An artists rendition of America's justified use of gunboat diplomacy. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Interventionism is as American as Manifest Destiny. We rightfully glorify it in movies, distastefully oppose it in song and happily fund it through the military industrial complex every year with our taxes.
According to Wikipedia, since our glorious nation's founding in 1776, there have been 393 instances of foreign military intervention, with nearly half of those instances occurring since 1950.
After seeing that staggering figure, I wanted to go through our nation's illustrious history and ask: Which American military intervention was the best?
An early contender for this distinction is the Convention of Kanagawa. Commodore Matthew C. Perry was sent to Japan in 1854 to force the country to open its borders after over 200 years of isolation from the outside world.
Perry used gunboat diplomacy to gently convince the Japanese to agree to their demands. This led to a prosperous relationship between the two nations outside of a certain 4-year stretch in the early 1940s.
In 1898, America engaged in the justified Spanish–American War after Spain blew up one of America's naval vessels, the USS Maine.
Of course, everyone knows America would never amplify a false narrative to create a reason to go to war for the sole purpose of imposing our will on another country — that would be absurd.
This short war with Spain resulted in America getting three new shiny colonies to play with: Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.
Highlights of America's incredible diplomacy in the early 1900s include our fighting in the Banana Wars in Central America, the annexation of the Philippines and our effort to bring down the Boxer Rebellion in China.
These were all legitimate and preventative interventions on the part of America and were totally justified conflicts for us to take part in.
After being involved in the tail end of World War I, America’s lust for conflict hit rock bottom because Congress passed Neutrality Acts to avoid future foreign interventionism.
This shameful behavior would thankfully last only 10 years, with America taking the gloves off for the World War sequel and single-handedly putting down Nazi Germany to end the fighting in Europe.
This was followed by a shift in foreign policy with Japan, moving from gunboat diplomacy to “nuclear bomb” diplomacy. This action placed America back atop the global food chain.
America was on a tear after World War II and got involved in every conflict we could find.
This particularly applied in Latin America, where countries had dictators who were not bending a knee to every American demand and policy. In response, America did what any rational country would do and started destabilizing their governments.
Fun fact: The CIA is great at destabilizing foreign governments — and eliminating foreign threats to American security.
My favorite intervention in Latin America during this time period — and a serious contender for the best intervention ever — is Operation Just Cause.
In short, America allowed drugs to continue flowing into the United States due to their relationship with Gen. Noriega. Noriega was a prominent figure in the Panamanian government who helped suppress multiple communist uprisings throughout Latin America during the Cold War. We were fine with Noriega's acceptance of drug money and drug trafficking as long as he wasn't a communist.
When this relationship was exposed and Noriega began to align with the communists, however, America was no longer fine enabling him. So George H.W. Bush declared we would not negotiate with a drug trafficker and successfully baited Panama into declaring war on the U.S.
This resulted in 26,000 American troops flowing into Panama with orders to secure the canal, take down the government and detain General Noriega.
The invasion lasted just over a month, with the bulk of it spent blasting rock music 24 hours a day outside the Apostolic Nunciature — the Catholic Church’s equivalent of an embassy — where Noriega was holed up.
America did not engage in this justified human rights violation with the intent of psychologically damaging the General, rather it was to prevent parabolic microphones from eavesdropping on negotiations.
The operation was aptly named “Operation Just Cause” to preserve the legitimacy of the invasion after the United Nations absurdly claimed that it was a “flagrant violation of international law.” These claims were not true, they were just made because they couldn't handle America's swag.
What followed the Cold War was a based decision from America to declare war on terror. This war on terror lasted over 20 years, highlighted by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Twenty years in Iraq and Afghanistan and the only ones to benefit were big oil and big pharma? I remember when, in 20 years, our nation could crank through dozens of interventions and win most of them.
Today, our government is a bigger fan of plausible deniability than getting its hands dirty and ripping other countries to shreds.
After extensive research to answer my question, Operation Just Cause is in my mind the best intervention.
It will be incredibly hard to top such a stellar invasion, but if we keep feeding money to the military, I'm sure there will come a day when there is another just cause to violate a country's rights.
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