Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright wrote an op-end in The New York Times today called The End of Intervention. According to Albright, the international response to the cyclone in Burma/Myanbar illustrates three new dynamics: (1) "the survival of totalitarian government in an age of global communications and democratic progress" (2) "their neighbors are reluctant to pressure them to change" and (3) "the concept of national sovereignty as an inviolable and overriding principle of global law is once again gaining ground."
In other words, the international community has stopped intervening to defend innocents from the world's most brutal dictators. It has forsaken its responsibility to protect.
The tragedy, according to Madeline Albright, is that the US invasion of Iraq is largely to blame for this mindset shift. Iraq has obviously presented its own internal problems to the United States; but it has also sent cascading shocks throughout the international system. Unintended consequences abound. The death of intervention is one of the most tragic.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comments:
Of course, the world wasn't too keen on our intervention in Iraq to begin with, so resistance to intervention hardly began with the invasion of Iraq. People tend to invoke "national sovereignty" not so much as an "inviolable principle" but as a flexible one when they don't approve of someone else's justification for intervention. That being said, Albright's fundamental analysis is probably correct. But she is, as always, being reactive, not proactive. She spent her time as Secretary of State cozying up to Kim Jong-Il and doing musical theater rather than advocating efforts against nuclear proliferation and terrorism.
Post a Comment