Israel Matzav: The age of humanitarian intervention is over

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

The age of humanitarian intervention is over

Some of you may recall the discussions in March 2011 about a 'new' doctrine of humanitarian intervention called Responsibility to Protect (R2P), which was used to justify NATO intervention in Libya. Michael Ignatieff argues that the current standoff over big power intervention in Syria shows that the doctrine is dead, although one of the causes of that death is the West's unwillingness to stand behind it.

At the end of the Cold War in 1989, we told ourselves history had a libretto—a story about liberty—set to a happy tune. Once regimes like Russia and China allowed market reforms, political reforms would follow, since peoples with economic freedom were bound to demand democracy too. The people have done so repeatedly since 1989 and both regimes have shut them down.

Our idea that history had a libretto of freedom led the West to misread Russia and China’s strategic intentions. We brushed aside signs that they were refusing to embrace our view of the world. Russia resisted NATO expansion to its border and refused to give the alliance a green light over Kosovo, but we thought their need for foreign capital would soften their intransigence over time. Chinese leaders dug in when asked to devalue their currency and they continued to imprison dissidents. But we assumed they would cooperate with us on other issues because they sought integration into the global economy. For too long we believed they were behind us on the march to freedom but were heading in the same direction.

Syria marks the end of these illusions and the post-Cold War period that went with them. A vast swathe of the globe, from the Russian border to the Pacific, including the tributary states of the Russian near-abroad, is now in the hands of venal, ruthless, deeply corrupt, single-party elites. These elites—Russian and Chinese—will draw closer together, as they understand that they have made the same strategic choice. Both are using capitalism to consolidate political despotism. They both see the world as a battle between elites like themselves with unlimited power and Western elites whose power is limited by democratic liberty.

When they look at the world this way, the Russian and Chinese regimes mock our view of history. They believe history is on their side. The economic crisis now entering its fifth year confirms their view that democracies are divided, incompetent, venal, hypocritical, and above all, weak. As Putin himself said in a speech in Moscow on July 9, our economic malaise is “weakening the dominant role of the so-called historical West.” Where the US and the West intervene, as in Iraq or Afghanistan, and try to impose what Putin called “missile-bomb diplomacy” we do not stay the course, and where we fail to back words with actions, as in Syria, we confirm the Russian and Chinese instinct that we are weak.

Syria tells us that the era of humanitarian intervention, “responsibility to protect,” is over, because it assumed a historical progression that has turned out to be false. The idea that the “international community” should shoulder together the responsibility to protect people from murderous regimes made sense only on the assumption that we all wanted people to live in tolerably decent ones. Neither Russia nor China takes this view. They are perfectly content with a world of Mugabes and Assads and they suspect, with more than just cynicism, that the West, for all its protestations, is too. For we are tired and worried about our economies back home and responsibility for other people’s freedom has turned out to be a costly and dirty business.

Read the whole thing.

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, China, Libyan regime change, responsibility to protect, Russia, Syrian uprising, United States