Not to pick on Booman Tribune user ask or his home country, but I have to wonder why the good people of Norway, a good and peace-loving people, never wring their hands about their inability to make the world safe from totalitarian regimes like the Burmese junta. I mean, just look at how Madeline Albright laments the loss of national will for foreign interventions:
THE Burmese government’s criminally neglectful response to last month’s cyclone, and the world’s response to that response, illustrate three grim realities today: totalitarian governments are alive and well; their neighbors are reluctant to pressure them to change; and the notion of national sovereignty as sacred is gaining ground, helped in no small part by the disastrous results of the American invasion of Iraq. Indeed, many of the world’s necessary interventions in the decade before the invasion — in places like Haiti and the Balkans — would seem impossible in today’s climate.
Maintaining the raw exercise of American power (with ad hoc ‘coalitions of the willing’) as the sole actor in both humanitarian and constabulary actions, is what neo-conservatism is all about. Albright’s vision is slightly more ecumenical:
…the concept of national sovereignty as an inviolable and overriding principle of global law is once again gaining ground. Many diplomats and foreign policy experts had hoped that the fall of the Berlin Wall would lead to the creation of an integrated world system free from spheres of influence, in which the wounds created by colonial and cold war empires would heal.
In such a world, the international community would recognize a responsibility to override sovereignty in emergency situations — to prevent ethnic cleansing or genocide, arrest war criminals, restore democracy or provide disaster relief when national governments were either unable or unwilling to do so.
The ‘international community’ in this case really amounts to the United States of America, and that’s the problem. Albright recognizes that the Bush era has destroyed America’s credibility as a leader in the humanitarian and constabulary fields, but that credibility was always highly exaggerated.
The global conscience is not asleep, but after the turbulence of recent years, it is profoundly confused. Some governments will oppose any exceptions to the principle of sovereignty because they fear criticism of their own policies. Others will defend the sanctity of sovereignty unless and until they again have confidence in the judgment of those proposing exceptions.
Perhaps people would trust Norway to decide when it is appropriate to invade a nation’s sovereignty. Maybe Norway would like to take a turn at the inevitable blowback in terrorism that foreign meddling invites. There is a world of difference between preventing the resurgence of any conventional power capable of inflicting human rights abuses on the scale of the Nazis and having the American taxpayer take it upon themselves to foot the bill for every humanitarian and constabulary action in the world.
Explain to the good people of Wichita, Kansas why the Burmese government is their problem and not the problem of the good people of Bremen, Norway. If the Burmese junta is somehow our joint problem, then explain why the U.S. must always take the lead role in risk and dollars in policing these global disputes?
How is the Burmese junta any threat to U.S. interests? Why is it a great shame that no nation is chomping at the bit to invade Burma and play social engineer in another country whose inner dynamics we only dimly understand?
This isn’t an argument in favor of isolationism. It’s an argument in favor of checking our hubris, minding our checking account balance, and getting the rest of the world to take their share of the responsibility for checking abusive regimes.
