Foreign Relations: The Johnson Corollary

For a long while after the gunfire has died away in the Dominican Republic, diplomats, lawyers, politicians and professors will be arguing the legality and morality of the U.S. intervention.

The U.S., of course, did not invent intervention—it has been an instrument of nations ever since there have been any. The U.S. has probably used that instrument with greater restraint, and less for the purpose of territorial aggrandizement, than any other major power in human history. Yet upon no fewer than 148 occasions—the latest being in the Dominican Republic—the U.S. has "intervened"...