Stephen Wertheim is former Managing Editor of the Harvard International Review.
What It Really Takes To Stop Genocide
Observing the failure of an overextended US military to intervene in Darfur, Michael O’Hanlon offers a creative proposal in the latest New Republic: form a rapid-deployment US military division dedicated to stopping genocide in the future. A 20,000-strong force should do the job, he argues. The problem is, it can’t. O’Hanlon—like many in the stop-genocide movement—neglects what military intervention really entails.
Once the force halts genocide, what happens next? If the mayhem in Iraq should teach us anything, it is that invaders need to be ready to rebuild. Countries rarely come equipped with shadow governments that are organized, legitimate, and desirable for instant installation—especially countries torn by genocidal violence and hatred. That means US troops will be in charge.
They cannot withdraw prematurely, plunging the country right back into genocide. They could hope the Europeans or United Nations takes over, but they cannot count on that, not when post-genocide stability seems likely to be uncertain. So if they really want to help, they better be willing and able to dig in and rule. A rapid-deployment division is designed to get in and get out. It will probably be capable of long-term occupation in neither manpower, training, nor doctrine; the US military as a whole lacks troops, military police, and civil personnel equipped for nation-building. That is to say nothing of domestic political pressures for withdrawal once casualties mount.
It would seem impossible to intervene to stop genocide only to do more harm than good. But unless America is willing and able to stay for years, exactly that might happen. The result would be tragedy for all involved.
“What happens next” seems like an obvious question to ask. Of course it ought to factor into decisions to intervene. Yet O’Hanlon ignores it. So do many fellow human-rights interventionists (notably Samantha Power in her Pulitzer Prize-winning A Problem from Hell). So did the Bush administration before the Iraq war. Why?
1. Perhaps intervention seems so imperative as to justify deception about the burdens it imposes. Such a view, however, is not only morally questionable but possibly self-defeating if it prevents recognition of actions needed to make intervention work.
2. Maybe the question is not asked because war evokes combat. Postwar stabilization is an afterthought in major wars, appropriately; the day after Pearl Harbor, FDR did not need a Japanese reconstruction plan to know to declare war. But such wars are fought to eliminate existential security threats. Humanitarian intervention, by contrast, is intended for the good of the local population. Those who would do good need to find out whether they can deliver.
3. The United States officially is not an empire and never acts like one (unofficially, not unless it feels like it, the Philippines and Haiti remind). Other Western nations are equally if not more anti-imperial. As I have argued, nations are unlikely to envision occupations they by nature “don’t do.”
4. Then there is good old idealism that can obscure reality. I have yet to hear an advocate of stopping genocide refer to “invasion.” Sometimes the term is “genocide prevention,” which would actually mean marching in before genocide started. Most often, however, it is “intervention.” Intervention is not invasion. It is clinical and cooperative. It’s what you do when you get your friends together to tell her he’s not the guy to date.
Intervention is war. “We should never be in a position where we are hesitant to stop a genocide because our troops are otherwise occupied,” O’Hanlon writes. I would say the opposite. We should always hesitate to stop a genocide, even if troops are available. We should hesitate in order to make sure we would do good. We should hesitate in order to imagine the possible and probable consequences. We should hesitate in order to plan realistically and farsightedly. If we will not do good, we must not go.
Advocates of stopping genocide like to ask why, despite post-Holocaust avowals of “never again,” genocide has been allowed to occur again and again. If they want to know the answer, they have to get real about what stopping genocide requires.
Why We Should Care About American Empire
Is America an empire? In the midst of much academic debate, political scientist Alexander J. Motyl asks a practical question: what does it matter?
“Imagine,” he writes, “that policy analysts and scholars stopped applying the label to the United States. Would it make any difference? I think not. The challenges facing the country—war in Iraq, nuclear weapons in Iran and North Korea, rising authoritarianism in Russia, growing military power in China, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, terrorism, avian flu, climate change, and so forth—would be exactly the same, as would US policy options…Life would go on, and no one—except for scholars of empire—would notice the difference.”
Motyl is undeniably right that challenges and policy options would be exactly the same. What he misses is that policymakers might never think of them or take them seriously. Here are two recent examples from Motyl’s own list.
