From the early stirrings of modern international law in the mid-1700s, there has been a norm of military non-intervention in others' affairs -- a kind of real-world version of Star Trek's Prime Directive -- but it has been routinely violated. Beginning with Emerich de Vattel's Law of Nations (1758), continuing with John Stuart Mill's "A Few Words About Non-Intervention" (1859), and on to John Vincent's Non-Intervention and International Order (1974), a steady stream of philosophers, scholars, and statesmen have affirmed the right of nations to determine their own fates without foreign militaries coming in to settle their hash. Still, this great weight of logical argument has been overturned again and again by nations keen to intervene and spread their influence, control natural resources, or, possibly more nobly, to "improve" other peoples' lives. As the late Hedley Bull observed back in the 1980s: "[T]he gap between the rule of non-intervention and the facts of intervention [is] now so vast that the former has become a mockery."
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In the decades since Professor Bull made his assessment, the United States has been one of the world's leading practitioners of intervention, often prompted by a growing willingness to use force to spread democracy. Even before George W. Bush's military misadventures in the Middle East, Bill Clinton had ratcheted up an aid mission in Somalia into an effort to tip the scales in an ongoing civil war, an intervention that ended badly on the chaotic streets of Mogadishu in 1993. The next year he ordered an invasion of Haiti -- a threat that was good enough on its own to send dictator Raoul Cedras running. Clinton also intervened twice in the Balkans, largely on humanitarian grounds -- both times only with air power, even in that pre-drone era. When it came to Rwanda, though, where nearly a million innocents were hacked to death in a few months, Clinton demurred -- an inaction that he notes in his memoirs is "his greatest regret."
Barack Obama has taken up the cudgels of intervention as well, but with much more subtlety than his immediate predecessors. In Libya, for example, he both cultivated allied participation and limited the American role to combat support. Same with Mali. Even his drone attacks on the sovereign territory of other nations have come at a slow pace -- only a few dozen have been launched this year -- and with much stealth. Now he calls for the removal of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, but he has so far limited the notion of intervening to stepped-up support for "good rebels." This is something like the position Ronald Reagan took with regard to arming the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s -- but that action is more properly labeled a "counter-intervention," as there were over 100,000 Russian soldiers occupying Afghanistan at the time. Obama's biggest test will come over Iran, where he could argue that self-defense compels intervention to prevent nuclear weapons proliferation.
The United States has hardly been alone in "making a mockery" of the norm on non-intervention. Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union provided considerable support for wars of national liberation -- often with the assistance of Cuban soldiers, who punched way above their weight on the world stage. These were the sorts of wars that, ironically, the Russians are now opposing by helping to prop up Assad in Syria. After the collapse of the USSR, Russian troops intervened in several of its successor states also, in the so-called "near abroad." But Moscow has seemingly tempered its appetite for intervention and now serves as a leading voice in the United Nations, along with China, against such ventures -- though, assistance to Bashar aside, Russian forces also remain in Abkhazia against the wishes of the Georgian government.
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