Humanitarian Intervention

Approval of any major action taken by the United Nations must be given by the UN Security Council. Unfortunately, any of the five permanent members of the Security Council have the ability to veto any course of action voted upon by the council. As a result, the bureaucracy within the council virtually neuters its ability to take quick, decisive action. Article II basically states that no member state can take any action within or against any other state without the approval of the UN.

In some cases, member states have been compelled to circumvent the UN and its bureaucracy laden structure in order to accomplish meaningful humanitarian missions. A perfect example is the war in Kosovo in 1999. The UN Security Council (Russia and China) blocked any attempt by the other powers to prevent a repetition of the 1995 Bosnia genocide. Once again, the Christian Serbs were setting out to cleanse the former Yugoslavia by getting rid of the Muslim Albanian Kosovars. Following the botched attempt by the UN at “Peacekeeping” in Bosnia, the western powers on the UN Security Council flanked the UN by engaging in Kosovo by way of NATO, the consequential trans-Atlantic military alliance.

The gamut of problems which fall under the umbrella of humanitarian crisis is extensive, ranging from mere food aid for disaster relief, to military intervention to prevent or halt genocide. The military end of the gamut is the more controversial within the UN and has a tendency to cause strife between member states.

The moral dilemma between engaging in a humanitarian crisis and ignoring it is more complex than could be covered in multiple volumes. However, the west, due to its adherence to a “superior moral compass”, has typically engaged or considered engaging in various types of humanitarian crises in order to prevent or lessen the damage caused thereby. The totalitarian history of the west’s Asian counterparts seems to lean Russia and China away from humanitarian causes.

In democratic societies, the danger of intervening is that the citizenry is typically not very keen on seeing body bags come home in exchange for humanitarian benefit in some far off land. Inasmuch as the people hold the ultimate power in a democracy, elected officials are likely more willing to listen to popular opinion and therefore less likely to take risks which would have little political value.

The dilemma lies in the moral compass. It’s obvious that it would be morally commendable to intervene in some humanitarian crisis if the cost was zero, and most Americans would probably agree. But when the perceived costs of that intervention exceed its perceived value to the public, even if the costs might be well worth the outcome to a benefitted group, officials are likely to steer away from committing to it. The advantage to elected officials in a UN intervention, rather than a unilateral one, is that they can take credit if it goes well, but shrug it off on the UN if it doesn’t. If things had gone badly wrong in Kosovo, President Clinton would have heard about it in a bad way.

A major complication with circumventing the UN, as in the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, is that other states, member and non-member alike, may then use that action as justification and precedent in performing their own unilateral action. Russia may easily have used that very case when it invaded Georgia in 2008. This principle applies to humanitarian intervention as easily as military endeavors. China could easily invade a neighbor on humanitarian grounds using the precedent established by NATO in Kosovo. The advantage NATO has in this instance is that NATO is a broad coalition of numerous nations. The problem is that unilateral action undermines the international order established within the UN. If states rampantly disregard the principles of the UN, it might as well not exist.