The Responsibility to Protect: An Assessment of the United States’ Foreign Policy and a Critique of Non-Interventionism

Foreign policy is one of the most important - and divisive - issues when it comes to modern political discourse. Because of its status as a world superpower, the United States’ foreign policy has massive global repercussions - which affects everything from alliances, to free trade, and even armed conflict.

There are many branches of foreign policy - each with their own sets of experts and fields of study - but perhaps the most frequently debated area of foreign policy has to do with military interventionism - especially when it involves the United States. US military interventions have done a great deal to shape the political structure of the world as we know it, and many ongoing conflicts in the world stem as a direct or indirect result of US foreign policy.

It goes without saying, of course, that the United States is no stranger to military interventions overseas. Indeed, since the end of World War II, it seems that the US has always - at one point or another - been militarily involved somewhere around the globe. Admittedly, the United States’ track record when it comes to foreign intervention isn’t the cleanest, and - as more information about the morally-ambiguous history of the CIA’s interference in foreign countries becomes publicly available, the foreign policy of the United States has come under increasingly harsh scrutiny.

In the years since the disastrous US invasion of Iraq in 2003, a common refrain heard in virtually all corners of politics - both the left and right - is that the US should stop being the “world’s policeman”.

Rather than continue its policy of global militarism and interventionism, these critics demand that the US adopt a non-interventionist approach to foreign policy. It is not America’s business, these non-interventionists say, to interfere in the conflicts of another country. America, they say, has thrust itself into one “endless war” after another at the expense of money, lives, and our reputation on the world stage.

We have seen these calls for non-intervention in cases such as Syria - where a sectarian civil war has been raging for the past nine years, with atrocities being committed by the ruling government of Bashar al-Assad. The Assad regime has been accused of using chemical weapons, carrying out mass executions of civilians, and persecuting ethnic minorities. And through all of these crimes against humanity, the non-interventionists have vehemently protested any US involvement in Syria. What business is it of the US, they say, to dictate what the Syrian government should do within its borders?

This rhetoric may undoubtedly be well intentioned. War is something that should be avoided when possible. But, as the old saying goes, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. And even the best-intentioned policies can have catastrophic consequences. Even with the US having an admittedly shoddy record of success when it comes to intervention overseas, the consequences of reverting to a foreign policy of non-interventionism and isolationism would be horrendous.

Now, the US’s record on foreign intervention is admittedly far from perfect - with the most notable blunder being the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Acting on faulty intelligence that was not corroborated by international organizations, the United States led a military invasion of Iraq in March of 2003 and overthrew the government of Saddam Hussein. After the invasion, Iraq devolved into chaotic sectarian violence between Sunni and Shia militias that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths (including over 4,000 US soldiers) and the rise of several dangerous terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. 

Make no mistake about it; the invasion of Iraq was a short-sighted, ill-planned tactical disaster that has done a great deal of harm to the concept of interventionism itself. The anti-war movement experienced a massive resurgence in the wake of the Iraq War, with many frustrated that trillions of dollars and thousands of lives had been lost in a conflict most believed to be an unnecessary one. The antiwar movement preached a message of pacifism and expressed a wish that the United States adopt a non-interventionist foreign policy - a policy in which the United States would stay out of any and all foreign affairs, and never militarily intervene in another nation unless we were ourselves attacked.

But, as much as the anti-war movement has attempted to portray this kind of foreign policy as the end-all-be-all solution to America’s imperialist history, this foreign policy itself has the potential to enable the mass slaughter of innocent people across the world. And it has already happened, with the notable example of this being in the small African country of Rwanda. 

The 1994 genocide in Rwanda in and of itself stands as a powerful example of the inherent dangers of a non-interventionist foreign policy. The circumstances that led to the genocide are too complex and numerous to convey in this article, but here is a brief overview. 

