The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
The [U.S. Role in the World] and/or When is [Intervention] Justified?
Hamurabi
MiamiRegistered User regular
MiamiRegistered User regular
So a recurring topic of discussion in the Middle East Thread these past few weeks has been whether or not intervention in Syria is justified. Of course the specifics of the Syrian situation merits its own discussion, but there's also the broader question of just what the role of the U.S. is in the contemporary international system. During the Cold War, the Kissinger-Kennan logic of when and how to intervene was relatively clear-cut: we intervened to combat Soviet influence to 'contain' communist expansion and to promote Washington Consensus policies of economic neoliberalism and (purportedly, though in reality seldom) liberal democracy. In the post-Cold War international system, the rationale for intervention is more vague and open-ended.
Now, the conversation centers largely on 'humanitarian intervention'. As in, the U.S. can or should intervene in cases of gross violations of human rights. Examples of this argument were Kosovo under Clinton, Iraq under Bush*, and Libya under Obama. The burgeoning consensus in international law on the subject centers on whether or not there is such a thing as a 'responsibility to protect' (R2P) in the international community.
My own general opinion on the matter:
There's a lot more to this, obviously... but I kinda wanna just get the ball rolling before I go to work.
tl;dr: Under what circumstances is a U.S./multilateral intervention justified? As a secondary question, what ought to be the general role of the U.S. in a multipolar international system?
*Yeah yeah, WMDs, al-Qaeda, etc. The secondary argument was made by the administration and neocons, though, that Saddam Hussein was just a Bad Dude and should be deposed for doing Bad Dude Stuff.
Now, the conversation centers largely on 'humanitarian intervention'. As in, the U.S. can or should intervene in cases of gross violations of human rights. Examples of this argument were Kosovo under Clinton, Iraq under Bush*, and Libya under Obama. The burgeoning consensus in international law on the subject centers on whether or not there is such a thing as a 'responsibility to protect' (R2P) in the international community.
My own general opinion on the matter:
I don't have any problems with calling myself an internationalist. The arbitrary lines separating me from Canada or Mexico are in fact arbitrary, imho; I view them in exactly the same way I view lines dividing Florida from Georgia or Alabama. Like we just had this horrific tornado in Oklahoma. It's reflexive and automatic to spend federal money to help the victims, because we're all "Americans." Why is it then so psychologically difficult to extend that same reflexive sympathy to people in Rwanda, or Darfur, or anywhere else that people are suffering?
And I'm well acquainted with all the counter-arguments. The normal responses are, "Well we can't afford it" or "So are we the World Police?" The first point is well-taken: the U.S. certainly doesn't have its own fiscal house in order -- though largely due to its inability to deal with structural costs like healthcare and cycles of bubble-and-bust, imo -- but it's not as if this is Free Money that we're throwing at global problems. USAID (problematic and ineffective as its programs are) exists for a reason: because soft power is A Thing. If we address these problems preemptively, maybe they won't become major catastrophes later.
The second point, about the U.S. becoming a World Police, seems several decades too late to me. Like, we are the World Police. We have far and away the largest military apparatus in the world, but at the moment its only purpose is to protect our economic interests -- and those of our economic friends -- abroad. I agree with Fareed Zakaria on this: the U.S. is definitely the hegemon of the moment, but it doesn't seem to want to deal with the other half of that role. It doesn't want to work to maintain global stability -- though in a multilateral context -- outside of strictly economic sectors.
The natural response to this is to level accusations of imperialism, and this is a fair point. I would argue, though, that a "multilateral imperialism" concerned primarily with the enforcement of norms of human rights isn't all that bad. Potentially problematic, to be sure -- who gets to decide when rights have been violated, what's the priority order of rights, etc. I'm still not 100% sure how this would even work -- but I think it would be preferable to a status quo where global powers look the other way unless their economic interests are at stake.
tl;dr: Under what circumstances is a U.S./multilateral intervention justified? As a secondary question, what ought to be the general role of the U.S. in a multipolar international system?
