R2P is a Doctrine Designed to Strike Down the Hand that Wields It
There has been much ado about Dr. Anne-Marie Slaughter’s ennunciation of “Responsibility to Protect” as a justification for the Obama administration’s unusually executed intervention (or assistance to primarily British and French intervention) in Libya in support of rebels seeking to oust their lunatic dictator, Colonel Moammar Gaddafi. In “R2P” the Obama administration, intentionally or not, has 
found it’s own Bush Doctrine, and unsurprisingly, the magnitude of such claims – essentially a declaration of jihad against what is left of the Westphalian state system by progressive elite intellectuals – are beginning to draw fire for implications that stretch far beyond Libya.
People in the strategic studies, IR and national security communities have a parlor game of wistfully reminiscing about the moral clarity of Containment and the wisdom of George Kennan. They have been issuing tendentiously self-important “Mr. Z” papers for so long that they failed to notice that if anyone has really written the 21st Century’s answer to Kennan’s X article, it was Anne-Marie Slaughter’s battle cry in the pages of The Atlantic.
George Kennan did not become the “Father of Containment” because he thought strategically about foreign policy in terms of brutal realism. Nor because he was a stern anti-Communist. Or because he had a deep and reflective understanding of Russian history and Leninism, whose nuances were the sources of Soviet conduct. No, Kennan became the Father of Containment because he encapsulated all of those things precisely at the moment when America’s key decision makers, facing the Soviet threat, were willing to embrace a persuasive explanatory narrative, a grand strategy that could harmonize policy with domestic politics.
Slaughter’s idea is not powerful because it is philosophically or legally airtight – it isn’t – but because R2P resonates deeply both with immediate state interests and emotionally with the generational worldview of what Milovan Djilas might have termed a Western “New Class”.
While it is easy to read R2P simply as a useful political cover for Obama administration policy in Libya, as it functioned as such in the short term, that is a mistaken view, and one that I think badly underestimates Anne-Marie Slaughter. Here is Slaughter’s core assertion, where she turns most of modern diplomatic history and international law as it is understood and practiced bilaterally and multilaterally by sovereign states in the real world (vice academics and IGO/NGO bureaucrats) on it’s head:
If we really do look at the world in terms of governments and societies and the relationship between them, and do recognize that both governments and their citizens have rights as subjects of international law and have agency as actors in international politics, then what exactly is the international community “intervening” in?
…For the first time, international law and the great powers of international politics have recognized both the rights of citizens and a specific relationship between the government and its citizens: a relationship of protection. The nature of sovereignty itself is thus changed: legitimate governments are defined not only by their control of a territory and a population but also by how they exercise that control. If they fail in that obligation, the international community has the responsibility to protect those citizens.
Slaughter is a revolutionary who aspires to a world that would functionally resemble the Holy Roman Empire, writ large, with a diffusion of power away from legal process of state institutions to the networking informalities of the larger social class from whom a majority of state and IGO officials are drawn, as a global community. In terms of policy advocacy, this is a brilliantly adept move to marry state and class interests with stark moral justifications, regardless of how the argument might be nibbled to death in an arcane academic debate.
As with Kennan’s X Article, which faced a sustained critique from Walter Lippmann who realized that Containment implied irrevocable changes in the American system, R2P has attracted criticism. Some examples:
Joshua Foust –Why sovereignty matters
Much as advocates of the “Responsibility to Protect,” or R2P, like to say that sovereignty is irrelevant to the relationship of a society to its government (which Slaughter explicitly argues), it is that very sovereignty which also creates the moral and legal justification to intervene. For example, the societies of the United States and NATO did not vote to intervene in Libya – their governments did.
Foreign Affairs – The Folly of Protection
….RtoP, responding to the sense that these domestic harms warranted international response, solidified the Security Council’s claims to wider discretion. Yet it also restricted its ability to sanction intervention to the four situations listed in the RtoP document — genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity — and thus precluded, for example, intervention in cases of civil disorder and coups. Although the resolution authorizing force against Libya will certainly further entrench the principle of RtoP, it will not completely resolve the tension between RtoP — in itself only a General Assembly recommendation — and the UN Charter itself, which, according to the letter of the law, limits action to “international” threats.
