America has unique responsibilities in the world. It’s not popular to say so, particularly in this era of bloated budgets and narrowing horizons.
It’s not popular in an age of foreign policy grayscale, where America’s interests again seem limited and local.
The editors of the magazine N+1 recently compiled many of the arguments against intervention on humanitarian grounds.
Cost, sovereign autonomy, and principle, they write, argue against humanitarian intervention. And their appeal to recent history has an undeniable relevance as well.
But despite our continuing difficulties in the wake of regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan, several things remain true about intervention.
There are regimes that oppress their people. There is often something America can do about it.
This is not to say that every intervention on humanitarian grounds is wise, or helpful, or necessary. America’s duty to the world can’t include the removal of every dictator everywhere.
But the fact that there is a limit to a duty does not remove the duty.
Part of the unease over intervention stems from a pervasive feeling that America will end up, as always, shouldering the weight of the world’s humanitarian impulses.
Some unease also arises when foreign policy takes on moral overtones. For America to decide on moral grounds that another government no longer deserves to remain in power reeks of suffocating moral arrogance, many feel.
But the real arrogance is in the idea that we are forever too compromised to make our best efforts in the face of evil.
Indeed, to denounce all humanitarian intervention as imperialist arrogance is to ignore a powerful yearning for justice that transcends party affiliation and nationality.
This yearning motivates humanitarian intervention, yes, but it is also what motivates the individual acts of justice and charity that lead Americans to flock to natural disaster sites to render aid, and to help a stranger change a tire.
So humanitarian intervention should be framed as a responsibility, rather than as a right.
The United States must consider intervening in perilous foreign situations not because it has a special right to decide the fates of nations, but because its status as the only world superpower that cares about human rights gives it a special responsibility to act, where it can, to alleviate human suffering.
The awful choice is always in the details. But as much as we might like to defer these choices to someone else, someone else doesn’t exist.
So when the U.N. and the Arab League pass resolutions, as they did condemning the Libyan government this year, they are tacitly asking for our help. President Obama acted.
The extent and wisdom of his actions are well within the bounds of political debate. But that we had a responsibility to do something should not be.
So as Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi clings to what look like his last days of power, it’s crucial that one thing doesn’t turn political: Sometimes America must act, because no one else can.
Maybe the Libyan people will never understand or care that America had a hand in Gadhafi’s downfall.
And it’s certainly possible that life in Libya will get worse before it gets better. The fall of tyrants often leave nasty vacuums in their wake, as we’ve repeatedly seen in recent years.
But if Gadhafi falls, the world is a better place, and the United States helped make it that way.
Reach the columnist at wmunsil@asu.edu.
