I answered a call for guest bloggers from All American Blogger, and was asked to write about how the new Administration might address the United Nations’ “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine. Below, I cross-posted the text from this page.
What Will a President Obama Likely Do With the U.N. Responsibility to Protect Doctrine?
by Gray Rinehart
Given that many in the international community seemed to interpret the recent U.S. election in terms favorable to themselves — so far accepting that the President-elect bodes well for their own nations — will our incoming President be likely to honor the goodwill he has gained by acceding to one of the United Nations’ most obnoxious doctrines?
The U.N. “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine, abbreviated R2P, sounds laudable enough in that it requires sovereign nations to protect their citizenry against maltreatment and human rights abuses; however, the doctrine goes further: it enjoins other nations to intervene if domestic nations fail to protect their people to the satisfaction of the international community.
R2P is a transnationalist’s dream. It requires nations to intervene in other nations’ internal affairs, and requires that they do so at the behest and under the authority of the United Nations Security Council. (The recent Russian incursion into sovereign Georgia, for example, would not qualify as an R2P event — not simply because the humanitarian cause was overstated or even drummed up, but because the U.N. Security Council did not authorize it.)
According to the Genocide Intervention Network, R2P “was created [in 2001] by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, an independent international commission established by the government of Canada,” to address concerns raised by then-U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan in response to the genocide in Rwanda. “In his report to the 2000 General Assembly, [Annan] challenged the international community to come to a consensus on when and how humanitarian interventions should proceed.” Furthermore,
R2P has redefined the conception of state sovereignty by arguing that international community [sic] has the responsibility to protect civilians in states that are unwilling or unable to do so.
Rebecca J. Hamilton, writing in the 2006 Harvard Human Rights Journal, put it well that this means (emphasis added)
Each state has a responsibility to protect its citizens; if a state is unable or unwilling to carry out that function, the state abrogates its sovereignty, at which point both the right and the responsibility to remedy the situation falls to the international community. This proposal refutes the long-standing assumption enshrined in Article 2(7) of the 1945 U.N. Charter, that there is no right to “intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.”
For the international community to usurp a nation’s sovereignty is a very serious matter, but R2P seems to treat it quite cavalierly. In a May 2008 paper for the Heritage Foundation, Stephen Groves argued that “Adopting a doctrine that compels the United States to act to prevent atrocities occurring in other countries would be risky and imprudent,” and that the U.S. “needs to preserve its national sovereignty by maintaining a monopoly on the decision to deploy diplomatic pressure, economic sanctions, political coercion, and especially its military forces.”
R2P actually involves three escalating responsibilities which nations owe not to their own people but to the people of foreign lands: as stated by the Genocide Intervention Network, the responsibilities to prevent “internal conflict and other man-made crises putting populations at risk;” to react to the same with “appropriate measures” ranging from sanctions (which have historically hurt more than helped indigenous populations while affecting determined tyrants hardly at all) to military action; and to rebuild after the event. The last “responsibility” is actually the least troublesome, since the U.S. in particular has shown greater will and ability to rebuild former enemies than any other nation in history. Most troublesome are the first, a clear blow against a nation’s sovereignty, and the second, a call for nations to intercede under the U.N. flag in matters which do not threaten other sovereign nations.
How might a President Obama handle R2P?
In October 2007, Senator Obama was noncommittal in his answer to a presidential candidate questionnaire. He said R2P was “an important and developing concept in international affairs and one which my Administration will closely monitor.” Cynics might point out that his answer was a somewhat verbose way of saying “we don’t know yet.” In contrast, we may take some encouragement from his unwillingness to commit to following the U.N. doctrine, and believe that he may weigh U.S. national interests above nebulous international interests or unproven geopolitical assertions.
Unfortunately, his nomination of Senator Clinton as Secretary of State is problematic in this regard, because her take on R2P appears to be much different — and Foggy Bottom is already known for playing by its own rules in the realm of diplomacy. In November 2007, in answer to the same candidate questionnaire, Senator Clinton said,
It is essential that the new Secretary General of the United Nations begin to bridge the gap between [the doctrine] and the institution’s deeds through a series of reforms intended to operationalize this concept. I am … committed to seeing that the United States and other economic and militarily capable states and organization take steps to bolster UN action.
Senator Clinton said that if she were elected President she would “adopt a policy that recognizes the prevention of mass atrocities as an important national security interest of the United States, not just a humanitarian goal.” That’s an interesting take on what should constitute a national security matter: a fine example of transnationalist thinking that would make a good topic for another day. Because she is not the President-elect, we may dismiss for the foreseeable future her promise to “develop a government-wide strategy to support this policy.” However, given the position to which she has been nominated, we should consider that she also said,
I will authorize my Secretary of State to institutionalize atrocity prevention into the work of the State Department, and I will direct my Secretary of State to strongly support the mission and activities of the office of reconstruction and stabilization, which plays an increasingly critical role.
As U.S. Secretary of State, then, is Ms. Clinton likely to subordinate Foggy Bottom to the directives of the U.N.? Is she likely to re-order U.S. diplomatic efforts in such a way as to support R2P and other international doctrines, to the detriment if not exclusion of our legitimate national interests? We wonder if such questions will be asked in her confirmation hearing. We hope her answer would be “no.” It is too soon to tell how independent her State Department would be from her President’s Administration — or if they would operate in synch — and which interests they would prioritize highest.
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President-elect Obama was careful during his campaign not to make the mistake Senator Kerry did in 2004, of saying he would subject questions of U.S. involvement or action to a “global test.” It remains to be seen whether he and his appointees will place the sovereign interests of the U.S. ahead of transnational interests, or if they will subordinate U.S. interests to some “greater good.” Once he occupies the Oval Office, he will no longer be able to circumlocute his position; perhaps in his first “State of the World” address* he will tell us what direction he plans to take our nation, and the world.
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*In October 2007, Senator Obama reportedly said, “I’ll give an annual ‘State of the World’ address to the American people in which I lay out our national security policy.”
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