ABSTRACT
The world's leading industrial democracy representing the virtue of procedural justice was found guilty of perhaps the most serious offense under the UN Charter and customary international law by the most authoritative world institution embodying the ideal of rule of law in international relations. "Intervention," according to Hans Morgenthau, "is as ancient and well-established an instrument of foreign policy as are diplomatic pressure, negotiations and war." Beyond the simple morality of compassionate Americans, additional moral constraints have been imposed on US foreign policy, and they are "founded on traditional American principles of justice and propriety." The left-wing political realists and idealists prescribe for the United States the policies of detente, nonintervention, and multilateral diplomacy. The major blind spot in US foreign policy, especially during the Reagan administration, appeared to be the failure to recognize the basic fact. Nicaragua was threatened with subversive intervention by the United States and was theoretically entitled to invoke the right of individual and collective self-defense.
