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The National Interest
Suffering
by Alan J. Kuperman
. . . Finally, although Rieff uses the term "moral hazard" twice in the book, it is not evident that he really understands what it means. Put simply, moral hazard is when efforts to ensure against risk inadvertently promote risk-taking behavior. For example, the U.S. government provides insurance to protect depositors against the risk of bank failure; but as a result depositors don't much care which insured bank they put their money in, so they wind up putting it in riskier banks than they otherwise might. Analogously, the "moral hazard of humanitarian intervention" signifies a situation in which international efforts to ensure people against genocide and ethnic cleansing inadvertently trigger these very atrocities.
The dynamic is simple: under ordinary circumstances, most disgruntled ethnic groups do not take up arms against the state because they fear ruthless retaliation. As a result, most states have no incentive to carry out genocide or ethnic cleansing against subordinate ethnic groups. But when the international community announces a policy of humanitarian intervention to protect ethnic groups against atrocities, it actually increases the incentive for these same groups to launch armed rebellions. Leaders of such groups now calculate that if their rebellion succeeds, they win; if it falters, some outside force will spare them the greater cost of defeat-so why not go for it? The tragic, unintended consequence of a policy of humanitarian intervention is thus to trigger more rebellion, which in turn provokes more ruthless retaliation by state authorities. Any credible analysis of humanitarian intervention today must at least discuss this dynamic. Rieff's does not. . . .