II. Prelude: 1945–1992

Humanitarian intervention was not entirely unknown before the 1990s. If you open Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars, one of the most important books of 1977, you will find that he not only mentions the topic but analyzes two instances in detail. (These were the interventions of the United States in Cuba in 1898, and of India in East Bengal in 1972.) Still, at the time of Walzer's writing the issue was not a lively one. His own attention fell primarily on the Vietnamese conflict and mutually assured destruction and other dilemmas of the Cold War.⁴

The armed and ideological were everywhere in those days; the armed and humane still awaited their day in the sun.⁵

In this respect as in many others, the Cold War had immobilized the West. To see this, we need look no further than Cambodia in the late 1970s. Despite the stunning carnage there and the relative weakness of the Khmer Rouge, neither global nor local configurations of power permitted an armed intervention. Only George McGovern, quixotic as ever, proposed that the international community undertake one. (Despite his suggestion that this enterprise occur under the banner of the United Nations, his initiative was not well received by his recent allies in the antiwar movement.)⁶

The honor of deposing the Khmer Rouge fell instead to their former allies the Vietnamese Communists, whose motives were less humanitarian than imperial (and who were acting as a proxy for the Soviet Union against China). The sequel brought continued war and faction, floods of refugees with all the hardships to which those are subject, and finally fears of famine in the shattered country. A conventional humanitarian operation under the auspices of the UN accomplished some limited good. Through it all, Cambodia remained wholly hostage to the relations among the great powers and between these and their local clients.

None of this was at all surprising. Throughout the Cold War, humanitarian considerations had yielded to exigent political ones. The decoupling of the two was a luxury that even the best intentioned could not afford. By 1990, however, the long struggle was over. Of the two contending alliance systems, only one remained on the board, its vast military power still intact. America and its allies thus enjoyed surplus military capacity. If they chose to turn it to humanitarian ends, the way seemed clear for them.

This was another respect in which the moment was ripe for military humanitarianism. Western sensibilities were growing more humane by the hour. They were also growing ever less warlike. The liberal democracies were busy reducing the size of their armies—the United States was no exception—and everywhere the ethos of military service was in decline. The cell-phone-toting unisex cosmopolitan citizen of the European Community (and soon of the World Wide Web) affected the least warlike way of life ever known to man—or should we say to persons? Traces of belligerence lingered, but the evolving moral consensus relegated them to racquetball. History offered no precedent of countries at once so powerful and so unwarlike.

While this trend boded ill for armed undertakings generally, it was less prejudicial to humanitarian ones than to others. For such interventions were no ordinary wars. Compare them with their predecessors. Consider the old order of things, which prevailed from the Stone Age until roughly 1990. In those days, belligerents, the powerful and the weak alike, had gone to war to advance their interests. Sometimes these interests were legitimate in the view of their neighbors, sometimes not. Sometimes they coincided with the interests of other parties, sometimes not. Sometimes, then, the interest underlying a conflict could be openly avowed, sometimes not. But for war to rest on an interest of some kind was not only permissible but obligatory. In making the case for a given war, you had to show that the interest at stake was vital—not that it was less of an interest than it might have been but that it was more of one. Take “repelling aggression,” that blanket justification of armed action which invoked the failure of appeasement in the 1930s and resounded through the Cold War years. It expressed not altruism but an appeal to the common interest of nations confronting a common threat.

Of course, “interest,” while dear to hard-nosed social scientists, captures only one aspect of political life. There are also “grievances,” and the two do not always coincide.⁷

Here too, however, the rule has been for nations to declaim on behalf of the grievances of others while resorting to war only to redress their own.

The end of the Cold War had reduced the prospect of war between the liberal democracies of the West and outsiders. It seemed to many to portend a world free of irreconcilable clashes whether of interest or ideology. True, Saddam Hussein's seizure of Kuwait in 1990 intervened to remind the world that the new situation needn't prove more peaceful than the old. Forty-five years after the founding of the United Nations, an international regime of collective security was still a work in progress. Still, we could hope that the establishment of a “New World Order” lay just around the corner. The very unanimity of the response to Saddam's aggression prefigured a future of global concord.

