Intervention

Intervention is a key concept for understanding global dynamics because of its presumed connection to international security. As the lone superpower the United States through military economics political or diplomatic means is largely responsible for structuring intervention choicesissues debates actions and meansin the world community. Feste explores the implications of U.S. intervention in the unipolar framework by examining intervention policies success and failure in recent cases (the Gulf War Panama Haiti Somalia Rwanda Bosnia Kosovo and Afghanistan) and learning experience outlined in alternative foreign policy doctrines. The U.S. intervention record during this period shows great variety in outcomes not a patterned design nor a grand strategy. Most recent crises she asserts did not threaten world peace.Post-Cold War U.S. intervention experience is compared with historical American involvement to understand when where why and how often military contingents were sent abroad throughout the 20th century alongside a timeline of intervention opportunitiesdefined as domestic and civil uprising in countries throughout the worldsince the end of World War II. Among her conclusions: The United States has intervened for a variety of reasonsoil terrorism humanitarian assistancebut one factor bad leadership in the target state stands out. The United States increasingly though not always has turned to a multilateral strategy for interventionseeking UN support participating in multinational peacekeeping operations. The variety of intrastate crises and intervention responses coupled with superpower global obligations and the unipolar world structure means intervention will continue as a signficant defining feature of international politics in the future.