Dan Trombly –The upending of sovereignty and Responsibility to Protect Ya Neck
Beauchamp, along with Slaughter, have revealed R2P for what it actually is: a doctrine based on regime change and the destruction of the foundations of international order wherever practically possible. After all, are intervening powers really fulfilling their responsibility if they fail to effect regime change after intervening? This is exactly why I believe R2P is far more insidious than many of its advocates would have us believe or intend in practice. It is essentially mandating a responsibility, wherever possible, to seek the sanction, coercion, or overthrow of regimes which fail to meet a liberal conception of acceptable state behavior. Even if R2P is never applied against a major power, it is hard to see why such behavior would not be met with just as much suspicion as humanitarian intervention and previous Western regime change operations were. Indeed, a full treatment will reveal there is immense pressure for R2P to initiate the more fundamental, and more universal, impulse to revert to the potential ruthlessness inherent in international anarchy.
Understandably, such critiques of R2P are primarily concerned with sovereignty as it relates to interstate relations and the historical predisposition for great powers to meddle in the affairs of weaker countries, usually with far less forthrightness than the Athenians displayed at Melos. It must be said, that small countries often are their own worst enemies in terms of frequently providing pretexts for foreign intervention due to epic incompetence in self-governance and a maniacal delight in atavistic bloodshed. Slaughter is not offering up a staw man in relation to democide and genocide being critical problems with which the international community is poorly equipped and politically unwilling to counter.
But R2P is a two edged sword – the sovereignty of all states diminished universally, in legal principle, to the authority of international rule-making about the domestic use of force is likewise diminished in it’s ability to legislate it’s own internal affairs, laws being nothing but sovereign promises of state enforcement. Once the camel’s nose is legitimated by being formally accepted as having a place in the tent, the rest of the camel is merely a question of degree.
And time.
As Containment required an NSC-68 to put policy flesh on the bones of doctrine, R2P will require the imposition of policy mechanisms that will change the political community of the United States, moving it away from democratic accountability to the electorate toward “legal”, administrative, accountability under international law; a process of harmonizing US policies to an amorphous, transnational, elite consensus, manifested in supranational and international bodies. Or decided privately and quietly, ratifying decisions later as a mere formality in a rubber-stamping process that is opaque to everyone outside of the ruling group.
Who is to say that there is not, somewhere in the intellectual ether, an R2P for the the environment, to protect the life of the unborn, to mandate strict control of small arms, or safeguard the political rights of minorities by strictly regulating speech? Or whatever might be invented to suit the needs of the moment?
When we arrest a bank robber, we do not feel a need to put law enforcement and the judiciary on a different systemic basis in order to try them. Finding legal pretexts for intervention to stop genocide does not require a substantial revision of international law, merely political will. R2P could become an excellent tool for elites to institute their policy preferences without securing democratic consent and that aspect, to oligarchical elites is a feature, not a bug.
R2P will come back to haunt us sooner than we think.
ADDENDUM:
Doug Mataconis at Outside the Beltway links here in a round-up and commentary about R2P posts popping up in the wake of the Slaughter piece:
The “Responsibility To Protect” Doctrine After Libya
….It’s understandable that the advocates of R2P don’t necessarily want to have Libya held up as an example of their doctrine in action. Leaving aside the obvious contrasts with the situation in Syria and other places in the world, it is by no means clear that post-Gaddafi Libya will be that much better than what preceded it. The rebels themselves are hardly united around anything other than wanting to get rid of Gaddafi and, now that they’ve done that, the possibility of the nation sliding into civil and tribal warfare is readily apparent. Moreover, the links between the rebels and elements of al Qaeda that originated in both Afghanistan and post-Saddam Iraq are well-known. If bringing down Gaddafi means the creation of a safe haven for al Qaeda inspired terrorism on the doorstep of Europe, then we will all surely come to regret the events of the past five months. Finally, with the rebels themselves now engaging in atrocities, one wonders what has happened to the United Nations mission to protect civilians, which didn’t distinguish between attacks by Gaddafi forces or attacks by rebels.
….Finally, there’s the danger that the doctrine poses to American domestic institutions. If Libya is any guide, then R2P interventions, of whatever kind, would likely be decided by international bodies of “experts” rather than the democratically elected representatives of the American people. American sailors and soldiers will be sent off into danger without the American people being consulted. That’s not what the Constitution contemplates, and if we allow it to happen it will be yet another nail in the coffin of liberty.