III. A Decade of Fitful Interventionism

In retrospect, the decade of the 1990s will likely appear the golden age of humanitarian military intervention. In politics all things are relative, of course—even golden ages. Still, this was the epoch in which humanitarian intervention, whether or not it succeeded and even whether or not it was attempted, loomed largest on the public agenda. Croatia, Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Haiti, Kosovo, Macedonia, the Congo, Sierra Leone, Liberia: it was a long list. In the American presidential election debates of 2000, humanitarian intervention ranked first among the topics of foreign policy discussed.⁸

This epoch came to a fiery end on September 11, 2001. No one would mistake the wars the United States and its allies waged after that date for humanitarian interventions. No apology is required for having deposed two regimes that governed with such murderous disregard for the fundamental rights of their citizens. Still, one cannot pretend that the primary motive in either case was to benefit the afflicted people. Just as warfare inflicts so-called collateral damage on the civilian population, so the liberation of the Afghan and Iraqi peoples represented collateral benefit.⁹

Consider, by way of contrast, American motives in opposing the Greater Serbia policies of Radovan Karadzic and Slobodan Milosevic. Here you will find nothing obviously personal. There was no flag to plant in Sarajevo or Pristina emblazoned with the names of murdered Americans. There was no supposed presidential grudge arising from a plot by the enemy to assassinate his father and predecessor. There was no fear of weapons of mass destruction or of Serbian support of terrorism against the United States. America's Balkan interventions were, if not wholly disinterested, as reasonable a facsimile as you could hope to encounter in the international arena—which was just why humorist P. J. O'Rourke took it upon himself to skewer them:

Note how O'Rourke blends so-called realism with a pinch of just war theory. The only thing that can vindicate a war is a pressing interest of one's own. Because humanitarian intervention fails this test, it stands exposed as “warmongering.” O'Rourke doesn't just claim that war is too important to be left to the disinterested. His cynicism goes further. Scratch a preacher of humanity, he implies, and you will find a conniving pol. Compared with Clinton, even the Mongols were paragons of rectitude. They rode about “extending their geopolitical power”; he disgraced himself posturing on the stage of domestic politics.

O'Rourke is right at least to this extent: humanitarian intervention enjoyed the prestige that it did despite or because of the fact that it was so anomalous. It was somehow military without being military, political without being political, partisan without being partisan. It was all these things precisely insofar as it was humanitarian, a category—the category—that by transcending warfare, politics, and partisanship, transformed them into something new and shining.

This is not the place to attempt a history of the humanitarian outlook. I will merely sketch its current incarnation. Today's humanitarianism begins from a preoccupation with the overwhelming evils of the twentieth century. First among these was genocide. In the decades since 1945, what has come to be known as “the Holocaust” has emerged as the negative moral reference point in human affairs.¹¹

It has become for us what the state of nature was for Hobbes or what despotism was for Montesquieu, a negative political standard that overshadows all positive ones.¹² (And as the reality of genocide, like that of Stalin's Gulag, was unimaginably worse than the most dire imaginings of Hobbes and Montesquieu, so its moral grip on us is deeper and more pervasive.) The ethics of the Holocaust fixes not on what we must do but on what we must never again permit to be done. Morality becomes an exercise in remembrance designed to preempt repetition. Humanitarians have undertaken to serve as the world's conscience on this score. They often attest to the force of this concern in shaping their commitment to their profession.¹³

A second factor shaping the humanitarian outlook, particularly among intellectuals, is the decline of the traditional Left. Throughout the West, educated people have abandoned any hope (and even any thirst) for the fundamental transformation of their comfortable welfarist societies. Certainly in North America today, your typical youthful idealist does not aim to ignite a proletarian revolution or even to unionize Wal-Mart. Between her BA and her MBA, she plans to spend a year in some wretched venue working for an NGO. In this she resembles her counterpart in Berlin or Barcelona.

The evolution is nowhere more visible than in Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders) and its schismatic offshoot Médecins du Monde (Doctors of the World), the agencies at the cutting edge of the new humanitarianism. Their leading figures, Rony Brauman and Bernard Kouchner,¹⁴

are alumni of the militant Left in France. Like many of their comrades in the movement, they began life steeped in Marxism but eventually renounced it root and branch. They now devote themselves to an activity that they understand as anti-ideological. Pol Pot collaborated with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to light this passage for them.¹⁵

In a sense, this transition from Marxism to humanitarianism signals a moderation of the Left. Humanitarians have renounced vast goals of social transformation in favor of the finite and practical one of relieving suffering in those regions of the world where it is worst. They have repudiated Marxism not only as impractical but as dangerous, recognizing that in the Third World as elsewhere it has swelled the sum of suffering in the world rather than reducing it. At the same time, humanitarianism has preserved the moral fervor of the Left. It thus combines the zeal typical of modern ideology with that rejection of “totalizing” systems (including the various modern ideologies) which defines postmodernism.¹⁶

With a roll of drums, a few more words about postmodernism. This new outlook on the world consolidated its intellectual hegemony in the West during the 1980s and 1990s, just as humanitarianism was also gathering steam. Its ascendancy likewise reflects the collapse of the intellectual authority of Marxism. Through the efforts of throngs of (mostly French) intermediaries, Nietzsche and Heidegger have superseded Marx, but Nietzsche and Heidegger as housebroken to the needs of the Left—including humanitarianism.

