American Intervention Research Articles

"Good Friday in December," World War II in the Editorials of Preservation of the Faith Magazine, 1939-1945

September 1, 1939, Hitler's tanks crossed border into Poland. Germany's invasion of Poland marks, by most accounts, beginning of Second World War of twentieth century. Lasting for six years, it left 60 million dead and Europe in shambles. The United States and Soviet Union emerged as dominant powers of post-war era until fall of Soviet Union in 1989. After subsequent controversial conflicts in Korea, Southeast Asia, Central America, and Middle East, World War II has come down to those born after it as good war, a paradigmatic case for just war theory. But what about Hitler?, argumentum ad Hitlerum, is widely taken as decisive refutation of contemporary Christian pacifists. Those who came of age during Great Depression and Second World War and went on to build modern America have come to be known, in Tom Brokaw's phrase, as the generation.1 Though war in Europe began in September 1939, United States did not enter war until after Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. In intervening twenty-seven months, still suffering under Great Depression, those who would become greatest generation found themselves bitterly divided over whether United States should enter war on side of Britain and France who were allied with Soviet Union, at this point less than a quarter of a century from its beginnings in 1917 Russian Revolution. The legendary flyer and one of America's first international celebrities, Charles Lindbergh (1902-1974), was major spokesperson for non-interventionists. After decisive American intervention on side of Allies and post-war stature of United States, represented by lionizing of greatest generation,

Continental and Homeland Security

Surrounded by oceans and friendly neighbours, and faced throughout the Cold War with a direct threat to its territory against which there was no effective defence (nuclear armed ballistic missiles), the United States has historically looked mainly overseas to guarantee its security. To many outside observers, the obvious American response to the terrorist attacks of n September 2001 might have been to focus less on measures abroad and more on those at home. After all, the strikes themselves shattered the notion that oceans and friendly borders made the United States less vulnerable to direct threats to its territory than countries not so fortunate in their geography. And terrorism is arguably a type of threat against which it may be possible to develop some effective defences. Yet the Bush administration's overwhelming response to the 9/11 attacks was to concentrate on the away game, whether it was direct American intervention in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, or assistance to other governments in combating terrorism in places like the Philippines and Africa.Despite its overseas orientation, the Bush administration arguably - and not surprisingly, given the terrorist attacks - devoted more attention to continental and homeland security than previous US administrations. It is this portion of America's overall security and defence activity that is the focus of this article. It begins by highlighting key developments in continental and homeland security during the Bush administration. It then examines the degree to which such issues figured in the 2008 presidential election and makes a projection as to how they may progress under the Obama administration. Finally, the article puts forward some thoughts about the implications for Canada of future developments in continental and homeland security.THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION'S HERITAGE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND DEFENCEThe Bush administration launched a number of measures in the civilian-led (homeland security) and military-led (homeland defence) arenas. On the civilian side it at first resisted significant institutional change, choosing instead to set up an Office of Homeland Security within the White House to coordinate America's homeland security efforts. Under congressional pressure, the administration eventually consented to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in March 2003 to bring together many ofthe dozens of agencies involved in some aspect of homeland security in the United States, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Coast Guard, the Secret Service, Customs and Border Patrol and the Transportation Security Administration, which had been created after 9 /11 to ensure the security of America's airports, railways, and subways.Since that time, Homeland Security has taken initiatives in all ofthe sea, land, and air dimensions of homeland security. A significant portion of its effort has been in the area of port security, with the primary concern being that a weapon of mass destruction could be smuggled into the United States in one ofthe thousands of containers unloaded on US docks each day. Under the container security initiative, ships leaving for the United States must transmit their manifest to the US destination port before leaving the foreign port. Once they arrive on US soil, close to 100 percent of all containers are scanned for radiation, up dramatically from a small percentage just a few years ago. Initiatives pertaining to the land dimension of homeland security include the smart border accord negotiated between Canada and the United States soon after the 9 /11 attacks to ensure the continued smooth flow of trade, and the follow-on security and prosperity partnership among Canada, the United States, and Mexico, signed in 2005. Beyond these initiatives, DHS has deployed numerous unmanned aerial vehicles to patrol both borders, especially the southern one, and dramatically increased the number of border patrol agents. …

Review: Replacing France: The Origins of American Intervention in Vietnam, by Kathryn C. Statler

Review: <i>Replacing France: The Origins of American Intervention in Vietnam</i>, by Kathryn C. Statler