Read the rest here.
September 3rd, 2011 at 12:25 pm
Major post, Zen.
September 3rd, 2011 at 1:07 pm
thanks Charles! Having run it up the flagpole, we shall see if it draws any salutes 😉
September 3rd, 2011 at 2:33 pm
As I recall, Philip II of Spain believed he had a responsibility to protect Catholic interests throughout Europe. Hence the Spanish Armada, etc.
Generally speaking, proponents of such doctrines generally envision only scenarios where they are the intervenors and not those scenarios where they are the intervenees. Indeed when such scenarios, where they are those who are intervened upon, are drawn to their attention, they can become quite unpleasant.
September 3rd, 2011 at 4:06 pm
Good post, Mark.
.
The questions of whether there’s an R2P the unborn, the environment, whales, minorities, etc. are questions that have already been raised with respect to the International Criminal Court. What happens when the American military court system fails to deliver a verdict demanded by international publics?
.
The problem with R2P is that it is essentially an open-ended doctrine. Regardless of it’s name, R2P defines what can be done. It does not define what cannot be done. There are no real limits, only rhetorical limits. In the Westphalian system, at the very least, there were territorial and temporal limits to what could be justified, as well as consequences. With R2P, none of that exists. The only thing that matters is that one be able to find a rationale for doing what one wishes.
.
Not to go all Godwin on you, but even Hitler took over the Sudentenland under the guise of "protection."
September 3rd, 2011 at 6:18 pm
R2P can be boiled down to "the strong do what they can, the weak do what they must".
The Westphalian system, inasmuch as such a creature ever existed, was held up by principles and conventions that proved as transient and weak as international liberalism does now when a challenger came along. Westphalia was preserved by the failure of any aspiring hegemon from Louis XIV to Hitler to summon enough violent power to overcome all of their enemies, not by any intrinsic truth discovered in 1648. Similarly, the attempts to squelch freedoms at home will succeed when the consent of the governed, upheld by the governed’s ability to kill the government, is overwhelmed by the violent means controlled by the elite.
The same logic applied to earlier eras of European hegemonic aspirations. Augustus, failed to consolidate his hold on Germania, Charlemagne, couldn’t subdue fringe groups like the Norsemen, Charles the
BoldRash, ran into unobliging Swiss pikemen, and his great-grandson Charles V faced French, Protestants, and any number of other incorrigibles.Europe was the only part of Eurasia that escaped the hegemonic potential of gunpowder. In the Middle East under Selim the Grim, Persia under Shah Ismail, and India under Babur, gunpowder swept away regional magnates and their strongholds and led to universal empires. Europe saw one brief flash of this when Charles VIII of France and his artillery swept through Italy in 1498 like a knife through butter.
Charles V by all rights should have been the Selim, Ismail, or Babur of Europe. However, the sudden emergence of the trace italienne and the political fragmentation it preserved frustrated his and his son Phillip’s ambitions.
A counter-factual America that experienced a less frustrating taste of ruling over foreigners than Korea or Vietnam may have been even more interventionist in the post-colonial era than the actual Cold War America. The lopsided success of Panama and Desert Storm, coupled with the sudden disappearance of the USSR, revived the American taste for violent foreign intervention that first appeared in the 1850s until quelched by the Civil War, revived in the early 2oth century until quelched by the Depression, and came back in full force after 1945 until quelched by Vietnam and the malaise of the 197os.
We may be entering another age of restraint like the 198os but if, like that decade, our restraint is due more to a perceived loss of power than an actual loss of power, we’ll be out intervening again in no time.
September 3rd, 2011 at 6:49 pm
Then again, R2P has brought about the greatest resurgence of classical state sovereignty in the post-1945 era. At the high-end of the spectrum of state sovereignty, the guarantor of sovereign rights is possession of nuclear weapons. If you have no nuclear capacity like Afghanistan 2001, Iraq 2003, or Libya 2011, you get R2Ped. If you do have nuclear capacity like North Korea 2oo5 or Iran 2009, you don’t get R2Ped. So, in a roundabout way, Slaughter is an extreme advocate of absolute state sovereignty.