Postmodernism went further than the relativism of the 1950s and 1960s in subverting the notion of an authoritative way of life or an affirmative code of morality. While the liberals of those earlier decades had held that moral relativism supported liberalism, the postmodernists drove home the point that this just wasn't so. Even if we could still bring ourselves to cherish our Western heritage as positive, we had to acknowledge its contingency or arbitrariness. As Richard Rorty has put it, the postmodern liberal “does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others.”¹⁷

True, Rorty also reassures us that since all ways of life are equally arbitrary no one could blame us for sticking with our own. It would also seem to follow, however, that neither could anyone blame us for breaking with it. “Our way, no better or worse than any other way”—that's not much of a battle cry.

Yet precisely by its weakness in this respect, postmodernism has promoted the appeal of humanitarianism. Compared to those robust principles of liberty, democracy, and tolerance that were at issue in the Second World War and subsequently in the Cold War, humanitarianism represents a greatly diluted version of “Western values.” It marks one of the points at which the Western ethos passes over into the post-Western one.¹⁸

True, humanitarianism is a distinctly Western development. Even the Buddhists who preach it learned it first from the West.¹⁹

With rare exceptions, humanitarian intervention is an encounter between Western or Westernized nations and non-Western ones, between lands where liberal democracy and technology have triumphed and lands where they have not. It is a cardinal instance of what political scientist Pierre Hassner calls the dialectic between “the bourgeois and the barbarian”: “an encounter between two kinds of societies” of which the one characteristically shrinks from violence while the other takes its dominion for granted.²⁰ To a West that has become morbidly sensitive to the charge of imposing its values, humanitarianism commends itself as impartial or neutral not least between the Western way of life and others. It is the white man's burden purged of its inconvenient whiteness. Precisely because it passes for nonpolitical, the relief of suffering affords a uniquely noncontroversial ground of political action.²¹

As moralities go, then, humanitarianism is a minimalist one, but in the current mood of the West this only enhances its appeal. “What is man?” asks Rony Brauman, cofounder and theoretician of Médecins sans Frontières: “Man is a creature who is not meant to suffer.”²²

Brauman preaches a negative teleology. We cannot say what nature means us to do, but we can say what she doesn't mean us to stomach. On this, at least, we can take our stand, wager our lives, and bear to look at ourselves in the mirror each morning as the sun rises pitilessly above Kigali—or merely as we glimpse the horrors there unfolding on television.

This is the truth in O'Rourke's claim that progressive intellectuals would prefer only wars certifiable as “peace by other means.” Not that they would rule out a military response to an actual attack on their homelands. From the end of the Cold War until September 11, however, they followed almost everyone else in regarding such an attack as improbable. The question was how strong, prosperous nations like their own were to deal with poor, weak, unstable ones. It was here that so many were so squeamish about the claims of national interest as actually to prefer that a given intervention not be defensible in these terms. Humanitarian intervention caters to this longing for a genuinely high-minded war.

It is not my purpose to eulogize Bill Clinton. As Machiavelli taught us, however, few men know how to be all good or all bad. I see no evidence that Clinton was one of them. An ambition to do good has haunted him throughout his career. Nor can I concur in O'Rourke's dismissal of the motives of the citizens who supported intervention. Those on the right were not simply truculent, nor were those on the left simply fatuous. And even if they were, we would still have to account for all those in the middle—ordinary citizens who defy classification in terms of left and right. In America as among her Western European allies, the policy of military intervention enjoyed broad public support. It appealed to a healthy satisfaction in the assertion of national power in a just cause, as well as to a generous concern with relieving the suffering of distant, hardly known peoples. It appealed not to what was worst in democratic citizens but to their best intentions. As the French statesman Talleyrand once cautioned, “we must beware of our first inclinations, gentlemen; they are almost always good.” And so they are. They are also almost always weak—easily diverted, diluted, or mislaid.

Fortunately, the presence of lofty intentions does not preclude the participation of lower ones. These last are commonly the leaven without which the cake could not rise. Certainly the record suggests that humanitarian motives rarely shine forth in indubitable purity. If O'Rourke goes too far (as is the humorist's task), he does so in two opposing respects. On the one hand, he minimizes the unselfish element in humanitarian intervention; on the other, he trivializes the real interests at stake in the cases confronting Clinton.

