Intervening to stop genocide/atrocities while not wanting to be world police - which events qualify?

Great Debates
1

Didn’t want to hijack the ongoing Sudan-crisis thread, so I started a separate one:

Many times there is an ongoing atrocity, genocide, civil war, other war, etc. you get two camps of people:

One side (correctly) says that if there is no outside intervention, then the genocide will continue and many thousands more people will die.

The other side (also correctly) says that if the United States, United Nations, or outside world were obligated to intervene every time something like this happens, then it would be nonstop world police mode all the time, and that such intervention is unpopular, fatiguing and costly.

So - where is the appropriate line to be drawn? Does a genocide or war need a clear good side and a clear bad side in order for there to be intervention, and if it’s two morally-ambiguous sides at war, then just let them keep killing and it’s their own business? (Not specifically about Sudan, but in general.) Does a genocide need to be of a certain scale, such as Rwanda 800,000 people being killed, to reach the criteria?

2

The problem with this is that the United States, UN, or other outside force aren’t always going to do things the wrong way. Yes, in recent years (and certainly under Trump), things haven’t been done / wouldn’t be done for the right reasons. But it most certainly is possible, such as in WWII.

IMHO each intervention or lack of intervention needs to be judged on its own individual merits. A blanket we will / won’t intervene because it’s always the right / wrong thing to do doesn’t cut it.

3

When it’s in our interest?

4

Agree. And to add - when it’s in our economic, security, or competitive interests. No one is prepared to do anything about an atrocity, much less involving their own citizens and resources, unless there is an upside. Things don’t happen out of the goodness of people’s heart.

5

Humans evolved to be social and tribal. The well being of our tribe benefitted our own well being. Our well being benefits the entire tribe. So there is an underlying desire to do good in the world, even if the motivation is fundamentally driven by a selfish desire to survive in a hostile world.

Granted, in modern times many people’s definition of their ‘tribe’ stops at a nations geographic border at best. People in northern Germany are going to be far more willing to help people in southern Germany (with universal health care, free education, infrastructure, etc) than people in northern Germany are going to be willing to help people in Ethiopia or Venezuela.

But with Rwanda it would’ve taken maybe 5,000 troops to stop the genocide that killed a million. That is something that should’ve been done.

Also, selfishly, there is the fact that a world full of atrocities is more likely to produce highly traumatized people and dictators, which is generally not good for stability. Most nations and groups that western nations end up having foreign policy issues with are nations with terrible human rights records and ideological extremism (communist dictatorships, islamic extremists, oppressive autocrats, etc). Functioning democracies with strong human rights generally don’t bother each other (Trump notwithstanding), at least not nearly as much as oppressive nations and extremist groups bother the west.

I don’t know where the line is, and I don’t understand why the concept of ‘the world police’ is even a bad thing. Society needs police. The ICC and ICJ are great things. The issue is how the police act, who controls the police, what the police’s priorities are, etc.

There is also the fact that there are many ways to intervene that do not require large amounts of sacrifice from the west. No fly zones, training police/military to maintain order in another nation, economic sanctions/incentives, diplomatic pressure, targeted strikes, etc can all help stop atrocities w/o spending hundreds of billions on a large scale land invasion.

6

This assumes people don’t learn that you don’t fuck with the World Police.

As for costly - it should be a shared global cost, with regular rotation of troops.

As for unpopular - is the alternative any more popular?

It needs to be international and as broad a coalition as possible, I think. And with teeth. If there has to be a global police force, it needs to be a UN one deployed by the UN as a whole, not units from individual militaries seconded to the UN, as the current peacekeepers are. And not subject to a veto by any “security council” star chamber, either. Simple majority decides on an intervention.

No. Genocides with two “bad” sides still need interventions, it’s not just complicit combatants getting killed in these things.

“A certain scale” is subjective, but for me it’d be in the high 100s or single thousands to trigger a response already. Whatever is a bare minimum logistic threshold to sending in one company of Blue Helmets, basically.

The actual police don’t wait for it to be a serial killing before they investigate a murder.

7

What would this look like in the early days of Russian invasion of Ukraine?

What about when Iran was killing thousands of it’s citizens protesting the regime?

China’s ethnic cleansing? Yemen?

It’s easy to say you’ll “police” atrocities when you can be reasonably sure you can send in an overwhelming force to quell the fighting. But when you can’t? And if you can, then what? How long do you remain? And what does the world police force look like? Is it a coalition of the willing or a mandatory requirement for each country to provide troops as well as funding? What if some countries or troops feel some non-neural way about a conflict they are being sent in to police?

8

I agree with this. I think it’s reasonable to say the US and someother countries had some bright moments with Bosnia for example and now backlash to our other misadventures in foreign policy has made our leaders abandon attempts to stop crimes against humanity where it is feasible.

However we would have to acknowledge that there a ton of places where the perpetrators are powerful enough that there is a greater risk of general escalation or specifically that the perpetrators could make us pay for intervening.

I also think military intervention is only the vest option if it’s reasonably likely that the intervening forces can leave and a stable government will still be there that will probably be less bad than the genocidal forces that were defeated. Long-term foreign occupation and/or peacekeeping forces have generally not worked.

