The New American Interventionism: Introduction

The New American Interventionism: Essays from Political Science Quarterly

Demetrios James Caraley (ed.)

1999

Introduction
Robert Jervis

Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will [America’s] heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.
—John Quincy Adams

When America talks of the defense of interests, and not just territories, it leads to continued suspicions that the United States is seeking a globalized NATO.
—An anonymous NATO official ₁

American intervention abroad, especially that utilizing force, is the subject of increased attention in the post-cold war era. Of course, the United States intervened extensively during the cold war itself. Indeed, John Quincy Adams notwithstanding, intervention is as American as apple pie, although it usually has been for the purpose of defending narrow national interests as well as for spreading American values. The first two American administrations sent considerable sums to the Barbary pirates to protect American shipping, and Thomas Jefferson resorted to force when their demands became exorbitant and the United States had built a navy that could do the job. Covert action was also not unknown to early American statesmen. ₂ Bribery, the support of foreign friends, conspiracies to overthrow unfriendly regimes, propaganda—both “white” (open) and “black” (disguised)—as well as the use of force were not newly discovered in 1945.

During the cold war, the United States intervened in the domestic affairs of almost every country in the world, usually by covert means. It sought to subvert communist regimes, albeit with little success, ₃ while in the rest of the world, covert action more frequently took the form of supporting chosen individuals and factions, notwithstanding the fact that the dramatic attempts to overthrow governments received the most attention. This is not to imply either that the United States was unique or that its behavior was immoral. International politics is built on the concept of sovereignty yet has always involved serious efforts by states to interfere in the domestic affairs of others. Americans may be outraged at the thought that China sought to influence the 1996 presidential election and gain Bill Clinton’s favor by contributing to his campaign. While we may wonder at Chinese sophistication if they believed that the sum of $100,000 would go far or that influence could be obtained by a contribution whose source had to be kept hidden, the more important point is that this kind of behavior is hardly unusual.

Despite its long history, the concept of intervention has no precise definition. In common parlance, intervention predominantly means either of two quite different things. First, it can refer to interference in another state’s domestic affairs with a view either to influence or to replace the government. Support for a leader or regime that might otherwise fall or be overthrown can also be considered a form of intervention. Such activities are usually covert or at least subject to “plausible deniability,” for the related reasons that they violate the norm of sovereignty and that a leader or faction whose overthrow is believed to be sought by the outside power may gain domestic support for that very reason. A second meaning of intervention is military, which can be undertaken to replace a government, support a regime against rebellion, repel (and, if our definition were to be truly evenhanded, assist) aggression against a third party, or end civil strife. ₄ In the post-cold war era, a third kind of intervention has become important as well: open efforts to establish and maintain democratic processes, irrespective of the identities of the individuals and factions that may gain power, subject only to the proviso that they will continue democratic practices.

States can also engage in what might be called “permissive intervention”: permitting others, including their own private citizens, to act where the state itself does not. Thus, during the war in Bosnia, the United States allowed arms to flow to that country and Croatia and also sanctioned the use of American military consultants to retrain the Croatian army as an effective force that could expel the native Serbs from eastern Croatia, thereby fundamentally changing the course of the war.

Because of its great size and power, the United States cannot help strongly influencing the fates of other countries, including their domestic arrangements. Most obviously, the state of the American economy has a major influence over the economic fortunes of all countries. An America that absorbs imports helps others grow and thereby contributes to the political success of the parties and regimes that happen to be in power. Conversely, when the Unites States raised interest rates in the 1970s, the effects were not only to increase the economic burden on debtor nations but also to weaken their governments.

American power means not only that its intervention can be inadvertent but also that it can occur by anticipation. Thus American opposition to Salvador Allende in Chile was sufficiently well known so that Augusto Pinochet and his colleagues did not have to be told that they would receive American support if they took control. Similarly, today, those who would make their countries more democratic know that some American support is likely, at least if they do not strongly oppose American policies.

