More Posner

Further thoughts on Eric Posner's broader argument against humanitarian intervention, which I said I mostly disagreed with earlier. Basically, I do agree that Iraq should make people (like me) who were humanitarian intervention enthusiasts in, say, 1999 somewhat more cautious. But there is a baby/bathwater issue here and I think it's hard to say anything super-general about the matter. Circumstances vary, and there's a lot of "it depends" factors here. But what does it depend on? Some scattered bullet-points below:

• For one thing, it depends on exactly what we're talking about. I really do think Iraq has shown that forcibly overthrowing entrenched regimes, even extremely nasty ones, is extraordinarily problematic. At great cost, it runs a substantial risk of generating the almost-as-bad humanitarian conditions of anarchy, and then there's no telling what will eventually emerge from the anarchy or how long it will last. Even if you could manage to make the situation "better" (in some sense) than what preceeded it, it looks extremely implausible to me that this will ever be a remotely efficient way of helping people.

• A lot of these considerations don't apply when you're talking about a situation of ongoing chaos (i.e., a failed state) or an ongoing or imminent mass slaughter. In these circumstances, the bar for what would be "better" is quite low, so it become much more plausible that military actions can make things better.

• Nevertheless, the entrenched dictator case wouldn't be so problematic if not for the fact that effective post-conflict stabilization turns out to be really, really hard. Kosovo and East Timor are both tiny in the scheme of things, but the results of intervention in those places has been decidedly mixed nonetheless.

• Consequently, you need to think seriously about available resources and not just pound your feet insisting that someone "do something" and then criticizing people post hoc for not having committed enough resources. How many troops are really available and are they the right kind? Do the would-be interveners have the language skills? Do policymakers actually understand the situation? You can mark me down as skeptical that American (or, for that matter, German) NCOs and junior officers are well-suited to being mayors of Darfuri towns or that US policy elites (down to and including, say, foreign policy bloggers) have a solid grasp of all the ins-and-outs of East African geopolitics.

• Context matters. UN authorization for something should be a very important consideration. Interventions that re-enforce the idea of a liberal global order are one thing, interventions that undermine it are another. Sadly, the world is a rather tragic place and sometimes it won't be possible to achieve everything it would be nice to be able to achieve.

• Relatedly, forum-shopping to NATO has its uses, but also real limits. Appealing to a European regional organization to get around the UN is a defensible idea for actions in Europe, but having a bunch of European countries agree to send a bunch of European soldiers to Africa to redraw the lines on a map is imperialism, not humanitarianism. And, yes, the 19th century imperialists cited humanitarian motives for their actions, too. They probably even believed in them, which is really neither here nor there.

• There's a whole other class of humanitarian military deployments -- consensual peace-keeping. This happens when parties to a civil war reach and agreement and ask outsiders to come in and help enforce it. The record of these operations is decent, but the problem is often that outsiders don't want to send as many forces as are being asked for. This is a damn crying shame. If you want to dispatch the Marines somewhere, first on your list should be the places where people are asking for Marines.

In sum, stuff like this Brookings op-ed on Sudan (via Justin Logan) makes me nervous with its offhand "The United States, preferably with NATO involvement and African political support, would strike Sudanese airfields, aircraft and other military assets" and "If the United States fails to gain U.N. support, we should act without it." If you're taking the idea of liberal internationalism seriously, issues like UN support and African political support ought to play an actual role in your decision-making. Not just a "preferably" kind of role. It needs to make a difference somewhere.

If existing institutions of international legitimacy don't produce the outcomes the United States prefers, we need to work on either altering the institutions, persuasing people to think differently in the future, or something else along those lines. Otherwise, what the liberals are laying down here is, really, just a mild modification of neoconservatism and it suffers from many of the same flaws. The world needs to operate along some kind of principles -- not just the whims of the American political system. Efforts to establish unilateral global hegemony won't work, won't serve our interests, and won't advance humane ends in the long run.

Comments

Well said.

Posted by crack | October 2, 2006 4:09 PM

I'm a hardboiled realist. Foreign policy should be conducted on the basis of what is in the best interests of the United States. The only difficult decisions are when there is a readily apparent tradeoff between the short and longterm interests at stake.

It is acceptable in my eyes to make occassional deviations from a realist foreign policy -- but we should do it with eyes wide open, and the costs and risks readily accounted for. Liberal interventions are a gift sometimes worth giving, but usually not.

Posted by decon | October 2, 2006 6:11 PM

There's a lot of realists out there like decon who may agree with your bullet points but will never side with liberal internationalism. And without a realist to vote for, they may even choose to vote for neocons over liberal internationalists.

I think Clinton and Albright did a good job pursuing a third/fourth way to foreign policy through their policy of "assertive multilateralism." And sometimes failing to intervene is hugely problematic. Intervention should not always be viewed as a gift. I think we had a duty to intervene in Rwanda, whether or not the Hutu majority asked us. Even Clinton and Albright have admitted that Rwanda was their greatest foreign policy failure.

Posted by michael | October 2, 2006 7:34 PM

"Appealing to a European regional organization to get around the UN is a defensible idea for actions in Europe,"

Is it? This sounds like a way to post-hoc Kosovo in while still excluding Iraq. But what if China were able to bully the other Asia powers into standing aside or supporting a humanitarian intervention in, say, Nepal? If they get approval of the regional players, through a formal organization or otherwise, can they blow off the UN?

Posted by Martin Bento | October 2, 2006 7:38 PM

"The world needs to operate along some kind of principles -- not just the whims of the American political system."

Since when?

Posted by Gregory Scoblete | October 2, 2006 7:56 PM

Whatever. It doesn't matter anymore if the chattering class wants to indulge in some better wars. No one's going to be willing to fight.

Of course, you can still recruit an army of foreign mercenaries. Heh, good luck with that.

Posted by Gary Sugar | October 2, 2006 8:46 PM

Inability to obtain support from neighbors of the troubled country is another warning sign that an intervention would be disastrous. In Kosovo, all of Yugoslavia's neighbors agreed on the need for intervention. With Iraq, only Kuwait openly supported intervention (That led to logistical problems when Turkey wasn't onboard).

Posted by Robert Nagle | October 5, 2006 8:47 AM