If policymakers thought of America as an empire, they might have thought it prudent to plan for postwar occupation of Iraq. “I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called nation-building,” George W. Bush declared in the 2000 presidential debates. Evidently he believed his rhetoric. When deciding to invade Iraq, the Bush administration found little need to draw up long-term plans to rule and reconstruct the country. Nor did Democrats in Congress press the point. Nor, for that matter, is the US military equipped in doctrine or manpower to conduct large-scale nation-building. Why prepare for what America by nature “doesn’t do?”
If policymakers thought of America as an empire, they might have been quicker to grasp Islamist terrorism as a major threat before 9/11. Policymakers were focused on state actors. And rightly, if America is solely a nation-state capable of being threatened solely by nation-states. By contrast, stateless tribal fighters are the age-old enemies of empire. They sacked Rome until Rome fell. They raided China from the north, conquering the realm several times despite the Great Wall built to keep them out. Pirates harassed Britain at sea. A clear lesson of empire is to beware the barbarian on the frontier. But if there is no empire, there is no frontier and no barbarian to beware. The US government devoted so little resources to tracking terrorism that almost no officials knew Osama bin Laden was a terrorist leader until 1996, even though bin Laden became al Qaeda’s leader in 1988, according to the 9/11 Commission Report.
Objectively, long-term occupation was a policy option and bin Laden was an enemy. The problem was subjective: they were not perceived as such.
Realist theory imagines an objective world. It assumes international relations consists of perfectly rational actors. Their interests are self-evident facts, and policy options obvious. These assumptions are necessary to explain the operation of the balance of power—probably the first thing any policymaker or analyst needs to know about international relations. But the balance of power is a structural phenomenon and no more. It’s foolish to think realism should explain everything. International relations is conducted by people, who are not perfectly rational, who conceive of interests differently and who must filter policy judgments through some ideology without which the world would appear as a bombardment of random events.
Yes, it matters whether America is an empire. And it matters whether policymakers think so, in the most practical ways.
America’s Trans-Atlantic Election
If Europeans could vote in US elections, would they vote in greater proportions than US citizens? That, of course, is destined to remain a hypothetical question. But it is worth posing if only because an answer in the affirmative seems possible.
Quite possible, to tell by the attention Europe gave the US midterm elections this November. After the Democratic victory, Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D’alema was openly ecstatic. “A cycle has ended,” he said. “The cycle of pre-emptive wars, of unilateralism, ends in great failure…A new cycle must begin and I think there is a great responsibility for Europe.” D’alema’s European counterparts were less bold, but many hold similar aspirations for the future of US foreign policy and European global responsibility.
Why are Europeans so interested in US elections? One answer is obvious. The United States, the sole superpower, mightily affects Europe and the international system for which Europe has a vision. President George W. Bush’s foreign policy offends European sensibilities, and Democrats, promising multilateralism, appear closer to Europeans.
That explains why Europeans care but not why D’alema’s Panglossian proclamation betrays desperation—as if two years of Democratic Congress will end unilateralism forever. Perhaps it is because US elections are Europe’s only realistic hope for attaining the change it seeks in US foreign relations. As Robert Kagan writes in his famous 2002 article on trans-Atlantic rift, Europeans “want to control the behemoth by appealing to its conscience.” Abundant in soft power, Europe lacks the hard power, particularly military, to compel the United States to see the world its way.
In the next few years, US presidential candidates will debate foreign policy, and it should become more clear whether the trends that disturb Europe are ephemeral products of the Bush administration or something longer lasting and more deeply rooted. I suspect the latter will be the case. If so, Europe will face a difficult choice, perhaps an impossibility. If Kagan is right that European ideology seeks transcendence of hard power in international relations, then that ideology seems bound to be self-defeating. Europe cannot acquire military power because it believes military power should be obsolete. Without military power, Europe will be too weak to define the rules of the international system. Its plight is like the pacifist’s: pacifism cannot be imposed on those who insist on fighting.
Europe could acquire military power only to gain leverage in diplomacy, not to employ in battle. That, however, seems doubly implausible, first in the acquiring, second in the limiting, because military capability tends to tempt its usage.
Otherwise the best way to reduce trans-Atlantic tension may be psychological—for Europeans to accommodate themselves to the reality that after roughly four centuries of defining the international system, they no longer run the world.