After the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war the ‘west’ moved to implement several new doctrines to justify intervention in foreign countries.

One is the Responsibility to Protect (R2P)

… populations from genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity is an international commitment by governments to prevent and react to grave crises, wherever they may occur.

Another is the concept of ‘guarantor of regional security’ as used for example by the U.S. State Department:

For the U.S., NATO of course remains the guarantor of security in Europe, and therefore in the Baltic Sea.

Note that most of the Baltic Sea coast is owned by countries which are not even NATO members. With what right should NATO be a ‘guarantor of security’ there?

A third kind of justification are U.N. Security Council resolution for peacekeeping and general ‘security’ issues. The U.S. falsely claimed that some of these legalized the attack on Iraq.

But now Russia has used more or less all three of the above justifications in response to the Georgian attack on South Ossetia.

Gareth Evans of the International Crisis Group and one of the initiators of the international R2P is miffed:

[The R2P] is the approach to dealing with mass-atrocity crimes that was embraced by 150 member states at the 2005 U.N. World Summit.
…
We are conscious of the fragility of that consensus should the impression gain hold that R2P is just another excuse for the major powers to throw their weight around. It needs to be made clear beyond a doubt that whatever other explanation Russia had for its military action in Georgia, the R2P principle was not among the valid ones.

Evans then goes on to give five arguments that the Russian Federation had no international R2P right to intervene in Georgia. I find his arguments very weak and believe Russia clearly had such a right. But Evans’ discussion is not to the point anyway because the Russian federation did not even claim that it acted on behalf of R2P in international law. As foreign minister Lavrov declared:

[T]he Constitution of the Russian Federation, the laws of the Russian Federation make it absolutely unavoidable to us to exercise responsibility to protect.

But back to those new intervention doctrines. The point is that the R2P, the ‘guarantor of regional security’ concept and the UN Security Council resolution process all have huge flaws that allow anyone to claim a right to intervene about everywhere.

The ‘west’, i.e. the U.S., could live with this very well when it was the only entity capable of serious intervention. Now that someone else uses the same reasoning, the danger of these concepts will be discussed differently.

Nikolas Gvosdev, outgoing editor of The National Interest, concludes:

I assume that in the next several years we may see a return to enhancing the position that the international system should be defined by sovereignty and territorial integrity of states and the importance of the imprimatur of the Security Council for any military action other than self-defense, ..

Let’s hope so. R2P, ‘humanitarian intervention’ and the other concepts are mostly pretense for neo-colonial intervention. They always can and will get abused.

The world needs to go back to the concepts of the Westphalian sovereignty and the principle of non-intervention.

There will still be cases where some will argue that they act in an international form of defense of others, i.e. breach of law to help a third person in an emergency.

That concept is well developed in national law. But that is only possible because we have national processes to judge the rightness of such a claim after the fact. We also have national authorities that penalizes cases of wrong applications of the concept.

But we do not have those institutions in the international realm. As long as we do not have an universally accepted international system of judgment and an international capability to penalize all offender nations, an international ‘defense of others’ is an invitation for misapplication.

Westphalian sovereignty is difficult. One has to stand by when some internal conflict in a foreign state turns nasty. But its alternative are lousy concepts like R2P and anarchy and the sole ‘right of the mighty’.