Humanitarian Intervention

I was invited to a dinner this evening that will be attended by, among others, a fair number of students. My hosts asked if I would speak for a bit. Originally, I had thought to give a talk about animal rights but my hosts pointed out that, with the exception of me and perhaps one or two others who would be enjoying the vegan option, most of the assemblage would be eating animal products. My hosts thought that under the circumstances, such a talk might make the other diners uncomfortable. Although I try not to be a judgmental jerk about it, I don't really have a problem with making people uncomfortable about what they eat. That said, on reflection, I took my hosts' admonition to heart because I concluded that the fact that people would be eating dead animal parts while listening to me would make them less receptive to the message than they might be under different circumstances.

At my hosts' suggestion, therefore, I'm going to talk about war. The proposal, which I accepted, is to address "the ethics of war. When is it ethical to wage war against another country? If the government of the other country is abusing the rights and freedoms of their own citizens by killing them for their dissenting views etc, do we have a duty to step in and protect those citizens?"

I have, in previous essays, already addressed the related question whether the international law of war permits armed humanitarian interventions. As I wrote most recently here, the short answer is no. Although some scholars and other have been arguing for over three decades that there is an emerging customary international law norm allowing--and on some views, even requiring--armed humanitarian intervention, the practice of nations (from which customary international law norms are drawn) simply does not recognize such a norm.

However, as the essay linked in the previous paragraph acknowledges, to say that armed humanitarian intervention is illegal is not to say it is immoral. As the UNESCO report put the matter, the NATO campaign in Kosovo was "illegal but legitimate." So, this evening, after explaining that armed humanitarian intervention is unlawful, I plan to acknowledge that it can nonetheless be justified, and not just because a UNESCO report said so but because that is an ethically sound position, at least sometimes.

According to a highly plausible view of World War II history, the U.S. and Britain had the military capacity to disrupt the transportation of Jews to death camps by 1944 at the latest but failed to do so through some combination of prioritization of military targets, indifference tinged with antisemitism, disbelief in the accounts of the scope and scale of the Nazi project, and some concern that bombing the train tracks and the gas chambers would be ineffective or even kill the people it was aimed to protect, given the imprecision of the munitions of the time. Assuming, however, that the best assessment ex ante was that targeting the infrastructure of the Holocaust would have had a salutary effect, it would have been ethical to do so. Indeed, under such an assumption, it was unethical not to do so.

But conditions will often render humanitarian intervention unethical. I'll consider a few.

Let's start with actual subjective motivation. Among the justifications that President Trump has offered for the U.S-Israel war against Iran is providing aid to the Iranian people who have suffered greatly--including in exactly the way that my hosts described--under a brutally authoritarian theocracy. However, Trump has also offered other, sometimes conflicting, explanations for the war. At this point, it is not clear to me that Trump, Defense Secretary Hegseth, Secretary of State Rubio, or anyone in the administration ever had a coherent reason or set of reasons for this war, but even if they did, and even if the "real" reasons had nothing to do with aiding the Iranian people throw off tyrannical oppression, I am willing to say that humanitarian intervention could be a legitimate justification if it is objectively justified, regardless of subjective motive.

That said, the fact that an invasion is not actually undertaken for humanitarian purposes will typically affect how it is carried out. Thus, Trump's initial suggestion that the unarmed Iranian people should hunker down for the duration of the war and then rise up to overwhelm the remnants of the regime was fantastical. One can imagine a world in which the U.S. or some other military power undertakes effective regime change for some separate reason with the beneficial side effect of ending rights abuses. I'm acknowledging that in that circumstance, the intervention could be ethically justified notwithstanding the ulterior motive. That just seems highly unlikely in general and obviously false in particular with respect to the U.S.-Israel war against Iran.

More broadly, an ethical justification for armed humanitarian intervention would seem to require some calculation of the likely effect of war. Part of what made the NATO operation in Kosovo justified was the expectation that it would in fact protect the ethnic Albanian population. In general, armed intervention on humanitarian grounds can be justified only if the expected humanitarian benefit outweighs the expected damage the war will cause (in injury and loss of life). Thus, armed intervention that aims to prevent, halt, or slow even a grave humanitarian harm will not be justified if it has a sufficiently low likelihood of success--for then it is likely to bring with it the harms of war without the humanitarian benefits sought.

These considerations also show why an allied attack on the Nazis' Holocaust infrastructure, if it had occurred, would have been much easier to justify than most new humanitarian interventions. The U.S. and Britain were already at war with Germany. There was thus no risk that bombing the tracks leading to Auschwitz would plunge the world into a global war because that global war already existed. By contrast, initiating a war for humanitarian purposes often will pose a substantial risk of spillover harm.

There's another consideration. As I noted in my essay linked above on the unlawfulness of the U.S.-Israel war against Iran, one reason to be careful about recognizing a legal right to humanitarian intervention is the risk that the same justification will be used by nations with other than pure motives. This is anything but a theoretical worry. Hitler pretextually claimed that his invasion of (what was then) Czechoslovakia was to protect ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland from persecution. Putin made similar noises about the persecution of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. Just as we have reason to worry that a legal norm allowing armed intervention on humanitarian grounds would lead to its pretextual invocation by wicked but powerful states, so too we have reason to worry that an ethical norm of this sort would do the same.

Hold on. The fact that someone might pretextually claim self-defense against a battery charge doesn't mean that people who actually act in self-defense are unable to claim self-defense--either legally or ethically. So why reach a different kind of conclusion when evaluating ethical conduct by nation-states?

The answer, I think, is that international relations are not like interpersonal relations in all respects. If an individual claims self-defense when he was clearly the aggressor, a court will reject the claim. But the mechanisms for enforcing international law and norms are so much weaker, so one must worry that there will be no authority to stop pretextual invocations of humanitarian aims. We rely much more on norms. Hence, a country with a powerful military that claims to be using it for humanitarian ends--even if those claims are correct--necessarily sets a precedent that, over time, weakens the will of the world community to resist international aggression when other countries invoke humanitarian grounds pretextually.

To repeat, none of that is to say that the use of military force for humanitarian aims can never be justified. It is to say that the threshold for justification should be very high. And needless to say, it is nowhere near met in the current war.