The Eternal Recurrence of Interventionism
I’ll go to my grave, I’m sure, insisting that Iraq was an oddball case all along, and that the mass consensus for treating Iraq in strange and unique ways was never fungible for a whole host of reasons. (Fleeting triumphalism among a few commentators interested in following suit with any place Alexander the Great once ruled notwithstanding.) Yet interventionism — which I’ll define as the policy of dispatching large numbers of personnel to a foreign country without the consent of that country’s government — isn’t dead, it’s here to stay, it will never die, baby. This isn’t because interventionism is a grippingly attractive ideology, but because the facts on the ground keep changing in this crazy world, and ad hoc coalitions periodically swirl around a shared frustration with particular countries that finally tips over into action.
Still, pure randomness isn’t at work. For the same reason that the Bush doctrine of preventive war was never going to be used on 95% of the whole planet, interventionism is extremely unlikely to ever affect, in our lifetimes, places like Australia, India, Japan, Argentina, Greenland, Madagascar, Canada, etc. There are a few prime candidates in the world for intervention — focal points around which an overlapping consensus of passionate frustration and calculating interest forms. Probably the most prominent one of these now is Burma, a country with what we can agreeably call a stupid and evil government, one that’s compounding mass disaster five days after a crushing cyclone hit.
Bringing me to Megan’s recent post on the topic:
It’s still not clear how much help Burma is going to allow in. The French foreign minister is making noises that sound curiously close to a humanitarian invasion:
In response, the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, suggested that the United Nations should invoke its “responsibility to protect” civilians as the basis for a resolution to allow the delivery of international aid even without the junta’s permission.
Is another coalition of the willing afoot — Rambos and socialists? More significantly, is France interested in reasserting itself as a great power? Can France lead Europe toward a confident, constructive role in the world, sharing burdens the United States has had to take on awkwardly and not successfully enough? Interventionism is a lot easier to stomach — as a practical, not a theoretical matter — when the US isn’t the only Western power doing the intervening.
UPDATE: On Burma, Megan suggests splitting the difference along the same lines as my Iran leaflet air raid proposal.
(Photo courtesy Flickr user Robin Thom)