Why does the United States intervene in some regional and civil conflicts and not in others? Why does the United States seem to act solely out of pure geostrategic interests in some instances while humanitarian concerns in other cases? This thesis seeks to shed light on these questions by examining the political dynamics and normative influences on historical and contemporary presidential decisions on military intervention. Drawing on existing scholarship on elite beliefs, I posit that American foreign policy elites coalesce into four separate “advocacy communities” emanating from four separate belief systems about the U.S. role in the international system: (1) selective engagers; (2) liberal humanitarianists; (3) hard-line internationalists; and (4) noninterventionists. I hypothesize that military intervention is a function of the political competition among these advocacy communities and the results of their battles to capture informational and propaganda advantages and frame public perception of regional and civil conflicts. I test this argument by process tracing cases of both intervention and nonintervention from World War II into the post-Cold War era: Dienbienphu, 1954; Lebanon, 1958; Grenada, 1983; Somalia, 1992; and, Bosnia, 1992.
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