The objectives of intervention are often broader than those sought by “normal” diplomacy. Normal diplomacy is usually aimed at securing specific policies such as deterring attacks on neighbors, opening markets, or gaining diplomatic support. Intervention often has the much more general objective of changing the orientation of another government, if not changing the government itself. During the cold war, the United States intervened with four objectives in mind: to secure regimes that would support or at least not oppose overall U.S. foreign policy; conversely, to prevent the establishment of communist regimes or, if this was not possible, to remove them; to ensure local and regional stability; and to support democracy. Sometimes these goals were linked: the desire for stability can often work in tandem with support for democracy. This was most notably the case with the American intervention in Western Europe in the late 1940s. Although some American rhetoric implied a fear of Soviet invasion, the real concern was that Western Europe would disintegrate from within, that economic collapse and the loss of faith would lead to political collapse and a communist takeover. Most obviously, this motivated the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan. But it also led to American covert action in support of democracy in Western Europe, especially in France and Italy. These fears also provided the main impetus for the American endorsement of a military alliance. The primary purpose of NATO in American eyes was not to deter a Soviet military attack, which was seen as extremely unlikely, but to give Western Europeans the sense that their futures were secure from external threat and that it was therefore worthwhile for them to devote their energies to internal recovery. The security guarantee was a security blanket; the target was less the USSR than the Europeans’ psyche. ₅

In other cases, however, one objective was gained only by sacrificing another. Thus the United States intervened to unseat the governments of Iran in 1953, Guatemala a year later, and Chile in 1973, even though the last one was a democracy and the first two were more democratic than the regimes that replaced them. The dilemma was most famously summarized by President John Kennedy when he discussed what the United States should do in the Dominican Republic after the dictator Rafael Trujillo was assassinated, an outcome that owed more than a little to American encouragement of the opposition. “There are three possibilities in descending order of preference: a decent democratic regime, a continuation of the Trujillo regime or a Castro regime. We ought to aim at the first, but we really can’t renounce the second until we are sure that we can avoid the third.” ₆ Although the fear of communism vanished with the Soviet Union, the perceived tension between stability and order, on the one hand, and radicalism and instability, on the other, continue, as Morris Morley and Chris McGillion show in their study of the Clinton administration’s policy toward Haiti. Similar conflicts cloud U.S. policy in the Congo and Eastern Africa and are likely to prove central in the more important arena of policy toward China, although in these cases even more than in Haiti, it is difficult to identify the democrats and the paths to democracy.

The cold war witnessed disagreement over whether American interventions were motivated primarily by security or economic concerns, over whether what the United States feared was the growth of Soviet power or indigenous left-wing regimes that would threaten American economic penetration. ₇ But it is likely that intervention was most likely when both interests were involved. Because relatively minor covert actions, and certainly anything more, entailed significant costs and risks and therefore would not be undertaken lightly, action was likely when the decision makers believed that what was at risk was not security or economic stakes or democratic values, but instead two—if not all three—of these values.

With the end of the cold war, interventions are even more likely to require multiple objectives, which now also include humanitarian concerns. At least where military intervention is concerned, it is likely to take several impulses to move the United States. Such intervention is not likely to come quickly. I do not think that it is an accident that American involvement in Somalia, Haiti, and Kosovo came only after slow deliberation, false starts, and procrastination. Whereas a shock like the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait can produce a fairly prompt response, even there several months were required to turn an embargo and defensive deployment into a military offensive.

Military intervention is, of course, different from other kinds not only because it is often inconsistent with the rule of law but also because it is likely to entail the expenditure of significant blood and treasure. Even relatively small operations like those in Grenada, Panama, and Haiti kill some American soldiers and innocent civilians and run risks whose upward bounds are hard to estimate. James Burk critically scrutinizes the popular view that American public opinion is particularly sensitive to casualties and argues, I believe correctly, that the public looks at the objectives for which the United States is intervening as well as at the costs and that it was splits within the elite rather than between it and the general public that produced the pressure to withdraw from Lebanon and Somalia. ₈ But it would be strange indeed if decisions to intervene were not to be influenced by estimates of costs. Symmetrically, the credibility of American threats to use force is influenced by the adversary’s estimate of what the United States thinks is at stake and the casualties it believes the United States foresees. So even if Burk is correct that the U.S. public is not as sensitive to casualties as many people believe, if other countries accept the conventional wisdom, they will develop strategies to threaten and inflict casualties and may discount American threats to act in the face of such costs.

