World Politics News   Articles for World Politics Course

One of the interesting aspects of the Syrian debate is the conflation of humanitarian and strategic concerns.  There is little question that there are atrocities occurring in Syria which should trigger the 2005 UN resolution on the Responsibility to Protect (R2P).  However, the only legitimate enforcer of R2P is the UN Security Council which is unlikely to pass any resolution because of the high likelihood of a Russian and Chinese veto.  More importantly, R2P is specifically designed to protect innocent civilians from the war atrocities, and an aerial assault is incapable of realizing that objective.  Indeed, an aerial assault may only stimulate the Syrian government to use more chemical weapons.

The Obama administration has chosen to emphasize US national security as the justification for an intervention.  In the resolution passed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the resolution reads in part: “Whereas Syria’s use of weapons of mass destruction and its conduct and actions constitute a grave threat to regional stability, world peace, and the national security interests of the United States and its allies and partners”.  President Obama went out of his way at St. Petersburg to emphasize the national security dimensions of the problem:

But ultimately, what I believe in even more deeply, because I think that the security of the world and — my particular task — looking out for the national security of the United States, requires that when there’s a breech this brazen of a norm this important, and the international community is paralyzed and frozen and doesn’t act, then that norm begins to unravel.

So we have a situation where the humanitarian impulse is being used to justify a national security concern.  Jack Goldsmith has written an interesting piece on the dangers of combining the two objectives.  He has also raised the legal and moral issues in a national intervention without Security Council sanction to implement a humanitarian mission.  Goldsmith refers to this as an action that is “illegal but legitimate.”

We all have to decide whether we think that US national security is being threatened (and readers of this blog know that I have a very strict definition of national security–that the fate of the republic must be at risk), or whether the legal strictures of R2P can be disregarded in this particular case, and whether such a precedent might fatally damage R2P in the future.