Rieff suggests a parallel between failing to help at an accident scene and failing to help in a humanitarian emergency. In this age of CNN, he says, the duty of interference seems intuitively right. But an individual's moral responsibility and a state's are not comparable. That is because individuals live under a social compact in a state of law, at least in civilized societies, whereas the world of nation-states operates under the more primitive law of nature -- despite the existence of international institutions. States periodically take the law into their own hands, and violently so, if they feel it is in their interest -- not only rogue states, but ours too -- while individuals cannot take the law into their own hands without severe penalty. Thus, while a Judeo-Christian code of morality operates for individuals, states are free of such constraints and can act according to a more ancient formulation of self-interest. Machiavelli, Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, and other philosophers have all written about the different moral codes that separate states and individuals. States, in short, are not bound by Christian ethics. Their very clandestine services are evidence of the need of states to operate outside the law -- if not of their own societies, then the law of others.

Rieff observes that moral intervention brilliantly captures both the good will and the hypocrisy of affluent Western publics. One could say the same thing about appeasement, which brilliantly captured the mood of Western publics in the decades following a war (World War one) that killed 8.5 million troops for no discernible reason. Of course, Rieff is merely bringing this to our attention. Bold leadership counters the public mood, and leads it toward places the public would not go on its own.

Rieff says humanitarian over-reach is not an issue, citing as an example the West's inaction over Russia's slaughter of the Chechens. I am not so sure. Russia was an easy call: nuclear weapons and so on meant it was simply not in our self-interest to intervene there. But we successfully helped Hutu refugees, and the chance of getting embroiled in a conflict elsewhere that begins as a purely moral exercise remains real.

In sum, while I generally accept Rieff's notion that "no humanitarian relief" is simply impractical in our age, I disagree -- based on my own experience traveling around America, etc. -- that the public is quite so enamored of a humanitarian foreign policy as he implies.

Schwarz stretches my point on a global constabulary force in order to invalidate it. I never said that it would, or should, lead to indiscriminate interventions, but merely that it would widen the berth for them sufficiently to keep us engaged more than we normally might be. The pay-off for our victory in the Cold War should be that we -- not Russia, China, or the UN -- shape the international institutions of the future. And because we are fewer than 300 million in a world of six billion, we will need such institutions to magnify our power at a reasonable cost. One does not have to believe that foreign policy need be driven by humanitarian concerns merely to accept the logic of an out-of-area NATO-style force such as I have proposed.

Regarding Schwarz's point on Stalin: Stalin did not forcibly invade another territory to the degree that Japan and Germany did in the 1930s, so my point about Japan remains valid.

Finally, I disagree with Schwarz that our involvement in Vietnam, Iraq, Kosovo, etc., carried no benefits: the fact that those interventions did not deter everybody around the world does not mean that they did not deter somebody, or indeed many people. Nixon may have prevented Soviet-Syrian aggression in Jordan in 1970 because of his ruthlessness in Vietnam. It's hard to imagine George McGovern, having recently staged a precipitous withdrawl from Vietnam, getting Syrian tanks to reverse themselves by, in effect, merely lifting his eyebrow -- as Nixon successfully did!

Schwarz is correct that an obsession with credibility will doom us. But, as I said above, the state of the world is the state of nature, and those who periodically prove their ability to act ruthlessly will incur benefits. Because we can't intervene everywhere or even in most places, some sort of international force made up of our allies -- and our allies only -- is needed to intervene more practically than we do now. We would run such a force like a CEO runs a company: neither as a dictator nor as a democrat, but through executive intent, constantly forging consensus.

The inconsistencies noted by Schwarz in his analysis of the ex-Yugoslavia are implicitly acknowledged by Rieff (even though Rieff has substantial differences with Schwarz's account). Yet foreign policy can never be wholly consistent. If it were, it would be too constrained to be effective, and too predictable to contain any element of surprise -- something that is also necessary in a state of nature.

Edward Luttwak provides a blunt, useful, and meticulous description of the public's inability to accept casualties. However, rather than make the debate on humanitarian intervention obsolete, I think it does the opposite: it makes it necessary. The fact is that we are in Kosovo, and we got there through a moral argument. The fact is that many people take seriously the notion that the international community should have done something about Rwanda. I will repeat my statement regarding Somalia from the first round because I think it bears repeating: the record thus far suggests that humanitarian concerns will periodically be enough to get American troops to a place, but once they start taking casualties, or even taking real risks on the ground, a national-interest argument is necessary or the public may demand their return. Post-industrial societies just don't like casualties -- another reason that we should never go it alone (that is, without a coalition) except for reasons of naked self-interest.

New! Round Three: Concluding Remarks -- April 14, 2000
Robert D. Kaplan | Edward Luttwak | David Rieff | Benjamin Schwarz

Round Two -- April 11, 2000
Robert D. Kaplan | Edward Luttwak | David Rieff | Benjamin Schwarz

Round One -- April 6, 2000
Robert D. Kaplan | Edward Luttwak | David Rieff | Benjamin Schwarz

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