Three major themes emerge from the essays that comprise this book. First, the effects of American intervention do not flow from American actions alone. Instead, what is crucial is the interaction between what the United States and other outside actors do and the politics on the scene. This point is perhaps only common sense, but it is often missed by those whose desire to criticize or defend American policy leads them to focus exclusively on American motives and actions. Alan Kuperman shows that many of the arguments about the effects of the American introduction of Stinger missiles into the Afghan conflict—and especially the claims that this escalation forced out the Soviets or, to the contrary, delayed Mikhail Gorbachev’s withdrawal—ignore the internally driven Soviet changes and the ways in which the groups doing the fighting reacted to the new technology. More generally, the “success” or “failure” of American policy cannot be explained without taking full account of the degree of overlapping interests between the United States and the targets of the intervention. As Barry Blechman and Tamara Wittes show, the different outcomes of American attempts are often attributable less to differences in American behavior than to differences in the objectives sought and, therefore, in the amount of local resistance. ₉ Similar considerations affect the credibility of American threats to intervene, which are more likely to be believed when what is at stake is very important to the United States but not as vital to the local actors who must comply in order to avoid intervention. Stating the problem in this way illustrates why threats to intervene are often insufficient and why it is so hard for the United States to bend local actors to its will, notwithstanding superior American material resources: especially in the post-cold war world, the stakes tend to be of only peripheral concern to the United States though are crucial to the local actors. Who rules in Iraq and what form of government prevails in the former Yugoslavia obviously matter to the United States, or its forces would not be there. But the outcomes matter much more to the actors in the region, who will therefore go to greater lengths to get their way.

Turning to the causes of American intervention, two factors stand out. First, intervention, like all foreign policy, remains deeply domestic. Whether and how the United States intervenes is shaped by domestic political processes, the values and interests of the participating groups in the United States, and the actors’ domestic political stakes. The structure of American government plays a crucial role here. As William Banks and Jeffrey Straussman explain, the Constitution gives Congress crucial powers through the appropriations process. But the cold war saw an erosion: a possible nuclear attack precluded congressional debate; presidents acted on their own in situations short of this; and Congress saw delegating power as expeditious and safe. These habits have maintained their hold, but whether they will continue to do so into the future remains unclear. ₁₀ Whether or not they do, the multiple domestic pressures on the president can neither be ignored nor encapsulated in a parsimonious theory of foreign policy. This was one reason that the American threats to oust the Panamanian dictator Manual Noriega were ineffective. As Eytan Gilboa shows, the administration was incapable of speaking with one voice, and even someone who listened carefully and had no bias would have had trouble guessing what the United States would do.

The second factor is the role of the past. Political scientists often overlook the guiding principle of historians: what happens at one time is strongly influenced by what has come before and strongly influences what comes later. No intervention is discrete and separate; instead, each instance changes the political landscape in which the actors operate. Forces and beliefs are generated, validated, nourished, and diminished by each case of intervention. Starting with the familiar point that Vietnam reduced both the American willingness to intervene and the credibility of American threats, Blechman and Wittes show that the course of subsequent interventions also affected both the United States’s willingness to use force and others’ perception of this likelihood. Sometimes rather striking lessons are drawn, ones that may not be detected by all the actors involved. Thus, behind the attack on Belgian peacekeepers at the start of the genocide in Rwanda were the lessons that the Hutu extremists learned from the American behavior in Somalia and the concomitant prediction that the Western powers would remove their forces once it was clear that they would suffer casualties if they stayed. ₁₁ Blechman and Wittes similarly find a Somali leader telling an American envoy, “We have studied Vietnam and Lebanon and know how to get rid of Americans, by killing them so that public opinion will put an end to things.”

