Michael Ignatieff on Humanitarian Intervention, Its Legacy, Condition and Prospects

It's a grim prognosis, in this month's edition of the The New Republic, in the context of a review of Freedom's Battle, by Gary J. Bass: Post 911, the United States retreats into America-First cynicism, Afghanistan and Iraq make liberals depressed, and then there's the rebirth of Russian imperialism, Chinese obstructionism in the Sudan, and the tendency of post-colonial societies to heave overboard the solidarity-of-the-oppressed that once liberated them. But, Ignatieff warns.

From all this we might draw the wrong conclusion, namely that humanitarian intervention was a hectic but fleeting moral fashion of the 1990s--an opportunity for the West to display its insufferable moral superiority at low cost, and for liberal intellectuals to wear their consciences on their sleeves. Bass helps us to see our own moral history in a more serene and clear-eyed light. There was more to the interventions that saved the Bosnians, Kosovars, and East Timorese than moral vanity. The philosophical beliefs that drove those foreign campaigns had a history going back to Byron and the Greeks. Thanks to Bass's fine book, we can uncover the lineage of some enduring intuitions about the duties that people owe each other across borders. These moral intuitions may be in retreat right now, with great power politics in the ascendant; but it would be foolish to pronounce their demise. The impulse to save and protect others will survive this parenthesis of retreat. We are not done with evil, and so we are not done with humanitarian intervention. Its time will come again; or it had better come, if we are to continue to respect ourselves.