Intervention and Nonintervention

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

The Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan doctrines did not pinpoint the conditions that might trigger a specific intervention. However, high-level military leaders often laid out the policy in somewhat more detail. For instance, General Colin Powell, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the administration of George H. W. Bush (1989–1993), declared that military interventions should be undertaken only when a number of conditions were met. Most importantly, the political objectives of the intervention had to be clearly defined and the gains and risks and likely outcomes had to be adequately assessed. Based on these assessments, it should be clear that the objectives of the intervention could be reached through military means at a defensible cost. Finally, nonviolent alternative policies, if suitable, had been tried first and failed.

Many observers argued that the various and sundry doctrines and statements by military leaders should not be viewed as blueprints for action. Rather, like the previously proclaimed nonintervention principles, they were tailored primarily for psychological impact. They were intended to discourage intervention-minded leaders and to give moral support to nations fearing communist attacks. It was hoped that policy pronouncements would obviate the need for remedial action. If action became necessary, the pronouncements could be characterized as prior warnings that legitimized subsequent actions.

Thus, the nonintervention doctrine has ebbed and flowed in its more than 200-year history. It has gone from an absolute expression, tempered by the implicit exception that interventions for vital purposes were permissible, to an emphasis on a broad range of exceptions to the doctrine, which left it little more than an empty shell. Then it was reformulated in absolute terms, tempered by statements of exceptions stressing that collective or unilateral intervention would still be used by the United States to protect vital security interests. But the absolutism abated again in the wake of major international threats posed by upheavals in Europe and Asia and evidence that collective interventions were difficult to orchestrate.

By the early twenty-first century, the policy implications of the doctrine were that the United States, like all sovereign states, claimed the right to protect its security by all means within its power—including intervention—whenever its leaders believed that this security was seriously endangered. Despite American capacity to intervene freely in the politics of most small nations, however, intervention would be used sparingly, primarily when conditions existed that potentially threatened the security of the United States and its allies and when all other means to resolve the problems failed. The pledges of nonintervention made in the twentieth century indicated the areas where intervention was most likely to occur and the conditions most likely to provoke it. They served as a rough guide to the government in its choice of policy options.