Intervention: Success, failure, and United States national interests

What makes humanitarian intervention succeed? What components of policy lead to success or failure in intrastate intervention? What are the roles of force and national interests? Humanitarian intervention is the employment of state resources into another state for the purpose of halting or preventing violence or averting humanitarian disasters. Although intervention may involve the use of military force, intervention differs from war in that the primary purpose of war is to achieve political goals through the use of violence, whereas the purpose of intervention is to achieve humanitarian goals without the use of violence---except as a last resort. Humanitarian intervention may include military coercion so long as its objectives fulfill humanitarian goals.; The purpose of this dissertation is to determine what factors lead to successful versus unsuccessful interventions---that is, whether an intervention halts the violence or ameliorates the humanitarian crisis. In contrast to previous research on intervention, this study relaxes the predominant assumption that states are unified rational actors and instead ties into existing theories on pluralism, government structure, and the role of the media to explain how the pursuit of short-term policy imperatives can overshadow the development of long-term solutions and prevent intervening states from providing the long-term commitment necessary to achieve success in target states.; This study examines four interventions through the development of an intervention model based upon five dimensions---national interests, environment, organization, unintended consequences, and aftereffects. These five dimensions mirror the dynamics of intervention and influence the outcome of success and failure.; The major conclusion of this research project is as follows. The prominence of vital national interests overshadows all other variables and is the most important factor that determines success or failure in a given intervention. This theory makes two predictions that are further corroborated in the study. (1) The presence of vital national interests in a given intervention will override other detractors from success. And (2) interventions that are not based upon vital national interests are subject to cancellation by the intervening force in the face of minor setbacks.