The National Interest
Spring 2000 (No. 59)

To Fight the Good Fight (Extracts)

By Elliott Abrams

 

. . . Krauthammer's Law The most serious pragmatic problem posed by humanitarian intervention is that the willingness of the intervening country to place lives and resources at risk is determined by the degree of national interest involved. Charles Krauthammer has described the resulting problem in an article in these pages, in which he calls the notion of humanitarian war "an idea whose time has come, and gone." He elaborates: "The central contradiction--the Iron Law of Humanitarian War--is this: Humanitarian war requires means that are inherently inadequate to its ends." The first reason that humanitarian war has no future, in his view, is that it involves "a contradiction of means: bloodless war."

Krauthammer's point is well taken, as is his observation that the very effort to avoid bloodshed (your own or the opponent's) may prolong a war. When the motive is purely humanitarian, national interests vague or nonexistent, and the risks high, humanitarian intervention will not, ironically, be an attractive option. There are, however, cases where conditions are more favorable. Sometimes the risks seem low due to a huge disproportion of power between the interveners and the target state; sometimes a measure of national interest is involved. For example, when the United States intervened in Haiti for "humanitarian" reasons, did we not also want a decent government in place there so that we could in good conscience send back Haitian "boat people"?

In fact, absolutely pure humanitarian interventions may be the exception rather than the rule. To diminish Krauthammer's gap between ends and means, it is necessary only to reduce the risks a bit and raise the national interest rewards above zero, and at some point a balance may be found. Indeed, considering the cases in which the world either did not intervene at all or did so without much energy--as in the cases of Rwanda and Tibet--Krauthammer's problem solves itself: when ends and means are too far out of whack, there will be no intervention. The decision to intervene is, after all, still being made most often by political leaders whose pursuit of humanitarian ends will continue to be tempered by their need to win elections.

Krauthammer's suggestion that means will be limited by ends--that humanitarian goals presage a weak-kneed effort that will fall short--may be wrong as well. Acting with absolute certainty of our moral rightness, we may be willing to pound the malefactors into the ground. In Kosovo, that is what happened: while the NATO effort began weakly, it later became so intense that some (including myself) complained of the civilian casualties being caused in Serbia. The moral arithmetic here became perverse: we were unwilling to risk many American casualties in air or ground combat but, given the rightness of our cause, we felt justified in a high-altitude bombing campaign that inevitably killed civilians. Instead of Krauthammer's limited war dilemma, we may in the future find ourselves confronted with a much different problem if we choose to ignore the "just war" doctrine of proportionality: we may just blast the bastards to smithereens--and feel better about it than we have any business feeling, especially in the humanitarian context.

These are practical problems: how hard do you fight, how much do you risk, how many do you kill when direct national interests are quite limited? To these questions one more must be added: how likely is success? To impose hardship and to take lives when there is little chance of solving anything is not only feckless but immoral. Krauthammer argues powerfully that few cases will provide any reasonable chance of a positive outcome because the social rifts deep enough to produce massive human rights crimes cannot be solved by a brief bit of international policing. We may stop the bloodshed while we are there, only to see it take off again when we leave.

In many cases, we will indeed be too ignorant about the society in question to do much good except keep the human rights violators apart from their intended victims for a while. Or we will be willing to intervene briefly but unwilling to meet the costs of the prolonged stay that real change requires. On other occasions our self-interested intervention will be wrongly labeled humanitarian, and we will advance our own national goals even if the locals benefit little (as in the case of Haiti). In all these situations, humanitarian intervention may achieve little long-term improvement in the lives of the people it claims to help.

But not always. The practical difficulties of successful humanitarian intervention remind us that our goal is to do good rather than feel good, but they should not block action when there is something useful to be done. Sometimes the problem may be an individual dictator: Panama, for example, is clearly better off with General Noriega in jail (whether one calls the U.S. intervention there humanitarian or imperialist) and has become a working democracy. Sometimes even deep social divisions can exist without sectarian violence or mass murder, and a period of foreign intervention may open a new phase in the political life of a nation. The "realist" school provides important warnings against allowing moralizing to replace judgment, but prudence does not always dictate inaction or indifference. . . .