John Spargo and American Socialism

AbstractMarkku Ruotsila's impressive new biography of John Spargo is an incisive assessment of one of the earliest architects of neoconservatism. Spargo, a British socialist who spent most of his life in the United States, had moved gradually to the right of the socialist movement, advocating a gradualist and anti-revolutionary interpretation of Marxism. Having defended the American intervention in WWI, he was an early and avid critic of the Bolshevik Revolution. It was Spargo who composed the Colby Note that formalised the Wilson administration's anti-communist doctrine, and engaged in a political alliance with Benito Mussolini which he maintained through Italy's Fascist years on account of Mussolini's intransigent anti-communism. A harsh critic of the Roosevelt administration's 'New Deal' and its recognition of the USSR, he moved to the hard right in his domestic politics, supporting the Dies Commission and McCarthy, and later supporting first Richard Nixon then Barry Goldwater in the 1964 elections. This review examines Spargo's journey to the right in the light, not only of the peculiar Hyndmanite Marxism into which he was initially inducted and the reformist socialism to which he later graduated, but also of his social Darwinism, his support for colonialism, and his perceptions of the global racial order. I argue that Ruotsila, while providing an unprecedented glimpse into a neglected prehistory of neoconservatism, is mistaken to see Spargo's transition as a logical and linear progression in which he successfully preserved the core of his 'Social Gospel' even as he became a Republican activist. He also understates, I will maintain, the role of Spargo's racial concerns in the fervent anti-communism that he espoused after 1917.

Beyond the Cold War: Approaching American Intervention in Vietnam

Why did U.S. policymakers decide to intervene in Vietnam in the 1960s? Until quite recently, this central question surrounding the American war in Vietnam appeared to have been answered: “The Cold War made them do it.” As George C. Herring argued in his influential America's Longest War, “The United States intervened to block the apparent march of a Soviet-dominated communism across Asia … and eventually made Vietnam a test of its determination to uphold world order.” U.S policy toward Vietnam, Herring wrote, was the logical “outgrowth of a world view and a policy, the policy of containment, which Americans in and out of government accepted without question for more than two decades.”1 Given the apparent hegemony and ubiquity of the Cold War lens, and the incremental but foundational American decisions of the 1950s to support the French war against the Vietnamese Communists and in its aftermath to create a non-Communist South Vietnamese state, the decisions of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson to escalate the war in the 1960s came to be seen by many historians of the American war as an almost inescapable, if fundamentally flawed, outcome.

Whose Freedom at Midnight? Machinations towards Guyana's Independence, May 1966

This article explores the tactics and rhetoric of Cheddi Jagan of the People's Progressive Party and Forbes Burnham of the People's National Congress in the negotiations and events leading to the independence of Guyana. It looks at the role of the colonial government and at President Kennedy, the CIA and American intervention. Burnham out-manoeuvred his rival to win the ‘prize’ of independence. Guyana remains a poor and racially polarized country.

:Replacing France: The Origins of American Intervention in Vietnam

:Replacing France: The Origins of American Intervention in Vietnam

Review: Replacing France: The Origins of American Intervention in Vietnam, by Kathryn Statler

Review: <i>Replacing France: The Origins of American Intervention in Vietnam</i>, by Kathryn Statler

Childhood's Imperial Imagination: Edward Stratemeyer's Fiction Factory and the Valorization of American Empire

Numerous studies have appeared in recent years that deal with the reasons and rationalizations that accompanied America's overseas acquisitions in 1898. This article uses juvenile series fiction to examine how the nation's youth—boys in particular—became targets of imperial boosterism. In the pages of adventure novels set against the backdrop of American interventions in the Caribbean and the Philippines, Edward Stratemeyer, the most successful author and publisher of youth series fiction, and other less well-known juvenile fiction producers offered sensationalistic dramas that advocated a racialist, expansionistic foreign policy. Stratemeyer and others offered American boys an imaginative space as participants in and future stewards of national triumph. Young readers, the article argues further, became active participants in their own politicization. An examination of the voluminous fan mail sent to series fiction authors by their juvenile admirers reveals boys' willingness, even eagerness, to participate in the ascendancy of the United States.

Militarism, Realism, Just War, or Nonviolence? Critical Geopolitics and the Problem of Normativity

Despite illuminating multiple modalities by which armed conflict is discursively justified, critical geopolitics can be criticised for providing a weak normative engagement with the social institution and practices of warfare. This has limited the impact of this school of thought outside of geography and critical security studies at a time when the ethics of military intervention have been prominent in public debate. This article explores the moral discourse of critical geopolitics through an examination of Gerard Toal's writings on Iraq and Bosnia. This scholarship is reviewed in the light of Coates's typology of major traditions of moral reflection on war – militarism, realism, just war theory, and pacifism/nonviolence. This analysis interrogates Toal's narratives, in which American military intervention was advocated in the Former Yugoslavia and opposed in Iraq. This suggests that rather than a thoroughgoing commitment to pacifism/nonviolence, or a blanket cynicism about American foreign policy, Toal's thinking includes an underlying attachment to some form of just war reasoning. However, its implicit and partial appropriation leads to a certain incoherence and selectivity that calls for further reflection. This presents a challenge to critical geopolitics. If it chooses to engage more explicitly with just war theory, its insights into identity and militarism could in turn inform a reworking of aspects of the theory, thereby facilitating critical geopolitics' engagement with wider public anti-militaristic modes of discourse. However, as this risks blunting the political potential of the project and repeating the mistakes of twentieth-century geopolitical thought, the paper concludes with a call for a wholehearted commitment to nonviolence.

