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During the early decades of the 20th century, the U.S. swung to the opposite extreme in its own Caribbean backyard, intervening in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Nicaragua. Paradoxically, these interventions strengthened the principle of nonintervention. After Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed the Good Neighbor policy, Latin American nations persuaded the U.S. to sign ever-stronger pledges of nonintervention. The Charter of the Organization of American States, drafted at Bogota in 1948, declares that "no State or group of States has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatsoever, in the internal or external affairs of any other State."
The Cause of Liberty. So sweeping and unconditional a ban on intervention, whether applied to Latin America or to any other region of the globe, fails to fit the realities of international life.
In the complex of relationships among the nations of the world, interventions in both gross and subtle forms go on all the time: when the U.S. assists another nation, either militarily or economically, that aid constitutes a form of intervention. Carried to its trembly philosophical conclusion, the principle of nonintervention implies total isolation. Even in the narrower sense, as a forcible application of national power, intervention is justified, like other uses of violence, when the cause is just and the means are commensurate with the end.
With nations as with men, justice, honor and the right of self-defense sometimes not only permit the use of force, but require it.
History records interventions that aided the cause of liberty—the U.S. intervention in Greece in the late 1940s, for example, when a U.S. military mission under General James Van Fleet furnished training and planning that enabled the loyalists to prevail in the civil war against Communist guerrillas. History also records instances where hindsight saw nonintervention to have been wrong-headed and wrong-hearted—the West's paralysis when Hitler seized Austria, the U.S.'s failure to intervene forcefully enough in China after World War II. Last week, with the Geneva conference on Laos getting started (see THE WORLD), British and French diplomats conceded that it would have been wiser for the West to intervene in Laos a month before so as to give itself a sturdier bargaining position.
Implacable Challenge. The nonintervention doctrine is especially unsuited to the world of the 1960s. The West is faced with the implacable challenge of Communism, which incessantly practices intervention of many kinds as an instrument of gradual world domination. To combat Communist interventions, the West must be ready and willing to intervene. Those who would commit the U.S. to nonintervention in the midst of the struggle against Communism might well ponder some lines that Philosopher John Stuart Mill, author of the famous tract On Liberty, wrote more than a hundred years ago: "The doctrine of nonintervention, to be a legitimate principle of morality, must be accepted by all governments. The despots must consent to be bound by it as well as the free States. Unless they do, the profession of it by free countries comes but to this miserable issue—that the wrong side may help the wrong, but the right must not help the right."