Justifying the unjustifiable: why Cold War American interventionism always had a strong ethical dimension

Papageorgiou, Agis (2024) Justifying the unjustifiable: why Cold War American interventionism always had a strong ethical dimension. St Antony's International Review. pp. 150-173. ISSN 1746-451X

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Abstract

This article challenges the assumption that Cold War American interventionism has been inherently immoral. To do so, it explores the marriage between American missionary exceptionalism and the necessities of realist foreign policymaking, to argue that we can identify the moral dimensions of American interventionism not in deontological, but in consequentialist terms. This article introduces its own theoretical framework to grasp the inherent ethical side of Cold War US foreign policymaking, through which it explores the influence of American Exceptionalism in the conceptualization of American foreign policy in the context of the Cold War – and superpower competition with the Soviet Union, and world communism more broadly. The fundamental principle that this article proposes is that Cold War American administrations operated with a consequentialist mindset, in which containing and defeating communism was not only a strategic and geopolitical interest in realist terms, but also a moral imperative, in existential ones. This only means that the injustices committed in interventions such as in Chile or in Vietnam, were otherwise considered not only as strategically indispensable, but also as the right thing to do because of the wider moral purpose that they served.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/stair/stair...
Additional Information:	© 2024 St. Antony's International Review
Divisions:	International History
Date Deposited:	14 Oct 2025 11:00
Last Modified:	22 Oct 2025 09:45
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/129794

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