In intervention as in politics generally, in politics as in life generally, the motives behind any policy are almost always mixed. If they weren't, they wouldn't carry the day against the mixture of opposing motives. This is especially true in the case of humanitarian intervention, where the opposing considerations are so entrenched, powerful, and various. The classic example of a military intervention in which humanitarian considerations eclipsed all others remains that in Rwanda in 1994. It was the classic example of such an intervention not least in that it didn't happen. In fact, it didn't come close to happening, or come close to coming close to happening: we could prolong this regress infinitely. If Clinton truly wanted to play Franklin Delano Gandhi, here was his opportunity. Its knock went unanswered.

IV. If Only …

In the face of such massive evils as the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda, we cannot but feel that much more could have been done. If only the will to act had been stronger, if only it had swept all before it to vindicate not in word but in deed the obligation to intervene to thwart this most terrible of all crimes against humanity… .

If only. In writing on this subject, it is de rigueur to deny either that you are a cynic or that you countenance complacency in others. I do hereby so deny. Still, we must raise the question of whether this chronic weakness of humanitarianism is not somehow a structural one. The public premise of a humanitarian intervention is that it is disinterested. The project evokes not our attachment to our own welfare but our attachment to that of the beneficiaries. It defines a situation in which we go to war without the usual incentives to warfare. In return we are spared the usual moral qualms attending it. The question is where this leaves us in terms of the depth of our commitment.

Professors today preach “ethical cosmopolitanism” and deprecate patriotism.²³

To hear them tell it, morality strictly forbids any partiality toward one's own or those who otherwise resemble oneself. David Rieff also subscribes to this view, although he is a journalist rather than a professor. He denounces not only all who were slow to recognize the need for action in Bosnia, but himself who so insistently promoted it. Why? Because despite rallying to the Bosnians, he failed to muster equal urgency in behalf of other victimized peoples. His sin was to respond to the besieged of Sarajevo not as human beings simply but as Westerners much like himself.²⁴

This fashionable view abstracts from the political aspect of morality, which always implies a distinction between one's own and outsiders. The French sociologist Luc Boltanski divides responses to the suffering of others into two categories: the humanitarian and the communal (communautaire).²⁵

A response is communal wherever there exists a prior bond between observer and victim arising from a shared particular identity. In the absence of any such previous connection, the spectator's response to the sufferer is humanitarian, and it is this response alone that forges the link between them. Inevitably, a humanitarian crisis evokes from the vast majority of spectators a humanitarian response, grounded in nothing save a sense of common humanity. Unfortunately, this is commonly the weaker of the two responses.

We naturally sympathize more intensely with those with whom we identify not just in their bare humanity but as our own. From a cosmopolitan perspective, the murder of ten Belgian peacekeepers (in 1994) may seem but a trifle in comparison with the genocide of 800,000 Rwandan Tutsi that it accompanied. All politics is local, however, and one aspect of locality is point of view. The world never looks quite the same from one vantage point as from another. So the people of Belgium followed the rest of the world in being stunned by the genocide, while exercising their right to be uniquely enraged at the murder of their fellow citizens. Professors to the contrary, Belgium wouldn't be much of a country, or the Belgians much of a people, if they didn't care more for their own peacekeepers than for the strangers among whom they perished trying to keep the peace. And the Belgian government would not be much of a government if it did not recognize its obligations to its own people as primary, and as defining the lens through which it views its alleged responsibilities to all others.

Governments and peoples, unlike certain elites (including the authors of The Responsibility to Protect), are unlikely to accept the notion that they in particular are morally required to risk their treasure and the blood of their citizens to rescue other peoples in need. A people may well favor such an effort, where the price does not seem unreasonably high, and will pride itself on having undertaken it. It will view such undertakings as all the nobler for not being, strictly speaking, required. But as it will recoil from the prospect of unreasonable losses incurred to this end, so it will balk at submitting to any international arrangement that will take the decision as to whether it will participate in such projects out of the hands of its own government.

There is thus an inevitable tension between humanitarian intentions and communal attachments, and it is only sober to expect the latter to undermine the former. Bare unfortified compassion will provide a broad constituency in favor of humanitarian intervention, but not a very deep, determined, or persistent one. Such compassion will not go so far as to support the notion of an enforceable “responsibility to protect.” “Someone really should help those people” stops several paces short of “We in particular are obliged to risk the lives of our young people to help them.”

Accepting this last premise will spare us a lengthy discussion of the failings of the mass media. Learned critics will dispute whether streams of images of suffering ultimately tend to quicken our sympathy or to dull it. You can argue it both ways, and probably be right both times.²⁶

Yet in assuming that the problem is in our media rather than in ourselves, discussion of this sort puts the cart before the horse.

