Undergraduate Thesis Or Project
 

The Puzzle of Humanitarian Intervention: Why the US militarily intervenes in some failed or fragile nation states and abstains from others

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  • Humanitarian intervention by the United States has increased since the end of the Cold War. This thesis examines the cases of Somalia, Rwanda, Libya and Syria as to explore why the US chooses to offer various amounts of aid to some failed or fragile nation states and not others. Rwanda offers an example of avoiding intervention by the US, while Somalia represents the largest effort of the four cases, with Libya and Syria in between the two. This analysis will first examine the grand strategies that inform and explain the actions of US foreign policy-makers in the post-Cold-War era. It will then examine the role of four key explanatory factors: national interests, international support, public opinion, and the media influence. This thesis argues that, with respect to each of the four case studies: 1) the United States will not engage in humanitarian intervention unless its national interests are directly affected; 2) in the absence of national interests, the US cannot sustain support for extended commitments because of the human and financial costs, 3) the results of previous conflicts have the effect of preventing future interventions; and 4) democratic nation-building has become the strategic and moral standard by which the US decides to intervene in failed or fragile states. Each of these influential factors are invariably linked to one another and to an often-evolving notion of how broadly the idea of “US national interests” is to be defined by policymakers.
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