ABSTRACT
The US government has persistently accused Nicaragua of unwarranted intervention in El Salvador, on the ground that Nicaragua has been supporting insurgents fighting against the Salvadoran government. Cases such as the US interventions in El Salvador and Nicaragua and the alleged Nicaraguan intervention in El Salvador raise fundamental questions about the ethics of international intervention. Most accounts agree that intervention involves coercive external interference in the affairs of a population that is organized in the form of a state. Many proposed definitions of intervention have stipulated either that the coercive agent must be a state or that the target of coercion must be a state. The position of international law is among the most stringently antiinterventionist of the major views on the ethics of international intervention. One might attempt to rescue the antipaternalist argument by construing the case in which the state authority acts against its own citizens as simply a case of the state harming itself.