No one denies that in the absence of media coverage humanitarian crises would be trees falling in forests where no one could hear them. Once the televised crash has broken upon their ears, by contrast, audiences cluck and grow agitated. They soon press their respective governments to do something, anything, to stop the bleeding. (This is the much-discussed “CNN factor.”) For the purpose of evoking an immediate response, an image may be worth a thousand words. A steady stream of them leaves the viewer with nowhere to hide.

At the same time, it is true that such images of hardship reach a point of diminishing returns. There is so much suffering in the world, no matter what anybody does; why go to the trouble of trying to alleviate it? When one crisis cools, the media will just serve up another. Awareness of many such emergencies distracts us from paying effective attention to any one of them. Yet concentrated media focus on one threatens to glut and overwhelm us.

The logical consequence of critiques of this kind, as the novelist and critic Susan Sontag suggested, would be to vex television with censorship of Platonic rigor, assuring that it provides us with neither too few nor too many images of a given instance of suffering, but just the right number of images of just the right kind. Sontag intends this as a reductio ad absurdum.²⁷

Declaimers speak of “compassion fatigue” as if it were a pathology to be blamed on journalists. The unstated premise is that compassion is a commodity in abundant natural supply, any shortfall in which must be due to defective methods of extraction. In fact, sympathy is always scarce relative to the demand for it. In E. M. Forster's novel A Passage to India, two characters react to the death of a third, whom the reader has come to know and cherish but whom they have not:

Middle-aged or not, we have all “invested our emotions elsewhere,” that is, somewhere other than in the day's televised calamity. We are busy people, not in that we are too busy for sympathy, but in that our sympathy too is already busy. We may reasonably be expected to suffer along with those we know and love, or with those with whom we identify more intensely than most through some perception of affinity. To expect us to exude compassion on demand, however, is unreasonable and indeed inhuman. God may know compassion for all created beings—animal, vegetable, and (following Forster) mineral—but in vain do we emulate Him.

If humanitarian military intervention tends to half measures, that is because so does humanitarianism as such. Just as many Americans of my generation shrank from dying in a war in Vietnam that they saw as unnecessary, unjust, and unsuccessful, so few today are eager to risk their own lives or those of their fellow citizens in a war they hold to be both necessary and just—but only on humanitarian grounds.

Let me stress once more that my point is not that Western citizens today lack genuine humanity. Rather, it is that genuine humanity is weak. Saints may rise above this rule, but they are few—that's what makes them saints. Committed humanitarians may rise above it, and they are more numerous than saints. They don't enlist in armies, however. There is no French Humanitarian Legion.²⁹

This, then, is the basic flaw in the fabric of humanitarian intervention: the weakness of compassion as a motive for the fortitude required in war. Footage of the Darfur crisis in Sudan, however stark, can do no more than foster a humanitarian bond between the nomad of the Sahel and the ordinary Joe watching the news in Cleveland. This bond will be genuine as far as it goes, but will remain peripheral, inconstant, and weak. Take the couch potato and make a soldier of him, and you may find him willing to risk his life for his comrades, his country, and mankind (in that order).³⁰

Leave him on his sofa, and you will likely see him disposed toward rescue in Darfur but reluctant to risk his or many other American lives to that end. You may also find him easily distracted by the next gripping news item, by the late movie following the news, and by the need to replenish his bowl of salsa. (Let this last need stand in for all his others.)

True, appeals to compassion (and its associated indignation) have played some part in all those great conflicts of our age that evoked the most intense commitment on the part of the belligerents. We need only harken back to “the rape of Belgium.” Yet America would not have entered the First World War solely because of that blatant violation of the neutrality of a third party, or even because of the harshness of the German occupation, however exaggerated by Allied propaganda. In the event, America plunged into the fray only after the Germans had declared unrestricted submarine warfare—thus violating American neutrality and murdering American citizens. Once engaged in war in defense of one's own, it spurs dedication to the common task to hold that the fate of humanity also rides on the outcome. Americans have often inclined to this view—and not entirely without reason. At the core of their warlike resolve, however, since September 11 as in 1942, 1918, and 1898 (“Remember the Maine”), lies something other than humanitarianism.³¹

Good citizens indignant in their own country's behalf thirst to chastise the enemy. While welcoming foreign allies, they would not delegate all retribution to them. When President Bush stood at Ground Zero on September 14, 2001, it was to announce that the assailants would soon be hearing from “all of us”—“all of us,” not America's Pakistani allies and not the United Nations.

Such martial ardor rarely swells at the prospect of humanitarian intervention. Even those who favor strong action typically care more that something be done than that their country be the one to do it. They would not object very strenuously to someone else bearing the risk and trouble.

