American Neutraility in the 20th Century

This work began for the author with a paper written in the spring of 1982 while as a student at the College of Command and Staff at the Naval War College. The author's professional and personal interest in the Law of War and Neutrality were nurtured throughout his studies and grew during his master's and doctoral work at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. This chronology demonstrates that the United States found the requirements of strict neutrality less than useful for fulfilling its policy imperatives throughout the 20th century. The reasons for this are varied, but all involve departures from strict impartiality required of neutrals. The common thread running through them is that global interests make impartiality difficult to maintain and often counterproductive. It also becomes clear that this will continue for the future. Although the incidents explored stretch back over 100 years, history is not its focus. Incidents are cited only to show their relationship to the pattern of US behavior; historical details are not elaborated. Further, incidents are looked at in the context for what was known at the time, without the benefit of hindsight. The loss of the battleship MAINE, for example, is now believed to have resulted from an accident; at the time it was believed to have been an attack. The detailed behavior of other nations was also not examined except in response to that of the United States, because while this work is about international law, it is for the US naval force and unit commanders who must understand that law. The author's personal knowledge of an involvement in highly sensitive US policy implementation in Central American and Panama in the mid-1980s requires that those examples not be treated. This exclusion does not detract from the product and removes even the question of whether classified material was used in any way in the preparation of this work. Our grandfathers had to make decisions with much less information and, like today, the initial reports were sometimes flawed. In some ways, therefore, the imperfections obvious in the contemporary accounts recorded in newspapers provide a better context than the more thorough and better informed historical accounts. In other places, historians' work is used extensively to document the details of incidents. This is especially true for the period immediately preceding World War II because so many significant examples occurred then. With a focus on identifying a pattern of departures from the strict impartiality of neutrality, this account resists, as much as possible, the temptation to explore other fascinating aspect of the incidents dealt with.