However, possession of nuclear weapons is not a guarantee of state sovereignty on the low end. There, the same gnawing away at the state that brought down the USSR can inject decay into even the holder of nuclear weapons and reduce it to ungoverned space. Pakistan is a strong candidate for that. However, this is no reason for Western smugness of the Slaughter variety. The same forces of decay that threaten state sovereignty in the Third World are at work in the developed world. Whether you can nuke your way back to a better social order is an open question.
September 3rd, 2011 at 9:15 pm
Nice post Zen.
I would ask as to the political context, what is the political context of R2P? For the US? And for the world? We are talking about essentially the Libyan intervention, right? And the US role in that intervention, which was more of a supporting role to the especially French lead, right?
Just an attempt to separate what is actually substantial from the smoke and mirrors . . .
September 4th, 2011 at 1:42 am
Who is to say that there is not, somewhere in the intellectual ether, an R2P for the environment, to protect the life of the unborn, to mandate strict control of small arms, or safeguard the political rights of minorities by strictly regulating speech? Or whatever might be invented to suit the needs of the moment? News Bulletin: September 1. 2019· The United States and the American people which consist of 5% of the world’s population have been indicted by a United Nations Tribunal for crimes against humanity for using 24% of the world’s energy, and collectively consuming billions of calories beyond what is needed for survival each day. The member nations are deciding on a plan of action to bring American consumption in line with the global average mandated by a UN commission. This imaginary new bulletin seems far-fetched today; but give it a few years as Mark notes.R2P will come back to haunt us sooner than we think.
September 4th, 2011 at 1:45 am
Hi gents,
.
Much thanks!
.
Mercutio wrote:
.
" Indeed when such scenarios, where they are those who are intervened upon, are drawn to their attention, they can become quite unpleasant."
.
I’m sure Dr. Slaughter is personally quite charming but, in general, I think you are right.
.
Nathaniel wrote:
.
"What happens when the American military court system fails to deliver a verdict demanded by international publics?"
.
The same general officers who kowtow to diversity totemics – like the guy pulling a SOF unit from it’s important, pre-deployment to Afghanistan training to attend a rush DADT repeal sensitivity session (I’m sure that PC cultishness helped in a firefight with the Taliban more than the mission-specific training they missed) – will strive to make certain courts-martial, tribunals, commissions and ROE all conform. The rub will be the point where conforming to elite transnationalists will be an operational dealbreaker AND guarantee nasty political blowback from pro-defense MoC. That’s when all hell will break loose.
.
"The problem with R2P is that it is essentially an open-ended doctrine. Regardless of it’s name, R2P defines what can be done. It does not define what cannot be done"
.
Bingo! Extremely well put.
.
Joseph Fouche wrote:
.
"R2P can be boiled down to "the strong do what they can, the weak do what they must".
The Westphalian system, inasmuch as such a creature ever existed, was held up by principles and conventions that proved as transient and weak as international liberalism does now when a challenger came along. Westphalia was preserved by the failure of any aspiring hegemon from Louis XIV to Hitler to summon enough violent power to overcome all of their enemies, not by any intrinsic truth discovered in 1648"
.
Sort of right. 1648 was the point where religiously inspired (or at least fig-leafed) maximalism in intra-european warfare stopped being the norm and became the exception, the Thirty Year’s War teaching the value of geopolitical restraint, in mutual self-interest. All in all the cabinet wars were less destructive and more easily terminated than earlier conflicts like, say, the Albigensian Crusade or later ones like the Spanish guerrilla resistance to Bonapartist rule of Spain.
.
". However, this is no reason for Western smugness of the Slaughter variety. The same forces of decay that threaten state sovereignty in the Third World are at work in the developed world. "
.
Very true. Slaughter is opening a doctrinal Pandora’s box here that will act as an accelerant on the smoldering embers of 4GW ( or "criminal insurgencies" or separatists or whatever you want to call them), as R2P will be used to thwart stable third world states from crushing deadly insurgencies. One can imagine advocates of R2P intervening in Sri Lanka to save the Tamil Tigers from destruction, or to stop Colombia from grinding FARC down into a nusiance, and so on. Western countries that try to nip serious internal security threats in the bud will be locked by legal paralysis.
.
seydlitz89 wrote:
.
"I would ask as to the political context, what is the political context of R2P? For the US? And for the world? We are talking about essentially the Libyan intervention, right? "
.