This natural tendency to pass the buck of intervention is aggravated by two further considerations. The first is the legalism that blankets humanitarian issues. It, like all legalism, is rich in respectable excuses for inaction. The second consideration is the cover afforded for dereliction by the mantle of that multilateralism so favored by all who undertake intervention. The differences among the parties, masked by their agreement to take common action, reemerge to bedevil the decision as to what action to take. These centrifugal forces may easily prove stronger than the uncertain forward thrust supplied by humanitarianism.

The Balkan quagmire of the 1990s clearly displayed the strengths and weaknesses of the politics of humanitarianism. The strengths were mostly verbal, the weaknesses only too actual. Through five years of successive crises, the powers relied heavily on the United Nations. UNPROFOR, however (the United Nations Protective Force for Bosnia), wanted no part of protecting Bosnian Muslims. Like the character Rick in Casablanca before he rediscovers his better self, it wouldn't stick out its neck for anybody. To be fair to it, UNPROFOR was undermanned, under-armed, and in no way a match for the forces of the Bosnian Serbs.

To be fairer still to the force, its mandate was not only restricted but contradictory. That was because there was no agreement among the major players as to what to do in Bosnia beyond trying to keep the lid on there. Everyone involved in the debacle—from the NATO countries and the permanent members of the UN Security Council to the United Nations Secretariat and its flock of agencies, on down to the International Committee of the Red Cross and the throng of other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—had interests of their own which told against effective intervention.³²

Obviously such an outcome frustrates the humanitarian impulses in response to which the various governments have acted. Yet it also faithfully mirrors the vagueness and wavering of those impulses. Humanitarianism may not want to take no for an answer, but it tends to be satisfied with a very weak yes. It will be especially timid when poised on the brink of war.

O'Rourke to the contrary, even the most avid partisans of humanitarianism will tremble at resorting to force in its name. While this may be the kind of military action most acceptable to them, they are still far from comfortable with it. They will always be inclined to give peace (yet another) chance. In any situation in which armed intervention looms, other initiatives will be underway. Much will be invested in such initiatives, and each will boast a vocal constituency.³³

These constituencies may include governments for whom humanitarianism is the perfect cover for military inaction.³⁴

The prospect of military intervention thus inevitably finds humanitarianism divided against itself. This will blunt the thrust of popular pressure on governments to act. Leaders may respond as well by delaying hostilities as by resorting to them, all the while urging the earnestness of their humanitarian concern. Eventually, the necessity of armed intervention may become clear to just about everyone—but usually only because it has failed to take place soon enough.

V. Wars of Half Measures

This natural lukewarmness of humanitarianism constrains not only the choice of occasions for intervention but the manner in which such campaigns are fought. The purpose of humanitarian warfare is to end suffering among the victimized people, not to submit to it ourselves. This is illustrated by, among many other examples, the willingness of the NATO leaders to intervene in behalf of Kosovo in 1999 by means of an air campaign against Serbia, but their aversion to committing ground troops to that campaign.³⁵

One of the ironies of intervention is that our righteous David never sallies forth unless he enjoys the military superiority of Goliath. On second thought, make that the superiority of David, whose sling enabled him to strike his foe from a safe distance.

Yet this expectation that a humanitarian intervention be waged so as to avoid mortal peril to the intervenors clashes with another expectation: namely, that as a humanitarian intervention it be waged as cleanly as possible. The same policy cannot combine doing as much as possible to avoid risk to one's own soldiers and to avoid risk to enemy noncombatants—or even to those victims in whose behalf the intervention was mounted—hence the report of Human Rights Watch accusing the NATO forces of “violations of the international humanitarian law of war” in Kosovo.³⁶

The report presents as unconfirmed the relationship between the standoffish bombing policy and the numerous cases of civilian death due to mistaken identity. (Many of the civilian victims were Kosovar refugees in flight from the conflict who were mistaken for Serbian forces.) It would be perverse, however, not to suppose there was some connection. And as the tendency toward such violations is inherent in the political constraints incumbent on the conduct of an intervention, so too is a lack of zeal such as NATO displayed for investigating allegations of such violations.

Similar reflections apply to the seemingly gratuitous destruction of the civilian infrastructure of Serbia—bridges, television station, and such—also indicted by Human Rights Watch. Where the potential for escalation is as limited as it is in cases of humanitarian warfare, blurring the always fuzzy distinction between military and civilian targets offers the attackers some leeway. While they are forbidden from mounting overt attacks on civilians, they will still wish to apply pressure to them. It stands to reason, then, that so high-minded a war will be waged somewhat underhandedly, especially if (as in Kosovo) the war stretches on and the attackers become exasperated.