James Fowler’s article finds that the prevailing lessons from other cases provide a parallel explanation of the paradox of the American acquiescence, if not support, for repression in Korea in 1979 under a liberal and human rights- oriented president and its support for liberalization in 1987 under a conservative administration. In 1979, American leaders were most impresssed (and depressed) by the fact that the liberalization of the shah of Iran and their refusal to support domestic repression led to a disastrous revolution and the seizure of American hostages; in 1987 what was salient was the success of the Philippine nonviolent revolution, which received at least a modicum of American support. Although states do not blindly repeat policies that were followed by success and shun those that seemed to produce failure, each important event does influence future behavior. The outcome of the NATO intervention in Kosovo is likely to prove to be a real turning point for the alliance and American foreign policy. Later behavior will be different because of it. By altering beliefs and domestic incentives, Kosovo will deeply affect how American national interest is defined, what policies are seen as effective and appropriate, and the priority given to humanitarian objectives if not to foreign policy in general.

Robert Jervis argues that the strong role of domestic politics and the impact of each episode on later beliefs and preferences mean that the United States will not be able to develop a coherent grand strategy for intervention and that other states will have difficulty predicting American behavior. The results will not be satisfying to scholars, citizens, or statesmen at home or abroad, but all will have to live with an inconsistent, if not contradictory, set of American policies.

At the end of this volume, we do not have a complete and parsimonious theory of intervention, and given the complexities and contingencies involved, we may never have one. But these essays bring to bear converging perspectives on these vital questions and make clear many of the multiple causes and effects that are at work. As we move into a world in which there is good reason to believe that covert action will continue and military intervention will increase, these arguments and analyses should help us to understand where we are going as well as where we have been.

Endnotes

Note 1: Quoted in Roger Cohen, “A Policy Struggle Starts Within NATO,” New York Times, 27 November 1998. Back.

Note 2: Stephen Knott, Secret and Sanctioned: Covert Operations and the American Presidency (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Back.

Note 3: The best study is that by Gregory Mitrovich, Compellence and Coexistence: The Transformation of America’s Cold War Objectives, 1947-1956 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, forthcoming); also see Walter Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996). Back.

Note 4: For good treatments of intervention for the latter purpose, see Ariel Levite, Bruce Jentleson, and Larry Berman, eds, Foreign Military Intervention (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); and Barbara Walter and Jack Snyder, eds., Civil Wars, Insecurity, and Intervention (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming). Back.

Note 5: For further discussion, see Robert Jervis, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 206-212. Back.

Note 6: Quoted in Arthur Schlesinger Jr., A Thousand Days (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 769. Back.

Note 7: A good general discussion of the causes of the American military intervention in this period is that by Herbert Tillema, Appeal to Force (New York: Crowell, 1973); also see Herbert Tillema, International Conflict Since 1945: A Bibliographic Handbook of Wars and Military Intervention (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991); Benjamin Fordham, “The Politics of Threat Perception and the Use of Force,” International Studies Quarterly 42 (September 1998): 567-590; Mi Yung Yoon, “Explaining U.S. Intervention in Third World Internal Wars, 1945-1989,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 41 (August 1997): 580-602. Back.

Note 8: For a general discussion of current public attitudes toward intervention, see Bruce Jentleson and Rebecca Britton, “Still Pretty Prudent: Post-Cold War American Public Opinion on the Use of Military Force,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 42 (August 1998): 395-417. Back.

Note 9: For a general appreciation of this point, see David Baldwin, Economic Statecraft (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). Back.

Note 10: For other discussions, see Randall Ripley and James Lindsay, eds., Congress Resurgent: Foreign and Defense Policy on Capitol Hill (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993); and Eugene Wittkopf and James McCormick, “Congress, the President, and the End of the Cold War: Has Anything Changed?” Journal of Conflict Resolution 42 (August 1998): 440-466. Back.

Note 11: Bruce Jones, “Keeping the Peace, Losing the War: Military Intervention in Rwanda’s `Two Wars’” in Walter and Snyder, eds., Civil Wars, Insecurity, and Intervention. Back.