R2P RIP?

INTERNATIONAL: "Responsibility to protect: An idea whose time has come--and gone? An idealistic effort to establish a new humanitarian principle is coming under attack at the United Nations," The Economist, 25 July 2009.

I met Gareth Evans, the former Aussie foreign minister, at the Davos retreat I attended in 2007 on a resort island near the Great Barrier Reef. Not the easiest guy to get along with and not my idea of a diplomat. He also has a fairly caustic opinion of America, and too much belief in the UN for my tastes.

Evans has been pushing the responsibility to protect, or R2P, concept at the UN for a while, succeeding to the extent of getting more than 150 nations to pledge their support to the notion back in 2005. Since then, though, a lot of middle-sized powers have worked to dilute support for the idea, which really hasn't resulted in any concrete actions since then anyway and is easily contorted to support almost any great power intervention inside the Gap (US and UK into Iraq, Russia into Georgia, etc.). Nonetheless, the countries most likely to perform such interventions (again, the big powers) tend to be skeptical of the notion, figuring it'll just get them interventions they don't want at the worst possible times (true enough, I think).

So the R2P concept seems to offer just about everybody something to decry: big states don't want the "responsibility" and small ones don't want the "protection," while the middle-sized fear it'll screw up their own desired spheres of influence and possibly put them on the chopping block.

Bottom line: there will be no simple, all-encompassing rule that defines when Core powers go into the Gap militarily. It'd be nice, but it's just not in the cards.

Comments

[David Sutton]

Tom – does that mean that we give up on the concept of a rule set to process bankrupt states? That was one of the things that really grabbed my attention back in PNM. R2P may well be another dog that won’t hunt, and the UN just depresses me, but if it’s all we have is it not worth putting some time and effort into making it work. Or do we ditch it and hope that we can find something better.

[large]

In the case of both the US and the UK, internal politics tend to stifle any desire to fully use the R2P concept . . and history has shown that we tend to get involved for far longer than original estimates, leading again, to internal political friction . .

Blame the diplomats, the politicians or the Generals, but after a while, the cannon fodder doesn't want to cooperate . .

[Gilbert Garza]

“Bottom line: there will be no simple, all-encompassing rule that defines when Core powers go into the Gap militarily. It'd be nice, but it's just not in the cards.”

If I understood Tom correctly he has said that this is much more than a nicety and that it will be in the cards when more of what he describes in PNM and BFC is in place structurally and working to formally indict and prosecute national/global criminal leaders of rogue regimes/activities with enforcement and security coming from a globally- recognized globally-accepted globally-responsive Leviathan (mostly military, mostly Core, mostly US) complemented as needed in everything else by a globally- recognized globally-accepted globally-responsive SysAdmin service (mostly non-military, mostly Core, mostly Non-US).