I am going to talk about six cases or seven cases. You can count Afghanistan twice. I am a little taken aback here because there is a friend of mine in the back who knows a lot about Afghanistan [Jason Lyall of Yale University] and it reminds me of a story I should tell: I am like a man who survived the Johnstown flood and did nothing else to distinguish himself during life, but was a good person and therefore went to Heaven when he died.
When the man was met at the pearly gates by St. I am going to talk about these cases, and Afghanistan is going to be the punch line. My key argument is that the criteria for intervention should depend first on US interests. It is key to differentiate the criteria that apply when the US has strong interests, when the situation is crucial to US interests, as opposed to when the US does not have crucial interests.
More demanding criteria are needed when the United States does not have crucial interests in the area than when it does. Therefore, different criteria apply for the other cases. Rwanda is in italics because nobody intervened. So, I have one situation here where there was not intervention, where, as you will see, I think that the United States should have intervened. So, here is the outline of the lecture. I am going to talk first about US power and US interests because they are related.
We have to understand that the evolution of US interests, and the shifts taking place in these interests, in my view, come from shifts in US power. Before we can actually make judgments, I am going to talk about criteria justifying US military intervention when crucial US interests are involved.
It is in those cases, in my view the Gulf war in and Afghanistan in , that there were crucial US interests involved. In general, I think these criteria have often been met in those situations. I will then turn to criteria that should be met when crucial US interests are not involved. In general, it seems to me that these criteria have often not been met. We have often fallen short. The conclusion will then focus on when the United States should intervene.
I am going to emphasize the key role of the exit strategy. Is there an exit strategy that is plausible? As you will see, I am not disposed toward the continuation of our intervention in Afghanistan. I want to provoke thinking not just about Afghanistan, but about how to respond when the situation arises, which will recur in your lifetime, when somebody proposes US intervention in a weak country and tells you it is going to be cheap.
I do not want to tell you what to think — but I want to urge you to think carefully when military intervention is proposed. Think about that if you are 33 and still in graduate school. He later became the president of the University of Chicago. Taft was also a man who was sure of his own presence and importance; and he weighed about pounds.
He was an imposing figure in every respect. Hutchins, I assume at Yale you teach your students that all judges are fools. Chief Justice, at Yale we teach our students to find that out for themselves. I think you should at least have some criteria in mind when intervention is proposed. The first set of questions is about interest and power. Interest and power are related to each other in that interests are endogenous to power.
What your interests are depends, in part, on what your power is. It is clear that the interests of Belgium or Switzerland are different from those of Germany, China, or the United States. There are certain things that small states simply cannot do. They cannot have an interest in maintaining world order. So, as power expands or contracts, so do interests. For example, as British power contracted in the years after , British interests also gradually contracted.
Britain had huge interests in India, interests in the Middle East and the Suez Canal, and it shed those interests gradually when it could not maintain them anymore. Britain did not have the power to do so. Throughout the Cold War it expanded its interest into places like Afghanistan and the Congo. And as I mentioned, the British interests, as well as French and even Dutch interests, contracted as their empires collapsed. A power shift will affect what its interests are. They are not written in stone forever.
The United States, despite what former Governor Romney said in his recent speech, is manifestly less powerful and financially capable than it was 20 years ago. Compare now to , when the Soviet Union collapsed and there were no rivals on the scene.
China was not yet in world politics. Power is relative. So while the US is less powerful and financially capable than it was 20 years ago, it still remains the most powerful state in the system. We do not want to confuse relative decline with the proposition that the US is weak. The United States is not weak, but it is less powerful than it was 10 years ago. America will face the rise of many others, both state and non-state actors.
Power being relative, the US will be less powerful in the future. It follows, then, that US interests will need to contract and that a sensible US foreign policy will not maintain the range of interests that were sensible when the US was as dominant as it was in What are the candidates for reduction?
Where should the US sensibly pull back? I think Central Asia is an obvious case that is not crucial to our interests. We got along fine not doing anything about it until the collapse of the Soviet Union, and to me, in general, this includes Pakistan and Afghanistan.
In the s, I would joke in class that Afghanistan was the place in which we had no interest. It is about as far as you get, especially since we are going to have to reach some sort of modus vivendi with China. I think that Africa, except for major oil producers, the Mediterranean, and South Africa, is also not an area of great US interest. It is impossible for the US to control the world, so the goal of preventing havens for terrorism must be abandoned.
After all, terrorists can go lots of places; they do not have to be in Afghanistan. They can be in Yemen, in Somalia, or in 50 other countries. So, the notion that your goal is to prevent havens for terrorists and therefore we should be in a particular place is senseless. It would only be sensible if terrorists committed themselves to one place and refused to move. Let us go back and think about foreign policy interests for a minute.
Arnold Wolfers, in a book published almost 50 years ago, made the distinction between possession goals and milieu goals. Then there are milieu goals, like a safe world for democracy at home or a world with opportunities for cultural infusion. I am not talking about a world safe for democracy abroad; what I am talking about is what do we need for our democracy?
The answer is that we have to have a world absent severe threats because such threats can lead to a garrison state. The necessary means to crucial interests are also crucial interests.
If one could show that something in itself is not a crucial interest, but a necessary means to obtain a crucial interest, you should treat it like a crucial interest.
I have four here, which I think are crucial to American interests. Although you can see I am critical of US foreign policy, you can also see that I am not an isolationist. One crucial interest is the maintenance of fairly democratic governments in Europe, Asia, and the Pacific rim of Asia. That means Japan, South Korea, Australia, and perhaps other countries. The second crucial interest is access to crucial sources of energy, especially in Saudi Arabia.
