Tod Lindberg on Darfur and R2P

Tod Lindberg, research fellow at the Hoover Institution and editor of Policy Review (and, full disclosure, good friend of mine) has a new article out in Commentary, “The Only Way to Prevent Genocide.”  The article argues that while “creative diplomacy” can make a difference, in “the end, it may all come down to the willingness of the United States to act.” It then walks back through the ways in which a consensus was built on a bi-partisan basis to support the idea of “responsibility to protect” in Washington as part of the US position on 2005 UN reform, and in other think tank and policy group reports and meetings as well (including a recent report drafted by Lindberg and former Clinton State Department senior staffer Lee Feinstein for a Brookings project, broadly similar to the ASIL’s project on US cooperation with the ICC that Duncan described in an earlier post; I’ll link when it is officially released).  

Lindberg’s essay is a powerful call for the US to be willing to act, and in that call, he indirectly reminds us that there is a broad strand of American conservative idealism in foreign affairs and that a form of neoconservatism lives on.  It is idealistic in the sense of taking moral ideals in foreign affairs seriously, including those that animate R2P; it is in line with neoconservative foreign policy in asserting that in the end, American will and power are what is required.  

By implication, of course, it raises a question for the currently unsettled directions of the new administration’s foreign policy: On the one hand, a reassertion of liberal internationalism in various ways, represented, I suppose, by Dean Koh’s nomination, and by a broad claim that America will now ‘engage’ again through liberal internationalism’s preferred routes of international law and organizations, the mechanisms that are intended to finally supplant international power politics.  And, on the other hand, the assertion of what I have elsewhere called the ‘new liberal realism’, represented by two different efforts, in one sense seemingly at odds but in another sense not.  The first is a realist willingness to ‘engage’ with people and regimes one might have had qualms about engaging with on human rights and idealist grounds – explicitly on a realist rationale.  The second is something that is perhaps encapsulated by Hillary’s now famous de-linking of human rights and US-China relations in the interests of, well, so many interests starting with who currently holds US sovereign debt and who the US hopes to hold much, much more of it in the future.  These different directions are easily enough reconciled, given that ‘engagement’ is a process, not a set of substantive commitments.  Like ‘multilateral’, it is a term of ambiguity, plasticity, flexibility.  It’s an affect, not an outcome.  

(Chris and I each express views on part of this, in papers in an upcoming Chicago Journal of International Law issue on a multipolar world.  I’ll post it up to SSRN when finally completed – Chris has no doubt long since finished his, and I am probably the final roadblock to the issue appearing!)