Comparative assessment of offensive and defensive realism in U.S. military interventions in Grenada, Panama, and Haiti

Abstract

Three U.S. military interventions in Grenada (1983), Panama (1989), and Haiti (1994) span the structural transition from late bipolarity to established unipolarity, providing controlled variation in systemic context against which the security-maximising disposition of offensive realism and the restraint-oriented posture of defensive realism can be assessed comparatively. Existing scholarship has located causal drivers at the unit level or in shifting normative beliefs. No prior study has assessed the two schools against the now-declassified deliberative record of all three. A comparative case study structured by Most Different Systems Design supplies the research design, with cases varying on rival presence, polarity, and unit-level background while sharing the outcome of U.S. military intervention to remove a government. Twenty-two declassified National Security Council files from the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton presidential libraries constitute the empirical basis, coded through an indicator framework operationalising the theoretical expectations of each school. Each case returns the same classification. Grenada, Panama, and Haiti all register as offensive-realist dominant, with the security-maximising orientation persisting through the transition itself. Polarity shapes the form this orientation takes, moving from rival denial at Grenada through sphere enforcement at Panama to self-referential credibility maintenance at Haiti, yet does not determine whether it prevails. Defensive content appears in every case but is consistently subordinated by a mechanism that narrows progressively as external constraints dissolve. Absence of systemic constraint in unconstrained unipolarity generated internal pressure toward intervention.