. Wilson's claim that the United States must discourage dictatorships or unconstitutional governments in Latin America by refusing to recognize them was accompanied by strong professions that such interventions accorded with the principles embodied in the established doctrine of nonintervention. Destruction of unpopular governments, Wilson argued, freed foreign nations from undue restraints on their sovereign right to opt for democratic rulers. Rather than serving as a tool for coercing these nations into unwanted action, intervention thus became a tool to enable their people to exercise their will. While Wilson expanded the scope of the right of intervention on one hand, he also laid the groundwork for subsequent contractions of the right. His stress on the sovereign rights of states to determine their own fates, regardless of size, led to a series of international agreements that proclaimed the nonintervention principle as a prescription of international law except for individual or collective self-defense. Such agreements became part of the Covenant of the League of Nations (1918) and later the United Nations Charter (1945).