The Taiwan Strait and the Future of China's No-First-Use Nuclear Policy

This article examines whether China may modify its no-first-use nuclear policy in the future. It suggests that due to the ascendance of Taiwan as the central security challenge for China and its inability to use conventional deterrence to prevent American military intervention in the Taiwan Strait, there are increasing Chinese discussions on the role of nuclear deterrence in this context. This article suggests that for political and strategic reasons China is unlikely to formally renounce the no-first-use policy. However, this does not rule out the possibility of China threatening first use of nuclear weapons when a real crisis in the strait makes American military intervention inevitable or imminent. Indeed, recent evidence suggests that some of China's nuclear experts are promoting a flexible approach to the no-first-use Policy. Thus, the article suggests the U.S. must prepare for the contingency of Chinese nuclear deterrence in the Taiwan Strait and examine how this scenario may impact American security strategies in the Pacific.

Replacing France: the origins of American intervention in Vietnam

Replacing France: the origins of American intervention in Vietnam

Primary prevention of coronary disease. Observations on the results of an American intervention study

Drug Prescribing for Patients with Chronic Kidney Disease in General Practice: a Cross-Sectional Study

Left Against Rights: A Review of Douzinas, Human Rights and Empire

Costas Douzinas has written a book that has something to infuriate just about everyone - human rights activists, neo-cons, liberals, cosmopolitans, anti-globalizationists, international lawyers, proponents of NATO's intervention in Kosovo, supporters of the American intervention in Iraq, and everyone else in between. I mean that as high praise. In 2000, the author published a book declaring the end of human rights which, not surprisingly, stirred up considerable controversy among the ranks of human rights advocates. One went so far as to call it repugnant. Douzinas neither adopts a pragmatic limitation on rights nor makes the type of simplistic attacks on rights associated with the American Critical Legal Studies movement of the 1980's. To the contrary, Douzinas passionately desires rights. He believes, however, that human-rights talk, as it has developed, is itself part of the problem. Being both intellectually vacuous and philosophically incoherent, it serves as a tool for rationalizing the exercise of power. Consequently, Douzinas is trying to save rights from human rights. This is an impassioned but rigorous philosophical exploration of what rights might mean in a post-modern, post-9/11 world.

Vietnamese Legal Reform: The Discourses of Aid?

In 2006, Pip Nicholson attended a conference in Seattle convened by the Universities of Washington and Umea together with the Illinois Urbana-Champaign College of Law. In the course of discussion she perceived divergent bases invoked to legitimate legal development initiatives in developing or transitional economies. More particularly, she noted that from parts of Europe public international law is used as a framework to morally inform and legitimate international legal aid. Those speaking on or about American and multilateral donor interventions identified sustainable economic 'development' as the legitimating mantra in the area of law and its development (either implicitly or explicitly). This remained the case even though 'sustainable economic development' is now often linked to or discussed using the language of good governance and rule of law. As a result two issues emerged, at least for the authors. The first was the hoary and enduring issue of the extent to which the 1960s law and development movement has been replaced or continues as the rationalisation for aid. This issue has been taken up at quite some length in the literature. David Trubek explores this issue when he argues that we are now in a 'Third in Law and Development' which he characterises as containing:a mix of very different ideas for development policy. These include the idea that markets can fail and compensatory intervention is necessary; as well as the idea that 'development' means more than economic growth and must be redefined to include 'human freedom'. As Trubek notes later in his chapter, 'despite rhetorical change the development assistance world still places primary faith in markets.' More particularly, this is acted out through development agency policies that largely retain the universal solution of 'market fundamentalism and market integration'. Trubek puts to rest the notion of a static law and development movement locked within the 1960s tradition. He thereby answers this first question.The contours of the third law and development Moment are fluid, but as Trubek notes they retain a privileged space for aid for markets. The question this paper then asks is whether the current law and development Moment, as defined by Trubek, captures all aid activity. Alternatively, are there deviants? Put another way, are there donor-generated legitimations for aid that do not privilege markets? Trubek offers a paradigm to which we can return. After analysing the respective aid agendas of Australia and Sweden comparatively, the issues of a taxonomy of aid in the twenty-first century can be revisited. At a greater level of specificity, this paper asks to what extent different legitimations for bilateral legal aid emanate out of parts of Europe and other parts of the globe (such as America or Australia). This is an important and relatively unexplored question. Its significance lies in the fact that if indeed bilateral aid is, even in part, motivated and activated by different aims, strategies and implementational models this contributes to the debate about whether we are in a law and development paradigm alone or whether other approaches to aid exist, at least with respect to bilateral aid. Discerning what might be used to legitimate aid and how it may be rationalised may also have implications for those seeking to look to the comparative aid experience. For example, if the objectives and domestic policy agendas differ between aid agencies, then 'inter-aid borrowing' (borrowing between aid agencies) needs to be undertaken with that information to hand. We argue that there are indeed apparent differences between how Swedish and Australian aid is rationalised. This in turn reflects at least partially divergent objectives for international aid in the legal sector. However, the differences are at their most explicit in aid policy documentation and project documents generated for the donors' domestic audience. During implementation, arguably, the differences soften as each agency steers a practical course in negotiating aid commitments with the recipient countries and delivery. Therefore, through an analysis of the discourses of aid in each country we offer a preliminary reading of the many ways in which aid is legitimated and articulated by these two donors in the legal sector in Vietnam, noting how the legitimations vary.

