The Sunset of Humanitarian Intervention? The Responsibility to Protect in a Unipolar Era

In spite of the current preoccupations, in the United States and in the United Nations, with the wars on terrorism and the occupation in Iraq, humanitarian intervention remains an important policy option. Future debates and action are framed by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, whose report entitled The Responsibility To Protect and an accompanying research volume were published in December 2001. Future humanitarian crises will arise in conjunction with the need for military force to protect human beings, and so four shortcomings of the report are evident. First, the report is not as forward-looking as the commissioners thought or as many opponents feared. Second, the concerns of the most vehement critics, especially developing countries, are misplaced because the problem is too little humanitarian intervention, not too much. Third, the purported danger that the concept of the responsibility to protect might become a Trojan Horse to be used by the great powers to intervene is fundamentally incorrect; rather, intervention by the USA in its pre-emptive or preventive war mode is the pressing concern. Fourth, the notion of reforming the UN Security Council is an illusion; the real challenge is to identify those humanitarian crises where Washington’s tactical multilateralism kicks in.