Justin Walters

3/22/2019

Take Home Exam #2

“It is daunting to acknowledge, but this country’s consistent policy of nonintervention in the face of
genocide offers sad testimony not to a broken American political system but to one that is ruthlessly
effective. The system as it stands is working.”

Evaluate this statement by Samantha Powers by using any two case studies in the book, A Problem from
Hell. Do you think that Samantha Power’s observation and conclusion regarding US policy towards
Genocide is justified?

The UN continues to struggle between respect for state sovereignty (and interest) versus human rights
(R2P). In what way can the UN be empowered to better fulfill its role as a protector of individual rights
particularly in cases where states are unable or unwilling to perform this responsibility? What according
to you are the major challenges? Give reasons to support your answer.

Any discussion of American nonintervention in the face of genocide should start with the
acknowledgement that traditionally America has gone back and forth between isolationism and a more
interventionist model of foreign policy. The American people have long been reticent to undertake
foreign interventions with any possibility that American servicemen and women might get killed.
Although American elites have not been so shy to deploy American military assets and strategic
resources to distant lands, in the modern era the political blowback from foreign interventions gone bad
has been enough to give pause to politicians of both parties. Samantha Power’s statement reminds me
of this truth, the American people tend toward isolationist foreign policy views in most cases and wish
to keep their sons and daughters out of potentially messy conflicts abroad, and in this, at least, our
political system seems relatively responsive to the interests of its constituents. Although oftentimes this
responsiveness to constituencies is abrogated when the American (elite) interest is strong enough. That
being acknowledged to specifically tackle the question with real, historical examples we’ll begin with
Cambodia.

The handling of the Khmer Rouge genocide was a great example of how America is always “fighting the
last war.” Fresh off our Vietnamese debacle, and not wanting to re-engage for another round of land
war in Southeast Asia, the US ignored the situation that would arise in neighboring Cambodia after our
pullout of Vietnam. Beyond the defeat America received militarily in that conflict, a more salient issue
was how Vietnam had played out in the court of public opinion. Politicians saw that the anti-war
movement was tearing the country apart and with it electoral politics would be upended as well.
Although he would suffer an electoral shellacking George McGovern would run for the office of
President as the Democratic party candidate with a record as a dove (although as our book details this
was not the case with him in regards to Cambodia). While war weariness was one factor in the initial
refusal to acknowledge or do anything about the genocide in Cambodia there was also a sense among
America’s foreign policy establishment that, despite evidence to the contrary, Communism in Southeast
Asia was some kind of monolithic pro-Soviet regime. It was not yet apparent to the US that even before
we had pulled out of Vietnam there were beginning to be notable divisions between Vietnamese and
Cambodian communists. Finally, as has been the case in many other instances of American refusal to
intervene in foreign conflicts, it was deemed that supporting the Khmer Rouge was in the interests of
the United States as a way to curry favor with China, the KR’s main international backer.

In the interest of driving a wedge between the emerging giant of China and the Soviet menace the US
would back the KR even after they had been driven from power by the Vietnamese and their Soviet
backers. The American political system is not set up to respond to principle as much as it responds to
politics and concrete interests. While many in the American public were sympathetic towards news of
mass murder coming from Cambodia it was not enough to change the political calculus around the issue.
The Carter administration simply would not even consider another intervention in the region, and would
not spend much in the way of political capital on the diplomatic end of things either. In fact, as our book
explains even the Reagan administration would not move forward in a concrete way against KR
atrocities until a kerfuffle around a Reagan gaffe/blunder relating to Nazis pushed his administration
towards making a show of support for the ratification of the genocide conventions. Even then it wasn’t
until 1988 that the treaty was ratified, and then only with sufficient carve outs to dilute the actual
impact of the convention in relation to America. Interests and politics trumped principal.