*Yeah yeah, WMDs, al-Qaeda, etc. The secondary argument was made by the administration and neocons, though, that Saddam Hussein was just a Bad Dude and should be deposed for doing Bad Dude Stuff.
0
Posts
A) The ruler of the given country has given up his right to sovereignty by violating the social contract. This is a controversial viewpoint in modern international law, but basically boils down to that if a government is oppressing and massacring its people, and cannot be stopped without outside interference, that government has given up its sovereignty and other nations can potentially step in.
C) In most cases, troops should not be deployed. It should more often be a case of evening the odds, such as instituting a no-fly zone to limit the use of aerial bombardment, instituting sanctions to limited the weapons that can be used in the conflict, and in some cases using targeted strikes to destroy hardware that gives the oppressive government in question an advantage over the popular uprising. The selling of arms to a resistance should be very, vary carefully evaluated.
Obviously these are somewhat rudimentary criteria, but I feel it's a logical starting point.
Now, obviously, the answer for most people would be 'never, then', and I think it's interesting to explore why.
Well, the big staple of international law is sovereignty, IE a nation's right to govern its own affairs. It's actually what China or Russia or whoever disapproves of intervention often brings up when the US talks about it. However, there's been a movement in the last few decades that's been attempting to redefine the limits of sovereignty, with the idea that a nation can lose it if it abuses its populace. Still, in most cases the US would claim sovereignty over its own affairs, and would be right to do so.
A lot of this also all stems from the end of WWII, when the UN was formed and much of international law about things like war crimes and intervention was laid out. What's interesting about the original UN charter is that its first and foremost goal is to avoid large scale war between the major powers from ever breaking out again. Humanitarian concerns come second. This is largely reflected in the international laws written at the time, and in the history since. Most of the world powers just try and keep the peace, and humanitarian crises, such as the Rwandan genocides, are ignored unless intervention is convenient and won't rock the boat too much. Despite the movement I mentioned earlier, sovereignty still tends to be the rule, because maintaining that concept prevents the world powers from resorting to violence to settle their disputes as much as they did in the past.
Of course, there's the hypocrisy that while large scale war amongst the powers is avoided, proxy wars and "police actions" of the powerful nations versus weaker nations have been allowed, despite much hand wringing and criticism.
In theory, it's not impossible for US interests and humanitarian good to coincide, so what I said above isn't enough to condemn intervention in and of itself. But the way the US (and Europe, for that matter) handles military intervention reflects their motives for doing so. If the US wants the ouster of a regime, it will attempt to ensure that whoever replaces it is amenable to easy extraction of natural resources, exploitation of cheap labor, or cordial foreign policy with whatever important allies the US has in the region. Humanitarian issues will only enter the equation to the extent that they may endanger the stability of the US-backed regime.
So I'm pretty firmly against intervention in almost all cases on the basis of who's doing the intervening. I question the ability of NATO bombing runs to bring peace and freedom to people, and I doubt that those in power have the desire to do so.
THat's because most people would never consider the options like "The Federal government systematically murdering people" or the like.
Isn't America the biggest player in the UN? So they'd be intervening anyway if they find humanitarian issues vile enough to act. The US has an extremely poor history by exploiting its interests over weaker countries - which is a horrific practice. At the very least it needs to form a partnership with a country, not hoard everything it can like a greedy child.
I'm not sure if you are being ironic or not. US foreign policy has often involved systematically murdering foreign people, eg. El Salvador. The trouble is that most US citizens don't believe that, or believe it's justified because they're foreign.
...which is pretty normal. People the whole world over suffer from the same misapprehensions. So why, then, does the US have any more authority than any other nation?
No, I'm saying people think "there's no time that someone else should interfere in US domestic affairs" (ie - the point of your post) because they never consider "brutal civil war with millions dead" as part of US domestic affairs.
I have no idea why you brought foreign people up at all since your premise was entirely domestic affairs.
This is simplistic silly goosery. There are certainly other concerns at work too, but to pretend humanitarian concerns have no power in international politics is simplistic cynicism masquerading as wisdom.
Government's and political movements and so on are composed of people. People who do give a shit about these kind of things.
