Don't just do something! "Humanitarian" interventions often lead to increased harm.

• Author: Berlatsky, Noah
• Position: Rajan Menon's "The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention" - Book review

The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention, by Rajan Menon, Oxford University Press, 224 pages, $27.94

"We knew that if we waited one more day, Benghazi--a city nearly the size of Charlotte--could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world." Barack Obama's rationale for intervening in Libya in 2011 is a succinct summary of the logic of humanitarian intervention: When mass atrocities occur, it suggests, the world community has a responsibility to intervene.

That intervention ended up exacerbating rather than ending the conflict, and Libya has since dissolved into chaos and grinding violence. Tens of thousands of people have died, and a second civil war launched in 2014 is still ongoing.

In The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention, City College of New York political scientist Rajan Menon argues that such disastrous missteps are common. When nations set out to salve "the conscience of the world," they often end up staining it more. "Humanitarian interventions," Menon writes, "like war in general, produce many unforeseen and unintended consequences that their architects ignore or dismiss, whether from ignorance or arrogance."

The argument for humanitarian intervention is based on the idea that there is a broad international consensus condemning mass atrocities and sanctioning military action to stop them. Following the failure to intervene in Rwanda in 1994 and Srebrenica in 1995, international institutions such as the United Nations developed a theory called "Responsibility to Protect," or R2P. This doctrine holds that state sovereignty is limited and that the global community has an obligation to step in when rulers commit mass atrocities against their own people. The U.N. officially adopted R2P at its World Summit in 2005.

But in practice, Menon argues, there is no consensus. Sometimes world powers--especially the United States--will launch a military action citing humanitarian concerns, as in Libya. But such actions are always overdetermined by a careful calculation of national interests. Humanitarian interventions aren't always as well-intentioned as they seem; at best, the good intentions are balanced by other considerations.

North Korea is surely one of the worst violators of human rights in the world. The U.S. does not invade North Korea, however, because the country has nuclear weapons. Similarly, America can be counted on never to invade China or Russia, no matter what...