« Hotel Rwanda | Main | On Supporting the Troops »

January 24, 2006

Hotel Rwanda, Revisited

Hotel Rwanda 2

Having established the limits of Western responsibility for civilian disasters such as the genocide in Rwanda, I left off yesterday without addressing the question of what should be done. Should is a value judgment, so my conclusion is prescriptive rather than descriptive.

Preventing or mitigating a civilian disaster benefits any nation which has a basically capitalist economy by preserving markets for that country's goods. Even the poorest of countries purchases some goods and services on the global market. Even if the area afflicted does not purchase anything from one particular country, its participation likely means that some of their money does eventually end up purchasing goods or services from that country. The amount of money brought in from that market is unlikely to counterbalance the costs of intervention in the medium term, but it is a long-term benefit to intervention due to the nature of the global economy. Due to feedback loops, the economy will be much stronger when its component parts are strong, and a weakness anywhere in the economy will tend to create a drag on the larger economy. By creating or preserving more markets for goods, the feedback loops of the economy will tend to cause accelerated growth and greater profits for all involved in the longer term.

Eliminating or mitigating the destabilization caused by civilian disasters has other beneficial effects on the global economy and therefore any nations which choose to intervene. Capitalism depends heavily on stability. Investors will avoid providing capital to areas where local instability is so great their money is unlikely to earn a return. An investor would be unlikely to provide startup funds for a new factory in Darfur, for example, because the instability of the region means the factory is unlikely to turn a profit in the face of possible deaths of factory personnel or even the destruction of the factory. Promoting stability promotes economic development. As noted earlier, promoting economic development anywhere helps to strengthen the global economy and therefore benefits the West.

Humanitarian issues have not been addressed until nor, because while they are of great importance to individuals, they here much less hold on nations. Western leaders must ask themselves if averting a humanitarian disaster is worth the expense of intervention in both money and lives. The American experience in Somalia is instructive here. President Clinton decided that attempting to resolve the conflict in Somalia was not worth the loss of 18 members of Task Force Ranger in the Battle of Mogadishu. There was very little public outcry regarding the decision to leave Somalia, whereas there was strong criticism of the Clinton administration for putting Task Force Ranger in Somalia for no vital national interest. Because most Western nations are republics, governments must consider public support for their actions, and public support for peacemaking missions is rarely strong. Western leaders must also consider the purpose of their military forces. A Western military exists to defend only vital interests. Spending money and people to provide humanitarian assistance or peace keeping (peacemaking operations is rarely a vital interest of a country.

It may seem cold-blooded to determine the appropriateness of an intervention based on the calculus of national interest rather than based on what is perceived as the moral thing to do. A Western leader must define right and wrong based on national interest. A Western leader is the steward of his nation's resources, with the power to forcibly extract money and even lives (in nations with a draft) to enact national policy. This power carries a commensurate responsibility. For a Western leader to commit blood and treasure to a cause, he must be able to defend that position to the people. Much of the trouble the Bush administration faces with Iraq today traces back to the failure of the administration to gain public support for the war it is now fighting in Iraq. Western leaders must always be able to justify the costs of military intervention to their people. If they cannot, they may place themselves in a worse position than if they had never interned in the first place. To use Iraq as an example again, the United States would have been better off never intervening in Iraq if it chooses to withdraw under the perception it is being forced to leave by the Iraqi insurgency, just as the decision to withdraw from Somalia after Mogadishu emboldened al Qaeda to strike directly at the United States. Western leaders must weigh these risks before committing to any intervention. But humanitarian interventions require greater scrutiny from a practical perspective because public support for humanitarian missions is not as strong as for combat missions.

While humanitarian interventions can provide certain benefits to nations, those benefits are rarely clearly linked to the intervention. Because Western leaders must justify intervention to their voters and must be able to justify the costs of intervention in terms of national interest, there is rarely a good case for intervention. Nations can not engage in charity. That privilege is reserved for individuals. While humanitarian intervention can occasionally be justified, the default position for all interventions, and especially humanitarian ones, must be no.