Historically, the United States (and many other nations, to be fair) have played very fast and loose with 'interventions' which would otherwise be called what they are--military invasions of another country for a particular reason. ~15,000 soldiers (or marines, I suppose) landing in Soviet Russia is an invasion--if not, how come 30,000 Japanese doing the same thing is? But that's the trick--Japan was, and is, close to Russia. They actually had contested territory, in effect the same thing as a shared border (Sakhalin Isles and other areas). Military forces exist literally for the reason of resolving disputes over territory. With the United States, it was a lot harder to back up the reasoning behind that.
The reason I bring this up is because, to an extent, it's still true. Even if it weren't a world superpower, the United States exercises pretty much complete suzerainty over North America and a good bit of the rest of the Western Hemisphere. Canada's military forces are, quite literally, integrated with those of the United States (at NORAD and elsewhere), even if they are a separate organization for a separate nation. Mexico's military capacity doesn't even register on the US level (indeed, the 'threat' Mexico might pose, if any, is from the in-capabilities of the Mexican government and their armed forces). The nation is terrifically secure in terms of the historical threats that nations have had to face and cite as a a reason of intervention, in a situation not entirely dissimilar from the center of the British Empire during its height. The country is never compelled to intervene elsewhere the same way others frequently are--when a civil war escalates to the point where shooting is leaking over the border, or where another military might actually pose a credible threat to your own. Certainly the Cold War introduced a world where Americans could be subject to harm from nuclear war the same way other parts of the world might--after the US monopoly on nuclear weapons was broken--but that's not what's on the mind of Washington, and it's somewhat understandable (though not as understandable as to why they keep spending as though it were...). Any decisions the US makes are made with a certain, for lack of a better term, "luxury" that no one military power in the world has. If you had even remotely comparable situations in close proximity to American borders as, say, Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 or the South Ossetian War of 2008--two cases of foreign intervention that the United States adamantly and vigorously opposed, in one case by sending a nuclear aircraft carrier group to "cool things down"--I think the United States would absolutely intervene, as India and Russia did. But that's not an issue for the country spending +40% of the world's military expenditures.
The United States has an incredibly capability to intervene--more aircraft, ships, tanks than the next several nations combined--but not the same possible threats those same nations actually face. Forget whether the opportunity to intervene is good or bad--it depends entirely on the situation, of course--the United States just isn't going to have the same compelling reasons other countries have, periodically, while actually being substantially more likely to intervene anyway. So it becomes really hard to make a principled argument that the United States would accept "being intervened" for the same reasons that it would intervene elsewhere.
You're quite right. I didn't think that through.
But part of my post does apply to your later post about humanitarianism, ie that single nations can't be trusted to act in the interests of the world.
And I think part of the problem is that there has been a blurring (deliberately I would say) between humanitarian and military action. I have no problem with the US sending grain to starving North Koreans, but a lot of people think of military actions such as Kosovo as 'humanitarian', since most people believe it was a necessity. So then there is a much smaller step to deciding that Iraq was 'humanitarian', which is bullshit.
It depends on the word "player"--I'm almost certain that the United States is the largest single financial contributor to the UN's budget--not counting the EU as a multinational federation, which the US may still beat. In terms of actual manpower (say, for United Nations Peacekeepers), India, Bangladesh and Pakistan are the highest contributors, and have far more men in blue uniforms. According to the BBC, anyway, if any country made up the fighting core of UN military personnel, it'd be Bangladesh.
What about the intervention in Kosovo, which the UN initially was against, but then after the fact sided with the US and NATO and agreed that, while it technically violated international law, it was done for good reasons and was retroactively approved?
Not to say that's the sort of behavior that should ever become the norm, but sometimes the UN is not that adept at responding to humanitarian crises, and just drags its feet until there's no longer a point to intervention.
Historically, I'm hard pressed to think of a US military intervention (either direct or indirect via arming and training rebels) which could plausibly be described as humanitarian. Sticking to post-WWII history, I think we'd both agree that US interventions in, say, Iraq, Afghanistan, Indochina, Korea, Indonesia, and Cuba were not motivated by humanitarian concerns. The history of Yugoslavia during the 1990s leading up to the Kosovo War is hella complicated and I don't understand it well enough to ascribe motives to the US and NATO, but if humanitarianism a factor in their intervention, I think it was one among many.