For nearly a millennia, Rwanda has been dominated by two major ethnic groups: the Hutus, who, at 85% of the population make up the ethnic majority; and the Tutsis, who, at 14% of the population, make up the ethnic minority. In the latter half of the 20th Century, after a Hutu extremist-controlled dictatorship seized power in Rwanda, ethnic tensions between the Hutus and Tutsis reached a boiling point. In 1990, a civil war broke out in Rwanda between the Hutu-led Rwandan government and a mostly-Tutsi rebel group known as the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).

For several years, the war rapidly escalated into a full-blown sectarian conflict, and that conflict itself boiled over on April 7th, 1994, after the Hutu President of Rwanda - Juvenal Habyarimana - was assassinated by unknown assailants. Following the assassination, the Hutu extremist government - blaming the Tutsi rebels for Habyarimana’s death - began a campaign of mass, indiscriminate slaughter against all ethnic Tutsis in Rwanda.

Over a period of 100 days, between April and July, 1994, between 800,000 and 1,000,000 ethnic Tutsis in Rwanda were systematically slaughtered by their own government. Entire villages were razed to the ground with no survivors. Women and children were raped by Hutu militias and hacked to death with machetes, and civilians were rounded up and machine-gunned by Rwandan soldiers and then dumped into mass graves.

As the genocide unfolded, the rest of the world, especially the United States - proclaiming a policy of non-interventionism - did nothing to stop the slaughter and ignored pleas for help from those trapped in Rwanda. The West either ignored the genocide or proclaimed that it wasn’t their problem and that they had no obligation to intervene.

Even the United Nations - which had a peacekeeping force in Rwanda at the time of the genocide - refused to put a stop to the killings. UN Peacekeepers were forbidden from using force to stop the murderous Hutu militias and Rwandan soldiers, and UN soldiers could only watch as countless innocent people were slaughtered while the UN leadership tried fruitlessly to negotiate with the genocidaires.

The Rwandan genocide only ended after the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front overthrew the Rwandan government and ended the civil war and the genocide in mid-July of 1994, and the West’s failure to intervene in Rwanda had catastrophic ramifications that far outlasted the 1994 genocide.

A refugee crisis instigated by the Rwandan genocide would later lead to a second sectarian conflict in the neighboring country of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), as the Hutu militias that massacred the Tutsis in Rwanda would re-establish ground in Zaire and continue to wage a bitter war against non-Hutus in the region. This would lead to a nine-year-long period of warfare known as the Congo Wars, in which an additional 6,000,000 people would be killed - making it the deadliest conflict since World War II - and over 2,000,000 others would be displaced. 

Although the Congo Wars ended in 2003, armed insurgencies are still ongoing in central Africa as a result of the spillover, and the bitter ethnic divides between the different tribes still remains a constant problem in regional politics.

US President Bill Clinton would later state that his biggest mistake as president was not intervening in Rwanda, and he spent the rest of his presidency promoting an interventionist - rather than isolationist - foreign policy. But his efforts to promote interventionism abroad drew the wrath of the antiwar and non-interventionist factions in politics. Many antiwar activists lampooned Clinton’s efforts and accused him and fellow interventionists of “imperialism”.

Jean Bricmont was one such individual. A Belgian philosopher and ardent non-interventionist, Bricmont has been a fierce critic of humanitarian interventionism, and in 2005 published a book entitled “Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War”.

“Since the end of the cold war, the idea of human rights has been made into a justification for intervention by the world’s leading economic and military powers - above all the United States - in countries that are vulnerable to their attacks”, Bricmont wrote.

However, Bricmont’s criticisms fail to differentiate between humanitarian interventionism and western imperialism - namely that he doesn’t address the actual circumstances that justify intervention. Whether or not war crimes and crimes against humanity can be used as justification for US interventionism isn’t really the issue as much as the acts of genocide themselves. And rather than offer a coherent solution to the supposed problem of interventionism, Bricmont seems more content to deflect and distract. In his book, Bricmont accuses “liberal hawks” of using humanitarian crises to “sell war”, and accuses the West of hypocrisy over their failure to intervene in Rwanda. Never mind, of course, that R2P wasn’t formally adopted by the US until AFTER the Rwandan genocide, but Bricmont is again conflating humanitarian interventionism with US imperialism; comparisons that are not apt in any sense. US interventions in the past have - for the most part - not been motivated by humanitarianism, and to discuss foreign policy in this manner as a dichotomy between runaway imperialism and blanket isolationism is extremely misleading and dishonest.

