Woodrow Wilson, R.I.P - 2 new books

Reason, Nov, 2001 by Ted Galen Carpenter

The folly of humanitarian military intervention

In recent years, the doctrine of humanitarian military intervention has become especially controversial. Under Bill Clinton, the United States participated in several missions of that type, most notably in the Balkans. Proponents insist that those ventures were legally and morally justified and that the outcomes were generally positive. Critics counter with equal vehemence that humanitarian interventions bear more than a passing resemblance to old-style imperialism, that they often make problems worse rather than better, and that they entangle the United States in murky disputes that have little or no connection to the nation's legitimate security interests.

Wilson's Ghost, by former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and Brown University political scientist James G. Blight, and Waging Modern War, by former NATO supreme commander Gen. Wesley K. Clark, present impassioned cases for an activist U.S. policy in the tradition of Woodrow Wilson. According to this view, the United States has a both moral and strategic interest in taking vigorous action, including the use of military force, to prevent egregious human-rights abuses and to prevent small conflicts from mushrooming into more serious wars. The result, the authors contend, would be a more stable and peaceful world.

Wilson's Ghost provides the more wide-ranging coverage, and makes the more nuanced, conditional case for intervention. McNamara and Blight concede that Wilson's emphasis on "national self-determination" helped unleash one of the more disruptive forces in international affairs during the 20th century. Nevertheless, they insist that Wilson's principal vision--of collective international action to repel aggression--was sound and could have spared humanity the century's subsequent mass slaughters. They believe that the failure to achieve Wilson's vision was an immense tragedy, but they contend that the United States and the rest of the international community have an opportunity to rectify that mistake and realize his dream in the 21st century.

McNamara and Blight argue that the reduction of human carnage throughout the world should be a central objective of U.S. foreign policy. To advance that goal, they present a number of specific proposals, which they tout as new initiatives. In reality, most of the proposals are hoary liberal interventionist panaceas. For example, the authors argue that the United States should undertake military actions only as part of multilateral coalitions--preferably those blessed by the United Nations. The UN itself should be restructured (that is, strengthened) so that it would be more effective in initiating and managing humanitarian interventions. More vigorous efforts should be made to define, deter, and punish war crimes--including a permanent international criminal court. All of these schemes have been around for decades. (McNamara and Blight even trot out the oldest of left-wing peace-movement panaceas: the abolition of nuclear weapons.)

Despite the stale quality of many of the arguments in Wilson's Ghost, the authors do make a few worthwhile observations. For example, they emphasize that a failure to integrate Russia and China into cooperative relations with the other major powers would greatly increase the danger of catastrophic war. And in marked contrast to most other members of the American foreign policy establishment, they acknowledge that U.S. policy is contributing to the alienation of those two countries. They note, for example, that Washington's push for the eastward expansion of NATO has led to a deterioration in U.S.-Russian relations. Most other writers on that topic seem blissfully oblivious to the connection between those two developments. McNamara and Blight justifiably find the state of America's overall relations with Russia and China worrisome. "Russia and China have entered the 21st century full of mistrust of the United States, suspicious that the United States seeks worldwide hegemony to which even the other Great Power s (as the Russians and Chinese regard themselves) are expected to knuckle under."

Yet even on that issue, McNamara and Blight minimize an important point. One of the developments that has most agitated Russia and China is the proliferation of U.S.-led humanitarian military interventions. Those are precisely the kind of missions that the authors would have Washington undertake to an even greater extent. And their emphasis on multilateralism, unless the UN is regarded as the sole legitimate mechanism, would not resolve that problem. Kosovo, after all, was a multilateral (NATO) intervention, and yet it was vehemently opposed by Russia and China.

The central defect in Wilson's Ghost, though, is the naivete of its major proposals. Among the most unrealistic of these is the author's support for the abolition of nuclear weapons. A world in which two countries (India and Pakistan) have recently joined the nuclear-weapons club is not going to renounce such weapons anytime soon. Indeed, the trend appears to be toward more proliferation, not less.