“When our interests and values are at stake, we have a responsibility to act,” President Barack Obama declared on the eve of intervention over the skies of Libya in the spring of 2011. It was telling that the president felt compelled to frame a nakedly humanitarian intervention as the defense of U.S. concerns. American interests in Libya, as opposed to those of Western European nations, were tenuous at best. American “values” are perhaps harder to define, but the merciless slaughter of civilians is certainly nothing the United States should accept as the normal conduct of statecraft. Should gross human rights violations alone precipitate the use of preventative American military force? Yes, they should, according to the previously academic doctrine dubbed “Responsibility to Protect,” or “R2P.” The argument in favor of the West’s responsibility to intervene on behalf of Libyan civilians, advanced at the time by now-United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power, won the day. It is, however, a flawed approach to defining the circumstances that should result in the application of American military power. It is susceptible to whimsy and malleable enough that it might be used to justify all manner of overseas adventurism. R2P’s brief period as a coherent doctrinal approach to foreign policy long ago reached its expiration date in the White House. While policymakers have discarded it, R2P doesn’t yet seem to have been completely discredited.
On the Republican presidential campaign trail, revisionist characterizations of the Libya campaign are all the rage. “If you look at President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and for that matter some of the more aggressive Washington neo-cons,” said Senator Ted Cruz, drawing an unduly broad brush across the American political canvas, “they have consistently misperceived the threat of radical Islamic terrorism and have advocated military adventurism that has had the effect of benefiting radical Islamic terrorists.” Cruz’s effort to link neo-conservatives, who in 2011 were perhaps at the nadir of their political credibility, with the Obama administration is surely a bit self-serving, but he did have a point. Interventionist Republicans like Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Marco Rubio backed creating a no-fly zone over Libya. In fact, they determined that an air campaign alone wouldn’t go far enough.
To suggest, however, that conservatives were responsible for the poor execution of the Libyan misadventure rewrites the history books. If regime change had been in the offing, an option that President Obama explicitly ruled out, perhaps NATO would have been better prepared when the government in Tripoli collapsed. In fact, the administration steadfastly refused to train or assist anti-Gaddafi rebels, and spent most of its energy “leading from behind” in the form of managing competing interests among the allies participating in the conflict. When Muammar Gaddafi was killed in what is now the ISIS stronghold of Sirte, the administration appeared outwardly elated. In fact, the White House’s conduct of that intervention left them no partners on the ground and little influence over the feckless and antagonistic transitional government. The administration’s aim was always to conduct a bloodless war and secure an easy and unambiguous victory – and they called the Bush administration unrealistic.
By the time that hundreds of thousands of Syrians were being slaughtered by regime forces and that civil war came to be characterized by the flagrant use of chemical weapons, there was simply no stomach left in the West for humanitarian intervention. Today, tens of thousands of Syrians are being systematically starved to death by the regime with the implicit support of Moscow and the explicit support of Tehran. All that Western powers can do in response is to bleat their disapproval; the threats implicit in the Atlantic Alliance’s condemnations are utterly exhausted.
None of this seems to have led to any soul-searching on the part of advocates for humanitarian intervention. In a heartrending dispatch in The New Republic, the Korean-American writer Suki Kim accurately noted that there is little hope for the civilians trapped in the open-air prison that the West refers to as North Korea. Sanctions have failed to weaken the regime. Six-party talks not only were unable to prevent Pyongyang from developing a reliable nuclear arsenal, but that nation’s military capability is growing. In fact, multilateral negotiations with responsible parties in the region only appear to have stabilized the regime. The true fear, Kim noted, is that this rogue state will successfully transfer a nuclear device to actors in the Middle East. “Then, the only remaining method of containment is an intervention, which would finally put an end to the world’s most brutal regime and its 7o-year entrapment of its citizens,” she observed.
This logic, while terrifying, is justifiable. The potential for catastrophe in that event is tangible, not based in speculation, and would necessitate bloody but unavoidable preemption in order to avert the worst of all possible outcomes. But Kim does not spend much time dwelling on the details. Instead, she noted the ways in which humanitarian intervention, if not preemption, is morally if not strategically warranted.
Kim closes with an impassioned appeal to common decency and our shared conceptions of human dignity, which are routinely violated by the criminal regime in Pyongyang.
There is no easy answer for how to deal with North Korea. But first, we should stop pretending that the negotiations as we have pursued them work. The longer we wait in patience, strategically inspired or not, the more people will die, and the more sophisticated Kim Jong-un’s arsenal will become. At the start of the New Year, President Obama shed tears for American children who have died from gun violence. But children are children everywhere, and perhaps the foremost consideration in relations with North Korea, which former U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry has called “the most unsuccessful exercise of diplomacy in our country’s history,” should now be human rights.
As Kim acknowledges, intervention in North Korea would be a dangerous affair, and the day after the collapse of the regime might be even worse than the war. To consider the costs associated with intervention, however, is to speculate about the effects of a real conventional war in which the number of service personnel and civilian casualties would be markedly higher than any allied conflict since the Vietnam War. The costs associated with overthrowing the regime in both blood and capital would pale in comparison to the sacrifices demanded by the post-war world we inherit. And this scenario presumes China declines to thwart the unification of the Korean peninsula through its own costly military intervention across the Yalu River.
Rebuilding the devastated South and the global economy the war claims in collateral damage will be immense, but that will be nothing compared to the task of reunification and the reintegration of a starving, intellectually impoverished, isolated people with the rest of the world. “If unification were to cost $2 trillion ($500 billion for military operations, $500 billion for damage suffered in the ROK and North Korea, and $1 trillion for economic development of the North), that would be about eight times the annual ROK government budget,” a 2013 Rand Corporation report estimated. The regrettably cold logical conclusion is that, as destabilizing and abusive as the North Korean regime is, the prospect of intervention with an eye toward regime change might be even worse. Such costs are not justified even by the systematic starvation and imprisonment of whole generations of Koreans. Containment and interdiction, rather than intervention, seems the only prudent response to the North Korean threat. At least, for now.
It is a foreseeable consequence of the administration’s short-sighted and contradictory embrace of humanitarian intervention in some conflicts and its rejection of it in others that it has become a discredited doctrine. It is an ironic twist of history that the Obama administration’s capricious stewardship of R2P has rendered it inoperative. It is a tragedy that so many civilian lives have been jeopardized in the process.