There is a middle ground, and that middle ground is a foreign policy based on humanitarianism, internationalism, and international cooperation - a foreign policy that Bricmont has thus far been unable or unwilling to discredit. Instead of addressing the actual tenets of humanitarian interventionism, Bricmont appears to conflate existing foreign policy with a proposed foreign policy - a policy which is focused on upholding the very human rights he claims are being used to “sell war”.

In the years since the Rwandan genocide, the US has intervened in multiple other conflicts in places like Bosnia, Haiti, and Kosovo - not always with humanitarian goals in mind but still - in general - a net positive for human rights in those regions. The failure to intervene in Rwanda led many in the United States to eschew non-interventionism and embrace a policy of humanitarian intervention. The United Nations has also followed suit, and has repeatedly adopted resolutions in support of “responsibility to protect”, or R2P - a policy in which countries adopt a humanitarian interventionist approach to foreign policy instead of non-interventionism - especially in cases of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

And that brings us to the main principles of “Responsibility to Protect”, or “R2P”.

The first examples of R2P can actually be seen in the aftermath of World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, over 11,000,000 people - including 6,000,000 Jews - were systematically slaughtered by the regime of Nazi Germany during World War II - a program of mass extermination now known as the Holocaust. The genocide was perhaps the ultimate example of consciousless human depravity, and images of the Nazi extermination camps, mass graves, and starved prisoners shocked the entire world.

In the aftermath of World War II, nearly everyone agreed that such atrocities should never be allowed to happen again. In 1945, the United Nations was founded - with one of its stated founding goals being to prevent another Holocaust from ever happening again.

But, of course, this was a promise the UN did not keep. Since 1945, genocide has wrought misery across the world in places like Rwanda, Cambodia, East Timor, Bosnia, Anfal, and Myanmar. And - while innocent people were slaughtered and regions were devastated by war - the international community, for the most part, stood by and did absolutely nothing.

However, in the years following the Rwandan genocide in 1994, the United Nations decided that something did, indeed, have to be done to prevent atrocities from occurring again. In 2006, the United Nations General Assembly ratified Resolution 1674, which endorsed the principle of “Responsibility to Protect”, or R2P. In essence, R2P stipulates that the international community has a fundamental, moral, and ethical obligation to stop genocide and crimes against humanity regardless of where they occur - even if the perpetrators of such atrocities are sovereign nations.

However, R2P was not without its detractors. Economist and non-interventionist author Ed Herman decried R2P as “a bogus doctrine designed to undermine the very foundations of international law”, and accused it of enabling “Great Powers” (such as the US and NATO) to violate the sovereignty of “lesser powers” (nations that don’t have superpower status).

But Herman’s objections are based more on a false equivalency between NATO and genocidal nations, rather than an honest analysis of R2P. The principles of R2P state that sovereignty is not a legitimate defense for committing war crimes and genocide, and that a nation’s sovereignty can be violated in the event of war crimes. This is implicitly laid out in Article 187 of the resolution:

“Each individual State has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. This responsibility entails the prevention of such crimes, including their incitement, through appropriate and necessary means. We accept that responsibility and will act in accordance with it.”, the resolution reads in part. “The international community should, as appropriate, encourage and help States to exercise this responsibility and support the United Nations in establishing an early warning capability.”

Now that we’ve established that R2P’s principles state that sovereignty is not an inviolable defense for genocide, let’s examine the circumstances in which R2P has been used as justification for interventions.

R2P was first cited when NATO intervened in the war in Kosovo in 1998. Though similar humanitarian interventions had been conducted in the past, Kosovo was the first time that R2P had been explicitly cited as a reason for interfering.

Like the genocide Rwanda, the conflict in Kosovo has a very long and complicated history, but, in short, Kosovo is a disputed region populated primarily by ethnic Slavs, Serbs, and Albanians, and ethnic divisions have been a constant source of strife. In the early 1990s, with the Cold War coming to an end, ethnic tensions began to come to a breaking point in the Balkans, and war eventually broke out - first in Bosnia and later in Kosovo.

