JSPES, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Fall 2001 )
pp. 625-638

The Ethos of Global Intervention

Dwight D. Murphey

Despite the presence in the world of a great many particularist movements that would split societies into smaller units, there is also a powerful drive toward consolidation, powered primarily by an international leadership that has adopted an ethos of global meliorism. In effect, the philosophy is that "everyone's business is our business." Important voices in the United States have expressed a desire for some constraints, but even these have called for a wide scope of world intervention. All of this is very much at odds with the traditional American foreign policy that prevailed until 1898. Now that the Cold War is over, the author says, it is time for a serious reexamination of the premises underlying both the new and the tradition policies.