America's Quandary: To Intervene or Not to Intervene?

Christopher A. Preble

Security,

As hard as it may be for many Americans to appreciate, since our military seems to be always at war, most other countries generally avoid intervening in other country’s affairs.

I’m grateful to my Cato colleague Brad Stapleton for organizing a forum with Michael W. Doyle, discussing his new book The Question of Intervention: John Stuart Mill & the Responsibility to Protect. I’m doubly grateful to Brad for asking me to comment, not because I’m short on things to do, but because I might not have read the book otherwise. I’ve spent the last few days pondering why Mill’s essay, “A Few Words on Non-Intervention,” published in 1859, is still relevant today.

Not all of it, mind you. Mill’s defense of imperialism was consistent with nineteenth century attitudes, but would offend modern readers (with a few notable exceptions). But Doyle, the Director of the Columbia Global Policy Initiative and the Harold Brown Professor of International Affairs, Law, and Political Science at Columbia University, reminds us why Mill’s presumption of nonintervention among civilized nations was, and is, correct.

As hard as it may be for many Americans to appreciate, since our military seems to be always at war, most other countries generally avoid intervening in other countries’ affairs. “Nonintervention is the norm of modern international law, international ethics, and the just war tradition,” Doyle writes, at the beginning of the book, “it can be overridden or disregarded only with good reasons.”