POLICE ACTION

The phrase "police action" is not a term of art, or one having any precise legal significance, but simply an expression or euphemism occasionally employed to describe the use of the armed forces of the United States and other nations to resist what is perceived as a violation of international law, a notable example being American use of the armed forces against the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950. (See korean war.) President harry s. truman based his decision to use American forces to defend South Korea on the fact that the North Korean aggression constituted a violation of the united nations charter, as declared in a resolution of the Security Council. (The Soviet Union, which of course treated the North Korean invasion as "self-defense," chose to absent itself from that meeting of the Council and thereby lost the opportunity to veto the resolution.) Subsequently, in 1957, Senator John Bricker and other conservative congressmen who were opposed to American intervention in Korea (not because they had any sympathy for communist imperialism but because they were isolationists) attempted to remove such justifications of presidential use of troops by unsuccessfully proposing that the Constitution be amended to require affirmative action by Congress before a treaty obligation could be implemented. (See state of war; bricker amendment.)

The phrase has occasionally been employed, although not officially, in other situations in which the United States has used its armed forces without a declaration of war or other explicit sanction by Congress, such as President john f. kennedy's 1962 blockade of Cuba. A pejorative variation of it was sometimes employed by opponents of American intervention in vietnam, who contended that the United States should not act as an "international policeman" or "international gendarme." Although it would have been appropriate, it seems to have been used by no one to describe President jimmy carter's unsuccessful attempt, in April 1980, to mount a military raid to free American hostages in Iran.

The characterization has never been officially or generally applied to a declared war.

Joseph W. Bishop, Jr.
(1986)

Bibliography

Sears, Kenneth C. 1956 Bricker-Dirksen Amendment. Hastings Law Journal 8:1–17.