In 1998, as the Balkans were being torn apart by sectarian conflict in neighboring Bosnia, the region of Kosovo (at the time under the control of the FR Yugoslavia) became the site of an insurgency between the Yugoslav government under Slobodan Milosevic and a mostly-Albanian rebel group known as the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA. In response, the Serb-dominated Yugoslav government began targeting ethnic Albanians in Kosovo for discrimination and expulsion. A 1999 Human Rights Watch report alleged that this campaign of ethnic cleansing killed between 1500 and 2,000 people - many of whom were civilians. Thousands of ethnic Albanians were murdered, with many women and girls raped by Yugoslav soldiers, and more than 1.4 million Kosovar Albanians were displaced from their homes.

Pressure quickly mounted on the west to do something to address the crisis in Kosovo, as advocates for intervention feared a repeat of the catastrophe in Rwanda.

At first, the West pursued diplomatic options, but these failed to achieve meaningful results. In 1999, NATO - citing the growing humanitarian crisis in Kosovo - intervened and began a strategic bombing campaign against the Yugoslav government, enforcing a no-fly zone and depriving the Yugoslav government of air support. 

The war ended later that year with the Treaty of Kumanovo, in which the Yugoslav government agreed to withdraw from Kosovo and allow displaced Albanians to return home.

It is worth noting that NATO’s intervention in Kosovo was not authorized by the United Nations, and was subject to heavy criticism. This is a common refrain from the non-interventionist faction of politics - that unilateral interventions by the West (particularly the United States) are “illegal” because they aren’t approved by the UN.

However, I would argue that the fact that NATO unilaterally intervened in Kosovo rather than waiting for permission from the UN actually highlights why the United States and Western nations should take up the cause of R2P instead of leaving it up to international bodies such as the UN.

The UN had similarly refused to endorse an intervention in Rwanda - a decision that had catastrophic results and led to the wholesale slaughter of over a million people. And, despite adopting resolutions in favor of R2P, the UN still failed to authorize an intervention in Kosovo - despite it being clearly necessary as a humanitarian crisis began to unfold in the region. 

In situations like these, where time is of the essence and inaction can cost lives, I firmly believe that it is not prudent to sit by and wait for approval from the UN to stop a genocide, and much more prudent to stand up and do it ourselves. As the principles of R2P themselves state, sovereignty is not a justifiable defense of genocide, and if the UN is unwilling to enforce such a principle, it is incumbent upon others to enforce it.

Since the intervention in Kosovo, R2P appears to have fallen out of favor with the general public, as haphazardly-implemented interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq have turned public attitudes against war and foreign intervention in general. But the lack of support for R2P does little to reduce its importance on the world stage. R2P would play another important role in 2011 when it was used to justify another NATO intervention, this time in the North African country of Libya.

In early 2011, Libya found itself caught up in the wave of social unrest that swept the Middle East known as the Arab Spring. Protesters gathered in the streets, demanding an end to government corruption and kleptocracy, and promoting democratic ideas such as free elections and freedom of speech.

Rather than listen to his constituents, Libya’s ruling dictator - Muammar Gaddafi - ordered the Libyan military to put down the protesters with violent force. Libyan aircraft bombed crowds of protesters in Tripoli, and dissidents were rounded up and shot by Gaddafi loyalists and militias. The violence was quickly responded to in kind, and civil war broke out in Libya between Gaddafi’s government and anti-Gaddafi rebels. Over 2,000 people were killed in the first month, and Gaddafi’s forces showed no sign of putting a stop to their atrocities.

In March of 2011, citing the growing number of human rights atrocities by the Gaddafi regime, NATO authorized the enforcement of a no-fly zone over Libya to stop the Libyan air force from bombing civilian targets. After NATO intervened, the rebels managed to gain the upper hand, and Gaddafi was toppled from power and executed by October of 2011.

