ABSTRACT
As the confrontation between the United States and revolutionary movements has come into sharper focus, the euphemistic rhetoric of American Responsibility (defending freedom and self-determination) has yielded to the starker idiom of realpolitik. The assertion of a police responsibility to prevent violent revolution and insurgency inevitably requires a militarization of a nation’s foreign policy. To be able to characterize the enemy in an insurgent struggle as a giant White Imperialist Power helps to bring nationalists of all classes into the revolutionary coalition. Juan Bosch exaggerated only slightly when he declared that where there were fifty-three communists in the Dominican Republic before the intervention, there were now fifty-three thousand. There are several principal arguments advanced in support of the policy of US intervention in civil wars and insurgencies which purport to rest on broad world-community interests rather than narrow nationalistic considerations.