In their own discrete and distinctive way, then, humanitarian interventions may take their place among what Teddy Roosevelt called the “savage wars of peace.” This is not an argument for eschewing them where necessary to prevent savagery of a much worse sort. Keeping it in mind may serve, however, to moderate our self-righteousness as intervenors.

The humanitarianism of an intervention will also constrain it on the political side. Other kinds of wars, where successful, settle many things (while unsettling many others). A humanitarian intervention, however, is by definition a stopgap. It seeks not to impose the solution most satisfactory to the conquerors—the intervenors are not conquerors—but to compel or persuade the parties on the ground to resolve their differences. If it denies victory to the perpetrator of the humanitarian outrage, it stops short of conferring victory on his victim. Intervention hopes to ease the transition from war to “conflict resolution.”

The question that mattered and continues to matter for both Serbs and Kosovars (as for any other groups engaged in a struggle to determine their respective futures) is that of sovereignty. This is a political question, not a humanitarian one; the intervenors cannot make the issue of the combatants their own. Ultimately, the sympathy each side craves is just what humanitarianism must deny it: solidarity with its burning resentment of the other.

Thus, humanitarianism, while it may afford a politically convenient basis for intervention, can offer no basis for a settlement. Here it is dogged once again by its fundamentally negative character. A humanitarian intervention seeks to avert the worst; only when the worst appears imminent will nations finally undertake such an intervention. The project enjoys no popular mandate beyond this, and once it has been accomplished, the business tends to drop from public sight. What follows for the intervenors/victors/“peacebuilders” is a long and painful hangover.³⁷

The initial success of an intervention introduces a new status quo which itself becomes the object of persistent contention. It does not help that the new situation is always nominally provisional, or that it falls short of an occupation. Crisis management will settle into tension management. Having balked at deciding the struggle of the parties, the intervenors must stay on to umpire it. This task is thankless. Nor is it likely that the intervenors will be as resolute at it as the strongest party among the locals will be to foil them. So it is that since the Kosovars have been de facto masters of their own house, it has been open season on the Serbian minority there.³⁸

That is not the only unflattering thing that can be said about what Kosovo has become under the stewardship of NATO. And recently the allegation has surfaced that what is left of Bosnia has become a bubbling cauldron of Islamic terrorism.³⁹

None of this implies an argument against the practice of intervention. Averting terrible evil is an admirable accomplishment whether or not we agree with the humanitarians that it is the worthiest thing going these days. Much of its nobility lies, however, precisely in the fact that it promises no happy ending beyond averting the evil in question. It seems that there is no humanitarian intervention the outcome of which is satisfactory—unless one considers the alternative.

VI. Farewell to Intervention?

Has the era of humanitarian intervention (such as it was) now passed? True, humanitarian commitments have expanded on paper—the progress charted by Michael Ignatieff⁴⁰

—and conceivably could expand even further through the adoption of a “responsibility to protect.” But will the nations that matter honor such commitments in practice? Revolutions in moral sensibility are fuzzy, while military intervention requires boots on the ground. Today those boots are grounded elsewhere, in Afghanistan and Iraq.

For this reason among others, the authors of The Responsibility to Protect might have paid more attention than they did to the “appalling events” of 9/11. Unfortunately for those in need of rescue, the Axis of Evil will always upstage that of Misery. Like any benefaction, humanitarian intervention is only for those who can afford it. While the 1990s seemed to make few demands on Western nations in seeing to their own security, the semblance proved delusory. Islamism was on the rise and indeed already on the offensive; we have since reaped the harvest of our insouciance. Then too, those years were ones of economic expansion, whereas these last have been ones of retrenchment. If the mood of the prosperous countries was (relatively) expansive then, it is cautious and vigilant now. This is true whether they have supported the American engagement in Iraq or have distanced themselves from it.

Inasmuch as Western publics are preoccupied with other foreign policy concerns, humanitarian crises have predictably receded from view. In North America, certainly, the plight of Darfur has received much less coverage than past dilemmas of comparable gravity. No journalist who mentions it omits to speak of its direness, yet neither is it front-page or first-item news. It has been upstaged, the victim of a vicious circle. The less concerned the public, the less the journalistic exposure, and the less the exposure, the less concerned the public. By the same token, statesmen feel less pressure from their constituents to intervene. Fear of terrorism, like that of hanging, wonderfully concentrates the mind, and like all fear also hardens the heart. As political theorist Harvey C. Mansfield has put the teaching of Machiavelli, “a man or a country may be able to afford generosity today but what of tomorrow?”⁴¹

Yesterday was the West's today, and today is its tomorrow. The threat of global terrorism has left us with less to spare—in our wallets, our arsenals, and our hearts. Americans in particular find themselves overstretched in more than just their troop deployments.