Unfortunately, given the policies we have followed or failed to follow over the past 40 years, we are highly dependent on energy from abroad. Third, we need access to other important markets. If those markets were cut off, the US would certainly suffer. Finally, it is a necessary means for crucial interests like world peace that we maintain a strong working interest with major rising powers, including the BRIC powers of Brazil, Russia, India, and China.
These, I would say, are the four necessary means to crucial interests, and they compound into a crucial interest or the equivalent of a crucial interest. Now I want to turn to the second part of the talk. Would it have been the right thing to do? A third is Darfur Would it have been wrong for the US to go in alone to stop the genocide? China and Russia each have a veto in the United Nations, and it can be difficult to secure their agreement.
However, this would formally split the world into two camps, and many experts believe the best way to deal with China and other nondemocracies is to work with them rather than against them. We have little polling data on the specific question of humanitarian military intervention, but a number of surveys ask closely related questions.
While figure 1 suggests reduced support for an active role in the s and s Vietnam and in the s Iraq , responses to other questions suggest no such change. Figure 1. Data sources: Gallup for ; Pew Research Center for ff. Figure 2. Figure 3. Figure 4. Figure 5. The US should take into account the interests of our allies even if it means making compromises with them Estimated share of US adults. Figure 6. There is need, precedent, moral justification, and authorization by the United Nations as a general principle.
Yet at the moment, prospects are mixed. Begin with the need for intervention. There is plenty. There are additional less well-known situations in Africa and Asia along with assorted suppressions of democratic movements in the Middle East. There is ample precedent for successful intervention, and it stretches over a long period of modern history. Though the question seems a new one a product of the end of the cold war , actually there were several humanitarian interventions by Britain and France in the s.
Along with need and precedent, there is moral justification. Many agree that intervention is morally justified in cases of humanitarian crisis. Finally, there is support from the United Nations. However, despite need, precedent, moral justification, and general UN authorization, support for humanitarian intervention among American citizens and policy makers seems to have dimmed.
The economic and political ascendance of China and Russia reduce the likelihood of UN Security Council approval of humanitarian intervention. But more fundamentally, and across the political spectrum, the idea that the United States should intervene even when American security is not directly threatened seems increasingly suspect. Rosemary Foot, professor and senior research fellow in politics and international relations at the University of Oxford. The UN Charter contained an understanding of state sovereignty that underlined the principle of non-interference in matters within the domestic jurisdiction of states.
But in , UN secretary-general Kofi Annan famously declared that the global community could not stand idly by watching gross and systematic violations of human rights, and that state sovereignty was being redefined to encompass the idea of individual sovereignty. They also endorsed the idea that the international community should help states build a capacity to prevent abuse, using diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means. Undoubtedly, it has proven difficult to implement RtoP in cases of need.
States remain wary of the doctrine, especially weaker or ex-colonial states. Many believe that RtoP will be applied only selectively and when the interests of the powerful in world politics are engaged, and that if military force is used for humanitarian purposes, it might actually make matters worse for populations in peril. While few lamented the demise of his murderous rule, the outcome for the Libyan population has been profoundly disturbing. RtoP has raised ethical dilemmas that remain unresolved.
Some argue that states violating human rights forfeit the right to non-interference in their internal affairs. This logic underpins liberal interventionism — the projection of western values into other states by military means. It seems unreasonable—not to mention politically unsustainable-for U.
Saving lives is not a uniquely American interest. And the United States, alone among the major western powers, already maintains high military vigilance in the Persian Gulf and the Korean peninsula. Unfortunately, other countries in general have neither the forcible entry capabilities nor the sustainable logistics to intervene in distant lands to save lives. Australia has done most of the work in East Timor, and our European allies have provided the vast majority of troops in Bosnia and Kosovo, of late.
But U. And the United States will need to contribute troops to postwar missions in places like the Balkans if it wishes to influence their conduct. Although the United States need not create a specialized armed force for peace operations, it should modify its military force structure to lessen the strain of various types of limited missions around the world.
Primary U. But some military units—including special forces with particular language and political skills, military police, and support units that provide water, food, and medical care—should be beefed up for peace operations. Some of these special units, many now in the reserve force structure because they do not require constant training and drilling to do their jobs in war, are being overused.
Placing more of them in the active-duty force structure would allow them to be deployed without excessively disrupting the lives of reservists, many of whom do not expect such duty short of a national crisis.
That is not too high a price to pay. Other countries have much more work to do. The European allies, Canada, and even Japan should improve their ability to move troops to distant combat zones. The United States should overcome its ambivalence about its allies strengthening their military capabilities and enthusiastically endorse most any steps they take toward greater military burdensharing. Among the major western European nations, the model for improving peace operations and forcible intervention capabilities is clear.
In a word, it is Britain. Its military is smaller than that of France or Germany but much more useful beyond its own borders. It can deploy perhaps 50, combat troops, with air support, well beyond its territory within three to four months and sustain them there for months. Britain is also planning to acquire more sealift and airlift to move its forces fairly rapidly.
Smaller European countries cannot use Britain as an exact model, of course, but they can scale their efforts to some extent proportionately or band together in subgroups, with each country developing certain specialties. Because the European Union cannot be expected in the near term to act as a single entity in matters of war and peace, the most realistic alternative is for several countries or subgroups of countries each to have the capacity for meaningful military action abroad on their own or as coalitions of the willing.
What of budget constraints? Most European countries do not need to spend more—they need to spend differently. Large force structures are no longer needed, as Britain has already recognized and as Germany appears to be concluding as well.
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