Joseph Nye, Harvard University
Project-Syndicate.org
CAMBRIDGE
– More than 130,000 people are said to have died in Syria’s civil war. United
Nations reports of atrocities, Internet images of attacks on civilians, and
accounts of suffering refugees rend our hearts. But what is to be done – and by
whom?
Recently,
the Canadian scholar-politician Michael Ignatieff urged US President Barack
Obama to impose a
no-fly zone over Syria, despite the near-certainty that Russia would
veto the United Nations Security Council resolution needed to legalize such a
move. In Ignatieff’s view, if Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is allowed to
prevail, his forces will obliterate the remaining Sunni insurgents – at least
for now; with hatreds inflamed, blood eventually will flow again.
In
an adjoining
article, the columnist Thomas Friedman drew some lessons from the
United States’ recent experience in the Middle East. First, Americans
understand little about the social and political complexities of the countries
there. Second, the US can stop bad things from happening (at considerable
cost), but it cannot make good things happen by itself. And, third, when
America tries to make good things happen in these countries, it runs the risk
of assuming responsibility for solving their problems.
So
what are a leader’s duties beyond borders? The problem extends far beyond Syria
– witness recent killings in South Sudan, the Central African Republic,
Somalia, and other places. In 2005, the UN General Assembly unanimously
recognized a “responsibility
to protect” citizens when their own government fails to do so, and
in 2011 it was invoked in UN Security
Council Resolution 1973, authorizing the use of military force in
Libya.
Russia,
China, and others believe that the principle was misused in Libya, and that the
guiding doctrine of international law remains the UN Charter, which
prohibits the use of force except in self-defense, or when authorized by the
Security Council. But, back in 1999, when faced with a Russian veto of a
potential Security Council resolution in the case of Kosovo, NATO used force
anyway, and many defenders argued that, legality aside, the decision was
morally justified.
So
which arguments should political leaders follow when trying to decide the right
policy to pursue? The answer depends, in part, on the collectivity to which he
or she feels morally obliged.
Above
the small-group level, human identity is shaped by what Benedict Anderson calls “imagined
communities.” Few people have direct experience of the other
members of the community with which they identify. In recent centuries, the
nation has been the imagined community for which most people were willing to
make sacrifices, and even to die, and most leaders have seen their primary
obligations to be national in scope.
In
a world of globalization, however, many people belong to multiple imagined
communities. Some – local, regional, national, cosmopolitan – seem to be
arranged as concentric circles, with the strength of identity diminishing with
distance from the core; but, in a global information age, this ordering has
become confused.
Today,
many identities are overlapping circles – affinities sustained by the Internet
and cheap travel. Diasporas are now a mouse click away. Professional groups
adhere to transnational standards. Activist groups, ranging from
environmentalists to terrorists, also connect across borders.
As
a result, sovereignty is no longer as absolute and impenetrable as it once
seemed. This is the reality that the UN General Assembly acknowledged when it
recognized a responsibility to protect endangered people in sovereign states.
But
what moral obligation does this place on a particular leader like Obama? The
leadership theorist Barbara Kellerman has accused former
US President Bill Clinton of the moral failure of insularity for his inadequate
response to the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. In one sense, she is right. But
other leaders were also insular, and no country responded adequately.
Had
Clinton tried to send American troops, he would have encountered stiff
resistance in the US Congress. Coming so soon after the death of US soldiers in
the 1993 humanitarian intervention in Somalia, the American public was in no
mood for another military mission abroad.
So
what should a democratically elected leader do in such circumstances? Clinton
has acknowledged that he could have done more to galvanize the UN and other
countries to save lives in Rwanda. But good leaders today are often caught
between their personal cosmopolitan inclinations and their more traditional
obligations to the citizens who elected them.
Fortunately,
insularity is not an “all or nothing” moral proposition. In a world in which
people are organized in national communities, a purely cosmopolitan ideal is
unrealistic. Global income equalization, for example, is not a credible
obligation for a national political leader; but such a leader could rally
followers by saying that more should be done to reduce poverty and disease
worldwide.
As
the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has put it,
“Thou shalt not kill is a test you take pass-fail. Honor
thy father and thy mother admits of gradations.”
The
same is true of cosmopolitanism versus insularity. We may admire leaders who
make efforts to increase their followers’ sense of moral duties beyond borders;
but it does little good to hold leaders to an impossible standard that would
undercut their capacity to remain leaders.
As
Obama wrestles with determining his responsibilities in Syria and elsewhere, he
faces a serious moral dilemma. As Appiah says, duties beyond borders are a
matter of degree; and there are also degrees of intervention that range from
aid to refugees and arms to different degrees of the use of force.
But
even when making these graduated choices, a leader also owes his followers a
duty of prudence – of remembering the Hippocratic oath to first of all, do no
harm. Ignatieff says Obama already owns the consequences of his inaction;
Friedman reminds him of the virtue of prudence. Pity Obama.
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