Amerykańska interwencja w obronie Dien Bien Phu w 1954 roku. Próba nowego spojrzenia

Amerykańska interwencja w obronie Dien Bien Phu w 1954 roku. Próba nowego spojrzenia

Replacing France: The Origins of American Intervention in Vietnam (review)

Replacing France: The Origins of American Intervention in Vietnam (review)

Representativeness and Humanitarian Intervention

Humanitarian intervention involves military action by a state, coalition of states, or multinational organization with the primary purpose of preventing, reducing, or halting a mass violation of basic human rights. It is widely held that humanitarian intervention needs to meet certain criteria in order to be morally justifiable. Most recent discussions of humanitarian intervention focus on the same few criteria, criteria derived from traditional Just War Theory (primarily the rules of jus ad bellum). These include the following. (1) The number of violations of basic human rights is large enough to justify humanitarian intervention. (2) There is a reasonable prospect of successfully tackling the humanitarian crisis. (3) The use of force is the last resort. (4) The intervener is a legitimate authority or has been authorized by a legitimate authority (which is typically taken to mean the United Nations Security Council). (5) The intervener has the right intent. (6) The intervener uses means to conduct the war that are consistent with its humanitarian aim. Much time and effort has been spent debating which of these criteria are morally important, why they are important, and what exactly they require. The preoccupation with Just War criteria has meant that two other factors in the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention have been, to some extent, overlooked. These two factors are more concerned with the views of those affected by intervention than their Just War counterparts, yet both significantly affect the legitimacy of an intervener. The first I shall describe as an intervener’s “internal representativeness.” This depends on whether an intervener’s decision making on the proposed intervention reflects the opinions of its citizens. For instance, the internal representativeness of the 1992 American intervention in Somalia turned on whether America represented the opinions of Americans. The second is what I shall describe as an intervener’s “external representativeness.” This depends on whether an intervener’s decision making on the proposed intervention reflects the opinions of those individuals in the political community that is subject to the intervention. To use the same example, the external representativeness of the 1992 American intervention in Somalia turned on whether America represented the opinions of Somalis. In this article, I make the case for the moral importance of these two factors that have been neglected in the literature to a certain extent. That is, I argue that an intervener’s legitimacy depends on whether it is representative of the opinions

Power or Plenty? Economic Interests, Security Concerns, and American Intervention

This paper evaluates the effect of economic interests and security concerns on American intervention in international conflict. Generalizations about the relative importance of these considerations have played an important role in the historiography of American foreign relations. Although statistical analysis is well suited for evaluating such generalizations, quantitative researchers have devoted relatively little attention to the issue. Existing large-n research has generally found that security concerns matter more, but has not considered how the economic and security concerns thought to affect intervention might also influence each other. These subsidiary relationships complicate efforts to assess the relative importance of these two influences on intervention. Evidence concerning intervention in international crises and civil wars indicates that, while alliance commitments and rival behavior have a greater immediate impact on American intervention, exports have an important indirect effect by shaping alliance commitments in the long run.

Power or Plenty? Economic Interests, Security Concerns, and American Intervention

This paper evaluates the effect of economic interests and security concerns on American intervention in civil and international conflict. Generalizations about the relative importance of these considerations have played critical role in the historiography of American foreign relations. Although statistical analysis is well suited for evaluating such generalizations, quantitative researchers have devoted relatively little attention to the issue. Existing large-n research has generally found that security concerns matter more, but has not considered how the economic and security concerns thought to affect intervention might also influence each other. These subsidiary relationships complicate efforts to assess the relative importance of these two influences on intervention. Evidence concerning intervention in international crises and civil wars indicates that, while alliance commitments and rival behavior have a greater immediate impact on American intervention, exports have an important indirect effect by shaping alliance commitments in the long run.