I’d say that the danger of R2P is that it is wielded as a contextless abstraction, posited as an emergent though fundamental (!) principle of international law applicable, theoretically, to be plugged into any context, as desired.
.
R2P as an academic notion precedes Libya, though Slaughter has articulated it forcefully and in laymen’s language. Libya is not a *model* of R2P but an *example* or case study that began with some favorable strategic advantages (militarily weak nation; an isolated, widely unpopular and irrational ruler; geography that maximizes the possible use of advanced NATO airpower; a widespread, if poorly armed and untrained, rebellion against the government) yet the great power intervention is still short of a successful conclusion as of this writing. I do not expect that the next R2P intervention will look the same, operationally, as Libya. R2P could be carried out in a wide range of ways, from massive ground invasion to no-fly zones to arming proxies to naval blockades and so on.
.
The thing is, such a doctrine is neither required to carry out an intervention of this nature – the French have been intervening quite regularly in post-colonial Francophone Africa without it for decades – nor is it particularly helpful in signaling to other states under what conditions intervention might happen, unlike, say the Truman Doctrine, the Carter Doctrine or even the Bush Doctrine. The latter of which shares the uncertainty-generating characteristics of R2P, which was at least focused on WMD programs and sponsorship of transnational terrorism. R2P could (theoretically) encompass the gamut of normal state behavior.
.
While there were advantages (and no small measure of justice) to toppling Gaddafi, it could have been done on more pragmatic and less universalistic pretexts.
September 4th, 2011 at 1:47 am
Much thanks Professor Tomas! You’re right, R2P is a weapon lying around, ready for imaginative use, by anyone with the strength to try it
September 5th, 2011 at 2:01 pm
Others are framing a similar question: http://pakobserver.net/detailnews.asp?id=112420
September 5th, 2011 at 8:10 pm
Excellent post. So it seems to me that, as a practical matter, R2P is simply a means to provide justification for something you want to do already. Wolfowitz and Feith would be proud.
September 8th, 2011 at 2:26 pm
[…] – R2P is a Doctrine Designed to Strike Down the Hand that Wields I submitted by The Glittering […]
September 8th, 2011 at 9:09 pm
[…] – R2P is a Doctrine Designed to Strike Down the Hand that Wields I submitted by The Glittering […]
September 9th, 2011 at 12:11 pm
[…] place *t* with 1 1/3 votes -Zen Pundit – R2P is a Doctrine Designed to Strike Down the Hand that Wields It submitted by The Glittering […]
September 9th, 2011 at 5:51 pm
[…] place *t* with 1 1/3 votes – Zen Pundit – R2P is a Doctrine Designed to Strike Down the Hand that Wields It submitted by The Glittering […]
September 11th, 2011 at 11:57 am
[…] Read Safranski’s whole post. For a taste of Anne Marie Slaughter: At first glance, disaggregating the state and granting at least a measure of sovereignty to its component parts might appear to weaken the state. In fact, it will bolster the power of the state as the primary actor in the international system…Giving each government institution a measure of legitimate authority under international law, with accompanying duties, marks government officials as distinctive in larger policy networks and allows the state to extend its reach. […]
September 13th, 2011 at 8:22 pm
[…] place *t* with 1 1/3 votes -Zen Pundit – R2P is a Doctrine Designed to Strike Down the Hand that Wields It submitted by The Glittering […]
November 12th, 2011 at 11:11 pm
useful articles…
[…]zenpundit.com » Blog Archive » R2P is a Doctrine Designed to Strike Down the Hand that Wields It[…]…
April 25th, 2012 at 6:20 pm
I wonder if we will have the stomach when Cuba lands 100 “peacekeepers” in Florida to control the race riots under the rubric of R2P. We still have the lens that we “know” best, wait till the judgment is viewed from the other end of the scope in various places in the world.
July 30th, 2013 at 4:19 pm
[…] and subjective, permitting a larger range of politically tolerable bad outcomes. ”Responsibility to Protect” and “War on Terror” are even more abstract, being essentially unlimited, […]
August 1st, 2013 at 10:38 am
[…] ill-defined and subjective, permitting a larger range of politically tolerable bad outcomes. ”Responsibility to Protect” and “War on Terror” are even more abstract, being essentially unlimited, open-ended, process […]