Intervention and Nonintervention

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

A second area of controversy concerns the means of intervention. There is substantial consensus that illegal intervention has occurred when a state dispatches armed forces to the territory of another. The Covenant of the League of Nations (1918), the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928), and the United Nations Charter (1945) are examples of international agreements outlawing such armed interventions. There is far less agreement about the legality of the vast array of nonmilitary pressures by which states can affect the affairs of other states. These include economic pressures, such as an offer or withdrawal of loans, trade, or aid, including military supplies; political pressures, such as granting recognition to an acceptable government to bolster its power, and withholding of recognition from an unacceptable government in hopes of toppling it; and psychological pressures, such as expressing support for one side in a revolution, denouncing the policies of another state, or excluding it from international meetings. There is a good deal of disagreement about which of such economic, political, and psychological pressures are legitimate exercises of a state's right to conduct its affairs with others as it pleases or undue interferences in the affairs of another state.

A third area of dispute involves the validity of consent to intervention. Many legal experts contend that intervention is legal if it is carried out pursuant to treaty rights or in response to an invitation by an incumbent government. Others dispute the legality of such interventions because treaties granting the right to intervention and requests for intervention frequently spring from duress or are initiated by unrepresentative governments eager to keep themselves in power. Whether these factors invalidate the consent expressed in the treaty or invitation is a controversial legal question. For example, when Colombia refused the request of President Theodore Roosevelt's administration to allow the United States to build a canal in Panama, then a part of Colombia, an uprising leading to Panama's independence was engineered with U.S. support. The pro-independence forces then requested U.S. aid in resisting Colombia's efforts to prevent the secession. The United States complied, ignoring Colombia's objections that the rebels lacked legitimacy and the right to request foreign aid. Once independent, Panama granted the United States the canal rights that its parent state had refused.

The official position of the United States on legality and illegality of interventions has generally leaned toward a fairly broad construction of the right of intervention. Presidents and secretaries of state have argued since the end of World War I that international law permits states to retain the right to determine which of their national interests may be protected through intervention and the occasions when intervention is required. Likewise, the United States contends that states retain the right to intervene individually when collective intervention machinery fails to operate efficiently. At the same time, the United States has narrowed the scope of American interests defined as vital enough to justify protection through intervention. Examples of circumstances claimed as justifying intervention include the establishment of Soviet missile sites in Cuba in 1962 and aid to the corrupt but noncommunist government of Vietnam in the 1960s when communist forces attempted to wrest power from the regime of President Ngo Dinh Diem.