The Right to Intervene

Amid the soft fog of irresolution that settled on the Kennedy Administration after the Cuba disaster, some vague and scattered signs of clearing were visible last week. "We're on the brink of a lot of things now," said a high-up White House aide. At a vacation retreat in Palm Beach, President Kennedy pondered a speech he plans to make within a few weeks calling for added defense expenditures and for a deeper spirit of sacrifice among the people. Vice President Lyndon Johnson sped out to faraway Saigon to deliver to President Ngo Dinh Diem a top-secret letter containing Kennedy's offer to aid South Viet Nam with new infusions of money and advisers in its struggle against Communist subversion and guerrilla warfare (see following story).

White House insiders reported that the Administration would "almost certainly" send U.S. troops to endangered Thailand in the near future, and that if the Geneva peace conference on Laos breaks down, as it well may, the Administration may intervene before the Communist Pathet Lao guerrillas can take over the whole country. At the meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Oslo, Secretary of State Dean Rusk reaffirmed the U.S.'s pledge that it will insist "with all means possible" upon continued access to West Berlin. In a speech to a convention of the National Association of Broadcasters, President Kennedy said that in Cuba "the story is not yet finally ended." White House aides explained that the President was determined, by political and economic isolation of Fidel Castro, to topple or enfeeble him--but he was setting no deadline.

Revolt Against Tyranny. These intimations of action, plus intensified national concern about the cold war and continuing reverberations of the Cuba disaster, combined to stir intense new interest in a long-debated issue of international law and international morality: the rights and wrongs of "intervention." Heard again, after a spell of hibernation, was the view that intervention in all cases is wrong on principle--a dangerous doctrine that could weaken the West in its struggle against Communism. Floating around the U.S. last week were "open letters" signed by 250 faculty members from 40-odd U.S. colleges and universities, ranging from Harvard to Stanford, urging President Kennedy to keep hands off Cuba as a matter of noninterventionist principle.

Far from being an ancient principle of the law of nations, the doctrine of nonintervention emerged during the century as the self-interested claim of small nations to immunity from great-power intrusions. In the U.S., adherence to nonintervention was fortified by the nation's inclination to keep out of foreign entanglements. Wrote Secretary of State William H. Seward in 1863, upon declining an invitation to join Britain, France and Austria in aiding the Poles, who had revolted against Russian tyranny: "The American people must be content to recommend the cause of human progress by the wisdom with which they should exercise the powers of self-government, forbearing at all times, and in every way, from foreign alliances, intervention and interference."

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."

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