Humanitarian Intervention

Introduction- I would say that the perspective linking US strategic and economic interests to so-called ‘humanitarian interventions’ is a correct one. Following the Cold War, the US still maintained its designs for global hegemony. It had economic interests in many regions of the globe. The health of these interests mainly depended on accessibility and security for US investment in resource-rich areas. More importantly, in order to preserve the existence of NATO(which the US counted on in order to perpetuate its global aims), some sort of post-war function was necessary. There were also the interests of the military-industrial complex to consider. Basically, as the US saw the great convenience that was the Soviet Union crumbling, it began scrambling to create functions and purposes for all the institutions that had thrived during the Cold War. To find these functions and purposes in the face of a world that was largely already subjugated to the established hegemony was no small task. For instance, Europe no longer required the ‘security blanket’ the US had formerly provided to it to shield it from the ‘threat’ of the Soviet Union. In 1991, the European Union resolved to create a Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) as part of the Maastricht Treaty. This laid the groundwork for the creation of Eurocorps, consisting of 50,000 troops from 5 countries. This force remained purely symbolic since it consisted of the same national troops that were formally committed to NATO. However, it did set in motion the process whereby the EU powers could start to move towards a situation where they could deploy troops as a regional branch of NATO, without having to utilise the entire machinery of the broad NATO alliance. Although the CFSP was initially dominated by the French and Germans, it took an important step forward in 1998 with the signing of an agreement in St. Malo. London and Paris declared that the EU "must have the capacity for autonomous action,