Not sure I agree with all the examples. I think it remains possible to sent NATO forces to Ukraine. It could be argued that Ukraine has more freedom to attack Russia’s mainland under the current dynamics And Yemen is two sides that absolutely pose no threat to a US or coalition force. IDK what the answer would have been at the height of the starvation - the Houthis were (and still are) a Taliban-esque Islamist terror state, the Saudis were (with US help) blockading and bombing supplies to the Houthis. There wasn’t really a Yemeni government to just hand the keys to. Other than refusing to give support to the Saudis it was definitely too much of a mess for outside actors to come in, stop the atrocities and leave a less horrible, more stable government behind.

9

NATO forces are a different thing than UN-like police force presence.

NATO forces would necessarily take a side, leading to a wider conflict/war.

10

Oh I should say I’m always in favor of taking a side. If the idea is to send UN peacekeepers to specifically stop atrocities, that will always cause more problems.

If yhere isn’t a side worth picking it a time when it’s better not to intervene.

Ukraine happens to be a very conventional war where the way to stop the genocide/ethnic cleansing is to stop Russia taking territory and continuing to support Ukraine’s government.

11

Is that really what caused the famine? I seem to recall that the UN stopped delivering aid because the Houthis themselves were causing danger to the aid workers, not the Saudis.

There is a clear and obvious problem in that conflict, and that is the Houthis.

That said, it’s also a great example of when intervention happens. When the Houthis are stupid enough to bother people outside the region - when they disrupt shipping, for example - everyone from the US to China shows up to bomb them until they stop. But no one is intervening to stop the atrocities they commit on people in the region they control as long as they keep things local.

12

I don’t agree on those specifics but thesecare topics for another thread.

13

I agree that it’s in NATO’s interest to defend Ukraine. But they haven’t seen fit to do so in a kinetic way.

I get it. Dramatic escalation with Russia is a real risk, and Putin isn’t bluffing when he threatens tactical nukes.
But let’s not get derailed into yet another Putin will-he/won’t-he debate.

14

Poul Anderson in some of his earlier stories envisaged a sort of ‘UN’ which actually had the teeth to do this.

But abandoned the idea in his later work.

There is the famous but probably apocryphal saying along the lines of: If someone is not a liberal at 20, they have no heart. If they are not a conservative at 50, they have no brain…

15

The G8 kicked Russia out of the G8 economic body and imposed sanctions due to what happened in Ukraine. NATO is also providing large amounts of military hardware, training, intelligence and funding to Ukraine.

The US and Israel have made targeted strikes against internal oppression infrastructure in Iran. Iran also has economic sanctions against them.

Various nations are working to combat the houthis using various methods.

These situations don’t have easy answers, but the idea that a large scale land invasion is the only option isn’t true. There are lots of other options to try.

When another nation becomes too powerful though, there aren’t many options.

16

It strikes me that you’ll likely have to intervene early, sometimes before you know a genocide is happening, or wait until you know, by which time a lot of damage has already been done. Knowing when to intervene is going to be difficult to answer.

17

The idea of ‘sanctions’ has to be a complete joke by now. Britain imposed ‘sanctions’ against Rhodesia’s UDI… etc etc.

It’s nonsense. A way of pretending to be doing something without having to actually do anything.

18

I think that the first question always needs to be “What’s the plan?”. What can we actually do, and what would that accomplish? If the plan is “Get Hitler and his government out of power”, well, that’s something that a military can actually accomplish. If the plan is just “go in there and stop everyone from killing everyone else”, well, how?

If you can’t come up with an actual plan, then you need to stay out of it. Staying out might be bad, but going in without any plan is going to be all of the same bad, plus more bad. And if anyone actually does manage to come up with a plan, at least you’re staying out of their way.

19

Agree with this. What do sanctions really do, anyway? It sounds like they inconvenience and hurt average citizens more than their oppressive government. What, we expect the people to rise up and overthrow their leaders and military because of sanction pain? Sanctions are essentially “I am going to write a strongly-worded letter opposing what those people are doing!” I am not saying not to use sanctions at all, as I think they do exert some amount of pressure, but unless the whole world does sanctions on the oppressor, someone always seems to have a friend or three to make sanctions hurt a little less.

20

Page 158 talks about the effectiveness of sanctions at achieving policy goals.

Are Sanctions Effective?

Overall, we found sanctions to be at least partially successful in 34 percent of the cases that we documented. However, the success rate importantly depended on the type of policy or governmental change sought. Episodes involving modest and limited goals, such as the release of a political prisoner, succeeded half the time. Cases involving attempts to change regimes (e.g., by destabilizing a particular leader or by encouraging an autocrat to democratize), to impair a foreign adversary’s military potential, or to otherwise change its policies in a major way succeeded in about 30 percent of those cases. Efforts to disrupt relatively minor military adventures succeeded in only a fifth of cases where that was the goal. Table 6.1 summarizes the scorecard.

Its not a perfect tool, but its one of dozens of tools that can be used to influence a foreign nation or organization.