Liberal Internationalism and Regime Change Myanmar

In my earlier entry, "Regime Change Myanmar?," I noted:

The humanitarian crisis in Myanmar is the most recent example of state failure among the developing world's authoritarian regimes.

Yesterday's Los Angeles Times noted, for example, that the Myanmar government's initial refusal to accept international relief reflected the junta's indecision and fear.

Whatever the cause, it's simply unacceptable for the world community to stand by idly while hundreds of thousands perish, and the nation descends into a nightmare of disease and hunger.

I suggested too that I was seeing little support for outside intervention on either side of the political spectrum, although liberal internationalists have long argued for regime change in precisely situations like these.

Well it turns out that the hippest liberal internationalist du jour has done a little writing on this, and Ross Douthat offers his response:

Matt has an interesting post on the questions that Burma raises for liberal internationalism of the sort he advances in Heads in the Sand:

Realistically, you're not going to see a forceful U.N. intervention in Burma because no country capable of mounting such an operation (basically the U.S. and maybe Britain and France) would want to mount one, while Russia and China (and probably even post-colonial democracies like India) would be opposed to anyone mounting one, and democratic countries would be secretly glad that Russia and China would block a move like this because they could blame inaction on Russia and China ... for a domestic audience even though they wouldn't want to step in themselves.

That said, if you could sort of bracket the logistics/will/capabilities issues, with any proposed humanitarian military intervention I've come to think that we need to think seriously about two issues - legitimacy and sustainability. We really might be greeted by the Burmese as liberators ... The trouble is what happens the day after you're greeted as a liberator. An occupying foreign power is naturally going to come to be viewed with suspicion by the occupied. This is in many ways an intrinsic problem, but it can be ameliorated a lot by legitimacy -- especially the kind of legitimacy you get from the U.N. where precisely because the UNSC decision-making process is cumbersome you can be ensured that a UNSC authorization reflects a broad international consensus ...

The other thing is sustainability. The international system needs to have some kind of recognized rules of the road. "The United States topples foreign regimes when we decide their government is bad" isn't a reasonable proposal for us to ask people in Beijing, Moscow, New Delhi, Teheran, Brasilia, or anywhere else to live by. By "any large country topples any foreign regime when it decides their government is bad" is a terrible rule that would lead to a lot of destructive conflict of various sorts. At the end of the day, great power conflict -- even if it "only" takes the form of cold war-style standoffs -- will do immense humanitarian damage to the world and avoiding it should be a very high priority. Does that mean we should do nothing? No, it doesn't, it means American officials (and, indeed, civil society figures) should keep pushing the international community to move to a world where something like the Responsibility to Protect has some force in the real world. But it has to be done in a reasonable consensual way that tries to stitch together America and its traditional allies with new emerging powers in various regions ...

I think this argument captures what I take to be the central difficulty with Matt's thesis: Namely, the extent to which it's offering a long-term agenda as a response to a question - how, when where and why the U.S. and our allies should intervene abroad - that tends to manifest itself as a series of discrete and very immediate challenges. It's all very well to say that the United States should be trying to build a world order in which great powers like Russia and China are willing to sign on whatever sort of Burmese intervention might theoretically be sanctioned under the "Responsibility to Protect" umbrella, but even if you're optimistic that such a world order is attainable - which Matt is, and I'm not - it's still far enough off that we can expect many more Burma-style (or Darfur-style, or Kosovo-style, or Rwanda-style) quandaries in the meantime. And answering the "what is to be done?" question that invariably accompanies these crises by saying that "American officials ...should keep pushing the international community to move to a world where something like the Responsibility to Protect has some force in the real world" amounts to answering it by saying "in the short term, nothing."

Now, that may be the right answer, but it's an answer that's more likely to appeal to realists and non-interventionists of the left and right than to the liberal internationalists to whom Matt's addressing himself. Basically, it amounts to telling people who are ideologically invested in the idea of interventions to halt wars, genocides, famines and so forth that they need to accept today's famine, and tomorrow's genocide, and the day after that's bloody civil war ... and someday, if the U.S. plays its cards right and invests heavily enough in a multilateral framework for international relations, the other great powers will come around to "rules of the road" under which it's plausible to imagine the UN conducting humanitarian interventions inside the borders of its more misgoverned member states. And while the Iraq invasion has made this Yglesian, "choose the UN, and patience" approach to world affairs much more appealing to the liberal-internationalist set than it was in, say, 1999 or 2002, as time goes by and more Burmese-style crises pass without an international response, I expect that most liberal hawks will default back toward the more aggressive and UN-skeptical approach to the world's troubles that at present is defended primarily by neoconservatives.

This is a long way of saying what I was trying to get at, clumsily, in my conversation with Matt about his book - namely, that he's trying carve out a "liberal internationalist" middle ground between the sort of liberal hawkery that helped give us the Iraq War and the non-interventionist (or pacifist) left, but that in practice (at least when the U.S. isn't just coming off a disastrous overseas intervention) this middle ground tends to get very narrow very fast: From JFK down to Bill Clinton and the liberals who agitated for the invasion of Iraq, it's hard to find all that many prominent liberal internationalists (at least within the Democratic Party) who resisted the temptation, when it presented itself, to choose interventionist ends even when the multilateral means that liberal internationalism is theoretically committed to weren't available.

I indulged the full quote so readers can digest it themselves - but also because I simply can't stand Yglesias' radical foreign policy project, and I want to give full play to Douthat's takedown.

Douthat mentions his "conversation" with Yglesias (available here), where he frankly puts Yglesias in a bind by suggesting that the international system doesn't just float by itself after one establishes some "legitimate" set on multilateral institutions and rules. The maintenance of international order is a collective action problem, and to overcome the system's inherent free-riding behavior (that will likely kill the regime), a "privileged group" or hegemon is required to bear the greatest burden in supporting the institutional order.

That hegemon is the United States, and since Yglesias detests not only U.S. power and prepondrance, but the use of any and all military force as well, there's no way he's going support a U.S.-led invasion of Myanmar to topple the military junta and open up that country to the world's humanitarianism that's practically pleading to help Burma's afflicted.

I've read Yglesias' Head in the Sand, and I'm planning to post a review on it sometime soon.

The book is inconsistent and utopian, and fails because it refuses to see any useful role for the deployment of American hard power.

Douthat is indulgent toward his colleague, who I imagine he has to see at the office quite frequently, and thus prefers some semblance of collegiality.

But let's be honest: Heads in the Sand is a long treatise in the foreign policy of Bush Derangement Syndrome. Yglesias comes out and says at least once explicitly, and by implication on a number of other occasions, that there's nothing - not one thing - redeeming about the Bush administration's foreign policy: Not breaking free from the outdated Cold War arms control framework, not resisting Kyoto-style hypocrisy on international climate change, not on Afghanistan (a war that had bipartisan support, but is pilloried by Yglesias as simply a "superficially important" warmup for toppling Saddam), and not the war in Iraq (where the surge is now looking to be the most important U.S. military turnaround in history).

And that's a serious problem, for even Yglesias' liberal international mentors see elements of utility in American leadership in security affairs, even in cases like Iraq, where (dubious) questions of international legitimacy constrained the American exercise of power.

I'll have more on these themes later.

But regarding regime change Myanmar, see Anne Applebaum, "A Drastic Remedy: The Case for Intervention in Burma."

Photo Credit: "Video footage has emerged showing the bodies of children who died in the cyclone, laid out in a row in a makeshift riverside morgue," BBC News