The Libyan intervention was heavily couched in humanitarian rhetoric; the Obama administration basically sold it as an effort to stop Gaddafi from massacring civilians. But I suspect Libya's possession of 3.5% of the world's oil had a lot to do with NATO's rush to intervene. It's hard to say what would have happened without intervention, and Libya is not Syria, but an extended and bloody civil war is probably among the more likely outcomes. That would have been unpredictable and probably far more destabilizing than the current situation, and could easily have disrupted the flow of oil to a much greater extent. Early intervention granted the US and Europe some influence in the formation of Libya's post-Gaddafi government, which made returning to pre-revolution levels of oil production a top priority. I think it's plausible that NATO's intervention in Libya cost less lives than allowing an extended civil war, but I think Libya's resource wealth was the most important factor in NATO's decision to intervene.
Maybe I was being overly simplistic in implying that geopolitical/economic calculus is the only factor behind US foreign policy, but it's easily the most significant. The inconsistency in the US's reaction to rights abuses in various countries, as well as its complicity in many of those abuses, implies that humanitarianism is a tertiary factor at best. I'm sure there are many individuals in the US government who do care about human rights abuses, but I just don't think it has ever been a driving factor in our foreign policy.
It seems to me that you're making a lot of cynical assumptions about these two events without presenting much reasoning beyond your own intuition.
You don't anticipate a problem making countries terrified about their relative strengths on the international order?
Wasn't it considered a significant strike against the younger Bush that he was widely unpopular internationally, in terms of domestic politics in the US, particularly amongst the left?
Situations where R2P is invoked are invariably situations where the practical motivations for adhering to the prevailing international order are collapsing, and the failed states involved have, without (ahem) fail, affected neighbouring non-failed states, either through ethnic politics or the inevitable refugee crisis.
And there are self-evident reasons why we would not want small industrial states to feel that they are obligated to police their neighbourhoods, if the post-WW2 order of giving selected historical major powers this role has collapsed. Intervention in Syria will become inevitable once the area starts creeping into the point where (1) Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Israel start worrying about long-term geopolitical stability (2) more to the point, start worrying about what each other may do to ensure that Syria resolves in their own interest (3) and therefore it is absolutely critical that it instead resolves in a suitably brokered fashion, the corpses of Syrian civilians be damned. You cannot out-atrocity what uncontrolled industrial combined-arms war can achieve. There must be no more Great Games, or all humanity is doomed.
This world order isn't intended to be egalitarian. By design, the UK and France are permanent UNSC members despite losing their colonial empires that once gave them such strength. But the price of giving powers a stake in a relatively peaceful world order has been discarding the ideal of pretending that we are all equal nations working in consensus.
Yes.
Then the question of the acceptability of invoking foreign interest is answered in the affirmative, isn't it.
Don't evade the question. Do you, or do you not, see a problem with seeing middle-tier countries frightened of other middle-tier countries?
I'm surprised there is so little mention of legitimacy in this discussion because that's the critical currency that all nation states operate on. Does the governing power possess enough legitimacy amongst their citizens to continue governing the state? Note by enough, I mean do enough citizens believe that open refusal to obey the government is warranted (be it peaceful or armed revolt), which should not be confused with the government being unpopular, while people still obey the rule of law.
A government's legitimacy is something that should always be considered when intervening in affairs that exist within just one nation state (different metrics need to be considered when a state is just be a fucking awful neighbor and that could warrant removing the government, even if the citizens in the state seem A-OK with it, NK readily comes to mind in this sort of situation). In both Syria and Libya, there is probably a compelling argument that the leaders at the time of the civil war lost any claim to being legitimate leaders amongst enough of the citizens.
