Non-intervention and the Monroe
Doctrine
BY JOHN BASSETT MOORE, LL.D.
Professor of International Law and Diplomacy, Columbia University
AMONG the rules of conduct prescribed for the United States by the statesmen who formulated its foreign policy, none was conceived to be more fundamental or more distinctively American than that which forbade intervention in the political affairs of other nations. The right of the government to intervene for the protection of its citizens in foreign lands and on the high seas never was doubted; nor was such action withheld in proper cases. But, warned by the spectacle of the great European struggles that had marked the attempts of nations to control one another's political destiny, the statesmen of America, believing that they had a different mission to perform, planted themselves upon the principle of the equality of nations as expounded by Grotius and other masters of international law. This principle was expressed with peculiar felicity and force by Vattel, who declared that nations inherited from nature "the same obligations and rights," that power or weakness could not in this respect produce any difference, and that a "small republic" was "no less a sovereign state than the most powerful kingdom." The same thought was tersely phrased by Chief-Justice Marshall, in his celebrated affirmation: "No principle is more universally acknowledged than the perfect equality of nations. Russia and Geneva have equal rights." And as the Declaration of Independence proclaimed life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to be "unalienable rights" of individual men, so the founders of the American republic ascribed the same rights to men in their aggregate political capacity as independent nations.
While the principle of non-intervention formed an integral part of the political philosophy of American statesmen, its practical importance was profoundly impressed upon them by the narrowness of their escape from being drawn, by the alliance with France, into the vortex of the European conflicts that grew out of the French Revolution. Even before American independence was acknowledged by Great Britain, American statesmen scented the dangers that lurked in a possible implication in European broils. "You are afraid," said Richard Oswald to John Adams, "of being made the tool of the powers of Europe." "Indeed I am," said Adams. "What powers?" inquired Oswald. "All of them," replied Adams; "it is obvious that all the powers of Europe will be continually manœuvring with us to work us into their real or imaginary balances of power. . . . But I think that it ought to be our rule not to meddle." In 1793 the revolutionary government of France, apparently doubting the applicability of the existing alliance with the United States to the situation in Europe, submitted a proposal for "a national agreement, in which two great peoples shall suspend their commercial and political interests and establish a mutual understanding to defend the empire of liberty, wherever it can be embraced." This proposal the American government declined; and its response found practical embodiment in its acts. The reasons for the policy of non-intervention and neutrality, to which the administration of the time so sedulously adhered, were eloquently summed up by Washington in that immortal political legacy, his Farewell Address. "The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations," said Washington, "is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good