Here a personal anecdote may serve. In August 2001, I encountered a young Army major named John Nagl. Clearly a rising star, he had proceeded from West Point to Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, had returned to command an armored detachment in the Gulf War, and since had split his career between armor assignments and staff positions. He loved armor but doubted that the tank would prove the weapon of tomorrow. The future, he thought, held more humanitarian interventions, and he hoped for the creation of a corps within the Army dedicated to that activity, in which he himself aspired to serve. (In this, it seemed to me, ambition of advancement mingled with genuine idealism.) Two years later, I noticed his picture on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, which profiled him as the Army's leading young tactician of counterinsurgency. Not surprisingly, the interviewer had found him in Iraq.

In the present situation of global tension, the further legalization of intervention, whether by a declarative resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations or some other means,⁴²

is unlikely to accomplish very much. If the United Nations is presumed to remain the intervenor of first resort, the problems that have dogged its previous such ventures will hamper new ventures under this new rubric. One can hardly exaggerate how badly the United Nations has acquitted itself in this role in the past, or offer plausible grounds for supposing that it will do better in the future. Of course, one can always entertain one's readers with proposals for reform of the organization. (Or change the subject by noting how necessary it is to the world in other respects.) One doesn't even have to despise the United Nations to recognize that waging war is just not its métier.

At most, then, the United Nations can authorize a humanitarian intervention, but anything beyond that presupposes the willingness of a major power and its allies to shoulder the burden. Suppose they held an intervention and nobody came? Even if the nations of the world should accept the “responsibility to protect” on paper, it is hard to imagine them leaping to perform it. As they have dragged their feet in the absence of such a convention, so they would likely drag their feet to evade it. As they have hemmed and hawed in spite (and because) of the Genocide Convention of 1948, so they would in spite (and because) of a Convention to Protect. Like the bean in the old shell game, this difficulty can be shuffled about, but darned if you won't always find it lurking under the final shell.

Heap up international covenants as you will, there can be no effectual coalitions except of the willing. There can be no (enforceable) responsibility to assume the responsibility to protect. If everyone accepts it nominally while seeking to fob it off on others, face will be saved, and little accomplished, just as in Darfur to this point. The duty of intervention will become a hot potato. All respectable nations will want to touch it, but only to hand it off to others. The United Nations will remain the most popular vehicle for achieving this transfer.

The pattern is clear from the recent cases of the Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and now Darfur. All parties will pay lip-service to the humanitarian principle, and those wealthy nations remote from the suffering will farm out the duty of intervention to countries in the affected region. Wealthy nations will restrict their own participation to passing resolutions and offering logistical assistance. Think of this as a kind of outsourcing, wholly benign from the perspective of the more developed nation since the job is one that no one at home wants to fill.

To be sure, the countries thus enlisted have more pressing interests in the local outcome than we Westerners do. In this sense, they are more appropriate intervenors. The problem, of course, is that these interests are more pressing than ours precisely because they are not humanitarian. Nor, of course, may these local forces display the honesty and competence required to protect the imperiled population. Still, as we have seen, the basic imperative of humanitarian public opinion is that something be done, anything, but preferably something not too risky to one's fellow citizens. However wanting in other respects, the strategy of devolution fills that bill. It does not preclude a major power stepping in briefly, as the British did in Sierra Leone and the Americans did in Liberia, if the situation proves obviously beyond the capacity of the local intervenors. Yet, as I have already noted, the more overstretched the major powers, the slighter the prospect of their intervention, and the less effective the threat of it as a deterrent.

We Westerners no longer aspire to rule other peoples and have lost most of our optimism that we can teach them to rule themselves. We trade with them, which profits us and may also be deemed to benefit them. In the realm of politics, we leave it to international organizations to patrol the interface between ourselves and the barbarians. Increasingly, those in the front lines of this effort will themselves be drawn from barbarian ranks. By continuing to address only extreme cases of the consequences of misgovernment rather than the misgovernment itself—which is what it means to remain on the plane of humanitarianism rather than politics—the “international community” will both salve its conscience and limit its exposure to risk.⁴³

Humanitarianism (and the humanity underlying it) will always be with us. At the same time, few of us will be willing to suffer much ourselves in order to redeem others from suffering. At most, Western leaders will sometimes confront a strong consensus in favor of weak action. Claiming credit for having acted on our best intentions, they will pray for results murky enough for them to declare humanitarian victory. This is a modest prayer, and as such likely to be granted. Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to relieve.

When I delivered an earlier version of this paper to an audience of Canadian foreign policy professionals, one of them observed that I should have called it “Wars for the End of History.” On reflection I decided that he was right. On September 11, however, the end of history ended.