ABSTRACT
For more than forty years, the United States had a fairly simple standard by which to judge the advisability of intervention: the need to contain the Soviet Union. That simple standard did not eliminate all controversy over specific cases of intervention. Nationalists like Ronald Reagan argued that the Soviet Union and communism were responsible for all armed insurrections in the world and thereby justified U.S. intervention in places like Nicaragua, while his restrained realist opponents insisted that such instances fell outside the containment doctrine because they posed no real threat to the world balance of power. But only a few revisionists, who believed that the United States had always intervened against economic rather than strategic threats, argued that the United States should not contain the Soviet Union when the challenge to the balance of power was real and serious. Thus, for most Americans, the debate over U.S. interventionism during the Cold War involved specific details rather than basic principles.