The intervention in Libya was, and still is, extremely controversial. In the wake of the 2011 civil war, Libya has descended into sectarian conflict, and the country does not yet have a unified government. And it is true that there are legitimate criticisms of the intervention. Libya is still dealing with insurgencies and has not established a post-transitional government.

However, the characterization of the intervention in Libya - and by extension the principle of R2P itself - as “humanitarian imperialism” and “starting more wars” is not a fair assessment of NATO’s intervention. While it is true that NATO’s intervention did not produce a stable, democratic government in Libya, that wasn’t the goal of NATO’s intervention in the first place. The goal was to put an end to the mass atrocities against civilians being perpetrated by the Gaddafi regime. The NATO resolution which authorized the intervention explicitly states that their presence was solely “to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack.”

If R2P were intended to be imperialist in nature, then NATO would have done a full-scale invasion of Libya and established a new government themselves. That was not the case in Libya; NATO’s intervention was strictly no-boots-on-the-ground and NATO troops did not and are currently not occupying Libya. Furthermore, the war that critics of NATO’s intervention accuse the US of “starting” began a full month before the United States intervened.

But let’s assume - for the sake of argument - that NATO’s intervention in Libya should not have occurred. What, then, would Libya look like had we not intervened?

Well, at the same time that the civil war in Libya started, another Middle Eastern country was itself dealing with almost identical circumstances. In the nation of Syria - much like Libya - the ruling Assad regime violently repressed anti-government demonstrations, leading to a civil war between the Syrian government and the rebel Free Syrian Army.

Unlike in Libya, NATO did not intervene in Syria as the war unfolded, even as the Assad regime began to carry out the same atrocities that the Libyan government had done against their own people. The Assad regime - in violation of international law - used poison gas on civilian targets, killing thousands, and carpet-bombed rebel-held cities with barrel-bombs.

As these atrocities unfolded, the West - having already faced backlash over their intervention in Libya - failed to intervene in Syria. But, rather than blowing over, the violence in Syria escalated into a full-on sectarian conflict. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant seized vast amounts of territory in Syria and neighboring Iraq, and began a brutal campaign of genocide against ethnic and religious minorities in the region, while the Assad government stepped up its use of weapons of mass destruction.

As of 2020, over 500,000 people have died in the Syrian Civil War, and millions have been displaced in a refugee crisis that has overwhelmed Europe. The Syrian Civil War even today continues to kill thousands of people, and the country is now divided amongst different religious and ethnic tribes, each fighting amongst each other for territory and resources.

Such a scenario was predicted by NATO to occur in Libya had they not intervened. To blame NATO for “starting” the war in Libya is dishonest, as it ignores the fact that the Libyan Civil War began almost two months before NATO authorized the intervention. And the Libyan Civil War - though violent and catastrophic as it was - resulted in ten times less the amount of deaths that occurred in Syria.

And speaking of Syria, the civil war that has resulted from the Assad regime’s atrocities is continuing to rage out of control. As recently as 2018, the Assad regime was again illegally using chemical weapons against civilian targets and conducting indiscriminate barrel-bombings of rebel-held cities while the rest of the world has done little to nothing to stop them.

Now, the Syrian Civil War is a complicated issue, and one can be forgiven for being hesitant about intervening in Syria. One cannot, however, deny the scale of the human rights crisis that is occurring there. The situation in Syria is completely unsustainable and has shown no signs of improving over the past nine years, and ignoring it has proven to be an absolute disaster.

Though human rights groups have remained tacit about endorsing intervention in Syria, Human Rights Watch seemed to suggest doing so in 2013, when they released a statement on the potential for US intervention in Syria following the 2013 Ghouta chemical attacks, which killed over a thousand Syrian civilians.

“Human Rights Watch does not take a position advocating or opposing such intervention,”, HRW’s statement reads in part, “but any armed intervention should be judged by how well it protects all Syrian civilians from further atrocities.”

