Intervention and Nonintervention

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

The determination of what constitutes legal intervention has been further complicated by the fact that it is deemed derogatory to charge a government with the practice of intervention. For many of the world's governments and people, interventions are policies pursued by international bullies and oppressors, while nonintervention is the hallmark of virtuous nations. These evaluative connotations tempt intervening governments to avoid the label of "intervention" even when their actions are lawful. Instead, they use deceptive names, such as "interposition" or "police action." Similarly, they may misrepresent illegal interventions as legal activities by using deceptive names or spurious legal justifications. The countries that are the targets of interventions may give the false taint of illegality to them by attaching the intervention label to them. Such misuses of political terms make it difficult to ascertain prevailing views within the community of nations on the precise nature of intervention and the criteria by which one can judge whether intervention has occurred and is legal or illegal.

THE PRACTICE OF INTERVENTION

If one were to draw a curve charting the number of American interventions over a 200-year span, it would begin at a fairly low point, reach a peak roughly at the center, then move sharply downward and rebound after World War II. The curve would show several lesser fluctuations during the years of ascent and descent. The major rationale for this ebb and flow of interventionism is the change in perceptions about the security of U.S. hegemony in the Western Hemisphere.

The United States has intervened in the affairs of other nations, or seriously considered intervening, primarily to prevent or foil anticipated attempts by powers on other continents to gain a foothold in the Western Hemisphere from which they might mount an attack on the United States. It has also intervened to maintain power balances among nations in Europe and Asia so that no single nation or combination of nations might become strong enough in these regions to launch an assault on the Western Hemisphere from abroad. Occasionally, the United States has also intervened to establish American strategic and economic bases abroad in order to protect its vital connecting routes to other parts of the world.

When challenges to hegemony were deemed minor, or when interventions were urged for goals not clearly involving the protection of hegemonic interests, the United States has generally shunned intervention. A major exception has been the policy of intervening on behalf of U.S. citizens abroad whenever their lives and property were threatened by political events in a weak foreign country. American statesmen have generally viewed the protective aspects of such actions as paramount and the interventionist aspects as strictly subordinate. Protective interventions, if limited to safeguard Americans, were ordinarily not counted in the record of interventions, at least not by American officials. Of course, the target country often viewed the matter differently.