Military Intervention

Risks are an integral part of complex, high-stakes decisions, and decisionmakers are faced with the unavoidable tasks of assessing risks and forming risk preferences. This is true for all decision domains, including financial, environmental, and foreign policy domains, among others. How well decisionmakers deal with risk affects, to a considerable extent, the quality of their decisions. This book provides the most comprehensive analysis available of the elements that influence risk judgments and preferences.

The book has two dimensions: theoretical and comparative-historical. The study of risk-taking behavior has been dominated by the rational choice approach. Instead, the author adopts a socio-cognitive approach involving: a multivariate theory integrating contextual, cognitive, motivational, and personality factors that affect an individual decisionmaker's judgment and preferences; the social interaction and structural effects of the decisionmaking group and its organizational setting; and the role of cultural-societal values and norms that sanction or discourage risk-taking behavior.

The book's theoretical approach is applied and tested in five historical case studies of foreign military interventions. The richly detailed empirical data in the case studies make them, metaphorically speaking, an ideal laboratory for applying a process-tracing approach in studying judgment and decision processes at varying risk levels. The case studies analyzed are: U.S. interventions in Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989 (both low risk); Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968 (moderate risk); U.S. intervention in Vietnam in 1964-68 (high risk); and Israel's intervention in Lebanon in1982-83 (high risk).

This new edition of the Carnegie Endowment bestseller -- selected by Choice as "an outstanding academic book of 1995" -- now also discusses the interventions in Haiti and Bosnia, the 1998 crisis (and earlier skirmishes) with Iraq, and the decision to not intervene to halt apparent genocide in Central Africa. In the core original study, which draws upon twelve cases -- including Somalia, Lebanon, Panama, Grenada, and the Gulf War -- Richard Haass suggests political and military guidelines for potential U.S. military interventions ranging from peacekeeping and humanitarian operations to preventive strikes and all-out warfare.

This study examines the history of superpower intervention in domestic conflicts around the world during the Cold War era. This unique analysis goes beyond a reexamination of dramatic instances of American and Soviet intervention to a combination of aggregate event data methodology and historical case studies. General patterns in the nature of superpower intervention throughout four decades are highlighted and U.S.-Soviet behavior is carefully and consistently compared across the entire period of the Cold War.

"A fascinating account of the interventions written by senior scholars & policymakers who were involved in the decision-making process." International Peacekeeping "Direct, insightful, & well worth reading. This book traces the beginnings of the Somalia crisis to the UN standoff to the inevitable withdrawal. A must-read!" Donald M. Payne Chairman, Congressional Black Caucus; member of the Subcommittee on Africa

It is a near certainty that, in the coming years, U.S. combat forces will deploy to foreign shores to confront guerrilla forces in the defense of new and/or unstable democratic governments that are threatened by armed internal opponents. This likelihood makes it imperative to address assertions that U.S. armed forces are not well prepared to engage in protracted conflict with guerrilla forces. Clearly, U.S. military involvement abroad, especially for extended periods and in ambiguous circumstances, will also have profound implications for U.S. domestic politics. Drawing upon experts from the intelligence, military, and academic communities, this study brings a variety of perspectives to this complex foreign policy issue.

The United Nations Charter in 1945 prohibits all use of force by states except in the event of an armed attack or when authorized by the Security Council. Although the Charter is very hard to amend, its drafters agreed that it should be interpreted flexibly by the UN's principal political institutions and the text has undergone extensive interpretation. This book relates these changes in law and practice to changing public values pertaining to the balance between maintaining peace and promoting justice.