As of the time of this writing, the United States has intervened in Syria, but only to combat the Islamic State, not oust Assad or put a stop to his atrocities. And aside from conducting several missile strikes on Syrian chemical weapons factories in 2017 and 2018, the West has done little to respond to these crimes against humanity. Even the 2017 and 2018 missile strikes were met with tremendous backlash from non-interventionists and critics of America’s foreign policy. 

These critics decried America’s status as the “world’s policeman” and cited the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq as one of many examples of why America’s foreign policy is detrimental to global stability. And it is true that America’s record of intervention has not been a great one. The United States supported brutal authoritarian dictators such as Augusto Pinochet and the Shah of Iran, and funded right-wing terrorist organizations in South America that wreaked havoc in the region.

To reiterate, America’s foreign policy record, to put it mildly, is far from stellar. But critics of American foreign policy don’t seem to have a very ideal solution to America’s foreign policy. Individuals like Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky propose that the United States adopt a non-interventionist foreign policy - one where the United States will never intervene in conflicts unless they are directly attacked. This can be seen, for instance, in the rhetoric promoted by US President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly declared that American foreign policy should be “America First”.

But, as has been shown in instances like Rwanda, this foreign policy is one that is unacceptably apathetic and immoral when it comes to humanitarian crises and atrocities. Isolationism especially fell out of favor following the Holocaust, and human rights groups and NGOs - even those who oppose US foreign policy - have generally been opposed to the US adopting a non-interventionist approach to international conflicts.

After the Holocaust, the world vowed to never again let such atrocities occur on their watch. And though genocides have occurred in the years since, the world has moved away from isolationism, non-interventionism, and pacifism, and this is a trend that the United States should commit to.

Of course, as I have mentioned before, the United States’ foreign policy has not historically been one motivated by humanitarianism. But the solution to bad interventionism isn’t non-interventionism. The United States cannot afford to turn its back on the world and allow genocide, tyranny, and illiberalism engulf the planet while it has the power to make a difference. The United States was founded on the principles of liberty, democracy, human rights, and equality, and it should stand by these principles and help ensure the safety and security of all people across the world.

Genocide is not a political or sovereign issue. It is a human issue. When genocide occurs, it is an attack on humanity itself and all nations have a responsibility to prevent genocide whenever and wherever it occurs. Many have pointed out that the United States should not be the “world’s policeman”, but, if not us, then who? Russia? China, maybe? As much as non-interventionists would like to think otherwise, the United States - as a world superpower - has the capability, the power, and the authority to intervene overseas in such cases, and it should make full use of this ability - especially since the two other major superpowers in the world (Russia and China) have atrocious human rights records and have never been motivated by humanitarianism when it comes to interventions overseas. If anything, as a superpower, the United States has an obligation to put a stop to atrocities whenever and wherever they occur, not turn their back on them and diffuse responsibility onto others while the rest of the world burns.

Without the United States asserting dominance on the world stage and intervening in conflicts, ground will be given to America’s enemies. Rival superpowers such as Russia and China will expand their spheres of influence and diminish the power of NATO and the western world. War crimes by dictators and their regimes will go unpunished. Genocides will occur unchallenged. And dangerous precedents will be set that, unless a conflict directly endangers American lives and American national security, a nefarious regime will have the free will to commit horrific crimes against humanity without fear of retaliation or recompense.

That is not a foreign policy we should aspire to. Isolationism has proven time and time again to cause nothing but disaster when it comes to world politics. The United States should make R2P the central principle of its foreign policy - a policy based on interventionism and humanitarianism instead of greed and nationalism. Whether we want to acknowledge it or not, we live in a world where there is immense suffering and where horrific crimes against humanity are perpetrated against innocent people every day by genocidal regimes. And in this world, we have two options. We can either ignore these atrocities and sit in our ivory towers, watching the world burn, and allow these atrocities to occur unchallenged; or we can do the right thing and stand up for the downtrodden, fight back against inhumanity, and do our part to make the world a better place - for the betterment of humanity itself.

The choices are clear and present. It’s up to all of us to see that the United States chooses the right one. 

In the words of Iranian human rights activist Payam Akhavan: “Empathy will always find a solution. Apathy will only find an excuse.”