Rieff - Round One

David Rieff
Round One - April 6, 2000

I would like to think more generally about this question before getting down to cases -- Kosovo, East Timor, etc. Does humanitarian intervention have a future? It does, both for better and for worse, and my own view is that a debate that does not acknowledge this fact is the foreign-policy equivalent of whistling past the graveyard. It may be that the U.S. would be better off with a foreign policy based on realpolitik, or, better still, on the kind of modest, "lead by example" idea of a George Kennan, but this is not going to happen. Such modesty, or realism, or pessimism -- call it what you will -- is out of sync with the American temper, which is grounded in the faith that there are no problems without solutions and few if any challenges where it is better (or even acceptable) to do nothing rather than something. In this sense, as in so many others, President Clinton is very much the representative man of the American millennium, and when we talk of humanitarian intervention we would do well to recall the signature phrase of his presidency -- "I still believe in a place called Hope."

Historically, the United States has never been a country where foreign-policy initiatives were undertaken only on sound calculations of national interest, and it is not going to become one in the twenty-first century. Nor is there any reason to expect that the country's deep bias in favor of some species of moralizing in foreign policy -- call it Wilsonian, internationalist, or just sentimental -- will ever be blunted, whatever the fantasies of the Buchananites on one side and what remains of the left on the other that, at long last, the pendulum is finally swinging back toward a different dispensation.

The peculiar centrality of the idea of humanitarian intervention in the post-Cold War period derives from the fact that other moralizing rationales no longer seem compelling. For all the vaunted religiosity of the U.S., only a secular justification is likely to win universal acceptance. For half a century the secular religion of U.S. policy makers was anti-communism; now it is human rights and humanitarianism. There should be nothing particularly surprising about this. What would be astonishing would be if, in this age of economic globalization (one of whose epiphenomena is that one can watch people die in real time on CNN), some new moral warrant had not been devised.

This is not simply a question of somehow putting one over on the public, or invoking humanitarianism to conceal other, occluded agendas. Our policy makers are not Roman centurions. They cannot simply advance the economic or military interests of the United States and, in doing so, think well enough of themselves to continue. On the contrary, they must believe that not only are they opening markets for GE but that they are opening minds, building democracy, furthering the cause of human rights, and upholding certain minimal humanitarian norms.

In other words, humanitarian intervention is part of a new world system that is coming into being. It can be argued that it is the "damage control" aspect of that system. And while the assault on national sovereignty that such intervention represents may seem very radical, in fact it is of a piece with the far more profound assault on sovereignty contained in the neo-liberal project of economic globalization. That there is much to be said both for humanitarian intervention and against it appears obvious to me, and doubtless we will go on to argue about that. But the salient point, it seems to me, is that this explains why it is here to stay, and why in an important sense criticizing the idea of humanitarian intervention, or exposing its inconsistencies and hypocrisies -- real as they are -- is beside the point. The real question is where this new doctrine will lead us, and whether there is any way of influencing its development.

What do you think?

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David Rieff is the author of Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West (1995) and the co-editor, with Roy Gutman, of Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know (1999). He is currently completing a book on humanitarian aid and, with Kenneth Anderson, co-authoring a critique of the human-rights movement.