Don’t you just miss the Cold War? Of course, I don’t mean the part about being on the brink of nuclear annihilation but rather the way that the superpower rivalry provided us with a good excuse to intervene where, when and against whom we liked. Back then, all that was required was to invoke the failsafe “Normative Justification” (NJ) that an intervention was necessary to “counter the Communist threat” as a matter of “Cold War Necessity” (CWN). For instance, when the democratically elected leaders in Guatemala and Iran had the audacity to jeopardise our economic interest by instigating programmes of nationalisation, we simply claimed that the “Russians were coming”, insisted the democratic leader of the time couldn’t handle the Soviet threat, and engineered a coup to install or re-install some authoritarian figure who would be happy to pander to our interest. Hundreds perhaps thousands of innocent civilians were killed as a result but as long as our interests were secured then who cared? Those were the days.
Amongst those likely to miss such times are policymakers in Washington and London. The end of the Cold War was all very well and good but with the destruction of the Berlin Wall came the destruction of CWN as the NJ. Of course, opportunities for military action still presented themselves in places such as Panama and the Gulf but they didn’t offer the same flexibility as a NJ. Something had to be done.
After a period of head scratching along came the idea of ‘Humanitarian Intervention’ (HI). Initially this new NJ seemed promising, coming across as something noble and benevolent and therefore hard to challenge. Just as with CWN it could be used selectively – i.e. Kosovo but not Columbia, Haiti but not Turkey etc. However, HI had its flaws. It proved hard to reconcile with International Law – the interventions associated with it failing to gain multilateral approval. It invoked the ire of Realists and only allowed for limited military action, action which often turned out to be not very “humanitarian” at all.
By the beginning of the 21st century, it was clear a new NJ was needed. Enter the ‘War on Terror’ (WoT). WoT could allow for full-scale interventions up to and including invasion, appeared to be reconcilable with established norms and certainly more acceptable to the Realist than HI. However, the debacles of Iraq and Afghanistan illustrated the problematic nature of WoT such as its propensity to actually increase the terror threat to the citizens of the intervening countries. In spite of this, WoT has not been abandoned. In fact, the Presidency of Barack Obama has seen an increase in the range of “terror targets”. However, by and large they are executed in the far more limited fashion of Predator Drone strikes.
Meanwhile HI has enjoyed a revival in the form of NATO’s intervention in Libya. The ousting of Gaddafi may suggest the return of HI as NJ. An intervention against Syria in the near future may serve to confirm this. On the other hand, David Cameron has recently raised the possibility of military action under the auspices of fighting terror when he identified Somalia as a “failed state that directly threatens British interests.”
It is evident that both NJs remain popular on both sides of the Atlantic. As neither one has the durability to stand on its own then we can conclude that in the future both will exist concurrently. Each will be called upon when the time comes for the next intervention. This would be a most unwelcome development when one looks at the disastrous military misadventures associated with both HI and WoT over the last two decades. Kosovo wasn’t humanitarian and Iraq intensified the terror threat. They both brought misery and death to untold numbers of innocent people. That fact alone should be reason enough to abandon both HI and WoT. Perhaps if we just stopped with these willy-nilly military interventions then we wouldn’t have to look for a reason to justify our actions in the first place.
