Follows the American consuls as they begin to become cultural brokers linking Americans to remnants of the great Mediterranean empires as America begins to consider an imperialistic turn in the wake of the Monroe Doctrine.

This and Chapter 3 seek to give an idea of the scope of the current use of interstate use of force. Chapter 2 offers brief descriptions of post-WWII conflicts, region-by-region. It covers the paucity of wars in Africa, Europe and the Americas, many conflicts in the Middle East, including Gulf War 1990, Iraq War 2003, Syrian Civil War, and the wars in Yemen and Afghanistan and Iran nuclear deal 2015 (JCPOA), It further describes conflicts in Asia and the Pacific, India/Pakistan conflicts, India/China clashes.

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the United States was a fledgling power, weaker than many European countries in both economic and military terms. The central government had effective control over only a small area of the continent, and disputes between it and the states were already well entrenched. The country had continental aspirations, but only gradually would it begin moving its border westward. The power imbalance between the United States and Latin America was therefore not yet great, but it would rapidly swing in favour of the U.S. in the first decades of the century. This chapter analyzes the challenges in establishing and maintaining relations between governments in the United States and Latin America and concludes with the post–Civil War period, at which time U.S. economic and military power markedly increased.

Chapter 3 re-examines the “ascent” of the United States within the 19th century’s Eurocentric international order, retracing its special path from a fledgling and vulnerable republic to the status of an exceptional and exceptionalist world power. It focuses on the evolution of American ideas and ideologies in the sphere of international affairs, the rise of distinctive forms of US imperialism and unilateralism, and the emergence of core maxims of US international conduct such as those embodied in the ever more expansively defined Monroe Doctrine and the Open Door Doctrine. It then casts new light on ephemeral aspirations to establish a modern Atlantic order of empires – led by the United States and the British Empire – that were pursued after the Spanish-American war of 1898 and in the era of Theodore Roosevelt.

Chapter 9 looks at the United States, which serves as something of an extra-European mirror in which European practices of intervention are reflected. The first conclusion to draw is that the US government regarded interventions by the Concert of Europe in the internal affairs of sovereign states as a colonial threat to its own national security interests, which led to the formulation in 1823 of the Monroe Doctrine and its paradigm of non-intervention. A fundamental change, however, came when the United States embarked on its own course of colonial expansion and increasingly came to adapt the practice of intervention to its own purposes. The key role here was played by the Caribbean island of Cuba, where a war of independence precipitated a humanitarian crisis. In the context of that crisis, the US government began to invoke European interventions as precedents and examples by which its own military action against Spain might be justified both legally and morally. The United States can thus be seen to have claimed the same right to humanitarian intervention in international politics in order to assert its own role as arbiter of power in the western hemisphere and as such to uphold by force the principles of civilisation and humanity – even against a Christian European state. Set alongside European interventions, the American case vividly shows how closely the idea of humanitarianism was interwoven with colonialism and imperialism.

This chapter turns to the analysis of the practice of justifying force in the ‘semi-peripheries’, i.e., in non-‘European’ States. The purpose is to see whether legal arguments were also developed and whether they differed from the ones brought forth to justify bellicose endeavours in the ‘centre’. It focuses on four case studies: the European intervention during the Greek War of Independence (1827); the French expedition in Lebanon and Syria (1860); the western intervention during the Boxer Revolt in China (1901); the Monroe doctrine and the Roosevelt corollary with special attention to their application in Nicaragua in the early twentieth century (1909–1912). It argues that, although these interventions rarely gave rise to full-blown wars, the justifications brought forward did not substantially differ from the ones used in the ‘centre’. States, in fact, carefully developed legal arguments and evidenced how their actions were meant to redress a previous offence.

In the era of the two world wars, internationally minded American statesmen turned their attention to meeting two objectives. The first was to engage the United States more with the wider world; more particularly to embed the United States within an international system dominated by European states but, with the inclusion of Japan, becoming increasingly pluralistic. The second was to use this new American global consciousness to reform the international system so that it accorded with the standards of civilization and operated along commonly regarded civilized norms. The codification and promotion of international law was one of the key methods of achieving these objectives; not coincidentally, many, if not most, of the key American internationalists of the era were lawyers.