PBS – Joshua Foust: When intervention fails
In his column for PBS Need to Know, ASP fellow Joshua Foust writes about the costs of intervention that are rarely discussed.
The issue isn’t that intervention never works, or that inaction is preferable – the consequences of not intervening in Rwanda, for example, are horrifying. But all too often, interventions are advocated for and put into practice with very little thought as to how they’ll turn out, or what the international community will do once they’re over and the messy work of reconciliation and rebuilding begins. Whatever the moral justifications are for a particular intervention (and there is always some value to intervening), there also needs to be an honest discussion of what its costs will be — for the long term.
The current public campaign to intervene in the uprisings across the Arab world – Libya, Syria, even Yemen or Bahrain – is based on a radicalredefinition of the relationship of society to the state through the R2P doctrine, demanding states provide or protect certain aspects of daily life for their citizens to be considered responsible. This is based on a concept we in the west find appealing; that does not always grant us to the right to dictate that same governmental philosophy on other nations.
Military power is, at best, a clumsy instrument of statecraft, and we have a terrible record of realistically predicting the consequences of its use. Normalizing the use of the military to interfere in conflicts that don’t involve us carries enormous costs that are often ignored in the heated public debate about how to end suffering. Nevertheless, those costs need to be kept paramount as we consider options — and especially if we choose to use the military to intervene for humanitarian purposes, we should be up front and honest about the likely high costs of doing so
