The new interventionism.

• Author: Hendrickson, David C.

When he ran for president in 2008, Barack Obama promised a new era of restraint in U.S. foreign policy. And in some respects, he has indeed been more restrained than his predecessor. But those looking for a reconsideration of America's universalist ambitions have been disappointed by Obama's record. Where it has mattered, there has been no retreat from the revolutionary ends to which George W. Bush committed the United States in his second inaugural address in 2005. Thus Obama (after much agonizing) threw in his lot with those seeking to overthrow Libya's Muammar el-Qaddafi by force. Thus Obama called for Bashar al-Assad to leave, encouraged "allied" efforts to overthrow him and made negotiations to end the civil war in Syria dependent on his departure. And thus the Obama administration (with the president himself curiously in the shade) played a key role in supporting the Maidan's overthrow of Ukraine's elected president, Viktor Yanukovych.

Liberal interventionists, neoconservatives and State Department officials insist that it is America's duty to support those making revolution in other countries. The United States has often been attracted to that policy since the Reagan administration, though it was only under the younger Bush that it reached full flower. While the public rightly grimaces over the consequences, there is little appreciation by the elites of how unprecedented these doctrines are, both in international law and in the American diplomatic tradition. Given the ill consequences following the breakage of states across the Middle East and now in Ukraine, the time is ripe for reconsidering these newfangled views. As a method of promoting liberty, the strategy of overthrow is deeply counterproductive. The old American lexicon taught that anarchy bred tyranny, whereas the new school teaches that the revolutionary destruction of the old order will produce democracy. The new interventionism has also thrown out the old rulebook for dealing with civil war, substituting a set of policies that in practice provides Western powers with unlimited discretion to intervene in civil conflicts throughout the world.

In the legal order birthed by World War II and the United Nations, the right of external intervention was sharply circumscribed; preventive war, in any normal definition of the term, was made illegal. A right of humanitarian intervention might be inferred from the vast discretion given to the Security Council by the un Charter, but no one thought of inferring that until many years had passed. It contradicted the dominant emphasis in the charter on state sovereignty. The right of self-determination in the charter put the colonial powers on notice that their imperial rule was coming to an end, but states were not deemed to have forfeited their right to put down internal revolts. On the contrary, the state was seen as an indispensable source of order.

When circumstances subsequently arose that seemed to call for humanitarian intervention--as with Bangladesh, Cambodia and Uganda--the intervening states (India, Vietnam and Tanzania) invariably appealed to their right of national self-defense, not humanity, in justifying their military movements across borders. That was because they thought the humanitarian claim would not cut it in the international community, not because they had poor legal advice. Their actions did not cause a change in norms; that came later, with the end of the Cold War and the widespread call that the "sole superpower" should not hesitate to respond, by military force if necessary, to acts that shocked the conscience of mankind. The traditional prohibition against intervention that was consecrated in 1919 and reaffirmed in 1945 was then greatly relaxed, if not entirely abandoned. A whole host of interventions were subsequently pursued or proposed in the next twenty-five years that took, amid the plenitude of...