I think the metric for pure humanitarian aid is a little looser. I do think this area tends to be murkier because handing out critical supplies almost always necessitates having armed security on hand to keep things peaceful and to attempt to discourage assholes from snagging those supplies to enrich themselves. In some cases, the state might not have the means to provide adequate security and that means bringing in armed personnel from elsewhere. There is also the issue of armed conflict always creating a humanitarian crisis in the process.
Finally, I think you have to look at both long term and short term pros and cons. I think nation states have a responsibility to look out for their citizens first, but I don't buy this nonsense that everything is a zero sum game and that every gain must be something that can be measured monetarily. Soft power is a thing and sometimes while the US is losing out short term monetarily. I think some foreign aid yields both monetary and returns more valuable than money later on.
Doesn't this happen anyways? Southeast Asia they all dislike each other, but they are trying to work together because it's the only way they can stand against China. The Balkans all hate each other. The Middle East needs no explanation, I think most of the stans despise each other to some extent (some more than others, obviously) and so on.
This is way too simplistic a view, because the "right" choice from your perspective can have detrimental long-term effects.
Consider an actual historical chain of events:
1951: Anglo-Iranian Oil Company nationalized
1953: Joint US-UK operation to overthrow the PM and install the Shah, thereby protecting the interests of a UK company and ensuring lower oil prices for the west
1979: Islamic revolution
Current status: Iran hates our guts and is the source of a lot of problems in the region, all to prevent oil prices from rising a bit 60 years ago. Wouldn't it be nice to have a majority-Islamic democracy as an ally in the middle east now?
And yet, despite vast power changes over the six odd decades after decolonization, borders have remained highly static. The level of militarization is much less than would be required to maintain borders if borders were weakly fluidly defined, and countries with vast military strength don't command territory commensurate with this strength.
Yes, that's the city-state of Singapore with an army that can almost certainly crush Malaysia and Indonesia at the same time (it gets more updated American exported weapons than the other two with all that cash). And yet it remains a city-state.
Southeast Asia might fear Chinese economic domination, but they do not fear the PLA starting colonies in countries it can easily push over with a breath.
This is extremely rare, historically speaking. Borders kept getting redrawn in Europe before WW2, even between major powers. France in WW2 gave up so easily precisely because the government anticipated being able to contest all that territory back eventually, as had been the order of things for centuries.
It doesnt take much foresight to predict that overthrowing a mostly popular elected regime in favour of a hated dictator (who was hated prior, he was technically re-installed) is going to end in disaster. The question is just when. Prior to the coup, relations were quite well, there would have been no reason to expect them to turn out any differently than Turkey.
edit: Also, this chain of events spawned quite a few problems down the line. The 79 oil crisis was due to a strike near the end of the Shahs reign. The Iran-Iraq war which eliminated exports from both countries for the start at least. And with Iran vehemently anti-West you ended up support Saddam to get another regional puppet government
I would like a clarification as to whether you are using "drone program" in the context of cooperation with the weak state, or against the weak state.
You are contradicting yourself by positing that major powers will cooperate to protect all mid-tier countries, regardless of the alignments of mid-tier countries, and yet proclaiming that major powers can and should only act in their self-interest.
1) It's hard to have a hard-and-fast litmus test, but I'd go for some approximation of when we can reasonably expect that the outcome will be worse for people generally if intervention is not made.
That is, if there's going to be mass death/harm/slavery/etc unless intervention happens. If intervention can be expected to exacerbate the mass harm situation, it may be such that it's better to have the mass harm occur.
The calculus gets more complicated over time. North Korea for example does constant and extreme harm to many of its own people, but intervention would almost certainly lead to an immediate increase in harm to both North Koreans and the various people who would be involved in that conflict, willingly or not (NK might launch a nuke at Japan, for example). So, do we accept a spike in harm for the prospect of having less harm after the dust settles?
2) I would prefer to have the US be a force for stabilization, preventing conflicts between states and atrocities within states. I would like the US to be more proactive about allaying harm in large part by allowing a lot more immigrants, and I wish a large component of US intervention would be to secure an exit area for people to flee a warzone/atrocity area to go to the US or other countries willing to accept people.
But migration is a politically contentious thing, so /shrug