The genocide in the former Yugoslavia was even less coherent in terms of America’s response to it, but
perhaps even more deeply cynical. Beginning with the first Bush administration and then continuing
through most of Clinton’s first term the US had avoided any intervention in the unfolding genocide
engulfing Bosnia. Premising the refusal to aid the Muslim people of Bosnia on a lack of compelling
national interest (and DoD fears of another Vietnam), and then later on in the Clinton administration a
desire to avoid any military adventurism, particularly after the embarrassment in Haiti coupled with the
horror of Black Hawk Down in Somalia, the US avoided involving itself. Whereas in Cambodia which had
essentially shut its borders to the outside world as it carried on its campaign of genocide the happenings
in the Balkans were, as our book tells us, more clearly known by the US than perhaps any previous
conflict we were to become involved in. However, one similarity between Bosnia and Cambodia was the
role that the press played in shifting the conversation around these countries towards one more friendly
towards intervention bent on stopping genocide. This, of course, would also be helped out by
courageous members of Congress like Frank McCloskey, advocates like Elie Wiesel, and many low to mid
ranking state and intelligence figures within the American bureaucracy. Without these internal and
external forces lobbying for a NATO led air campaign and lifting of sanctions on the Muslim people of
Bosnia this would have, yet again, been an example where the US failed to protect a people from
genocide based on narrow national interest and political concerns rather than principal. Indeed, as
Samantha Power notes in the chapter on Bosnia the thing that would get you ignored quicker in the
state department than perhaps anything else was to couch your recommendations in moral/ethical
terms.

In both these cases you see that the American foreign policy and defense establishment, not to mention
our elected politicians, are very hesitant to use American military force to protect or infringe upon the
sovereignty of other states absent a compelling national interest case or a clear cut winning political
narrative surrounding the intervention in question. The reasons for this are varied, under Bush it was
about a lack of clear national interest coupled with hesitance by the DoD, and under Clinton some of
those reasons carried over along with added concerns about the wariness of getting bogged down in
matters of foreign policy at the expense of a domestic agenda while also being an administration
skeptical of interventionism more generally. Regardless of the reasons specific to these two case studies
we can clearly see how even though the weight of international law and opprobrium towards genocide
would seem to make the case for intervention clear, this is frequently not the case.

As realists would point out security concerns and relative advantage drive much of how foreign relations
are conducted and the R2P debate is no different. It is hard even for those who don’t ascribe to the
realist school to overlook the facts on the ground as it were that in most cases countries do not willingly
want to enter into potentially dangerous foreign conflicts without a clear interest in the resolution of the
conflict or the means to turn the issue into something resembling a competitive advantage against other
nation-states. I am not sure what the solution to this issue is from a UN standpoint, and I fear that as
with most of our politics right now the only solution is to just kind of muddle forward and hope for the
best. To try and give an actual answer though I would point to the need to eliminate more veto points in
our institutions like the UN with the biggest one being either an end to the security council or at least
the removal of permanent seats with unilateral veto powers. As with many of our governing bodies,
mechanisms deemed politically expedient towards creating consensus or towards enabling some degree
of socio-political cohesion often have the drawback of hampering timely responses and in some cases
any response at all. Strengthening the hand of the UN and other international organizations concerned
with the right to protect and the rights of individuals more generally must look to innovate and adapt to
the changing reality of a world where internal conflicts and authoritarianism are on the rise rather than
the reality that bodies like the UN arose from where the fear of large scale external conflicts waged
between nation-states motivated the formation and perpetuation of such international bodies.

On a political level one area that must be addressed is the persistent lack of leadership shown by the
world’s great powers. The United State’s on again off again love affair with isolation coupled with its
slow decline into near total political dysfunction has had measurably negative effects on international
order which are being exacerbated and not mitigated by many within the international community that
should be shoring up the international order (legal and institutional). China’s absolutist views on state
sovereignty and commitment to “peaceful rise” that essentially prioritizes exploiting globalization,
foreign direct investment as a form of new economic colonialism, and marginalization of individual
rights further weakens the international order. It is hard to muster an influential voice regarding
international norms about the right to protect when you are busily interning millions of your own
citizens in camps based on religious minority status. Britain is a fading power in shambles over Brexit
that has voluntarily forfeited global leadership in favor of perpetual declension in the name of imagined
sovereignty. France is mired by eternal protests, societal division, feckless centrism, rising anti-semitic
and far right radicalization. Germany is wedded to pacifism and all of its attendant foreign policy
shortfalls, and with little ambition to go beyond rhetorical leadership on the international stage. Russia
is a committed revanchist state still fighting the Cold War in the name of a lost empire, not out of sincere
conviction by the men in charge of the Russian Federation, but as a cynical gambit designed to hold onto
the reins of power in the world’s most powerful kleptocracy. Everywhere you turn you run into the same
issue of increasingly closed societies mired in their own political dysfunction and narrow domestic
concerns watching passively as the international system breaks down and proves unequal to the many
serious problems facing humanity as a whole. The answer is elusive, but it will obviously require political
courage and a reversal of current geo-political trends.