Miscellany Central: The failure of humanitarian militarism

The failure of humanitarian militarism

War — what is it good for? Achieving narrowly defined national security goals

Matthew Yglesias

Aug 19

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(Turkish National Defence Ministry / Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

When I was young, there was a big vogue for an idea often called “humanitarian intervention” which was basically the notion that rather than dismantling the Cold War project of global military hegemony, the United States could leverage global military domination in order to do good in the world.

This was inspired specifically by the thought that the U.S. could have intervened fruitfully in the Rwandan genocide or to prevent ethnic cleansing during the Bosnian Civil War, and it ultimately came to fruition in the brief U.S. war with Serbia that secured de facto independence for Kosovo. But it was also quite visible in pop culture. Films from “Air Force One” to “The Contender,” both of which I like a lot, toy with the idea of a president rousing the American people from the slumbers with a new doctrine of military humanism.

George W. Bush’s administration did not really take up this mantle, but it was in the mix discourse-wise around the time of the Iraq War, and it became very prominent when it turned out that the nuclear program that caused us to invade Iraq with the intention of halting was fake.

It then sort of faded out of view over time in a way that I think is telling. First the Global War on Terrorism, then the (alleged) need to contain Iran, and now the less-fake need to balance against China turned out to provide serviceable rationales for a campaign of global military domination. You didn’t need “stopping genocide” as an answer to the question “what is all this for?” You could come up with traditional-sounding security rationales.

But something we saw on the way out the door in Afghanistan is that hawks will throw the whole kitchen sink of arguments at you, so we got a lot of humanitarian sentimentalities. And I know that a lot of Democratic staffers were not comfortable with the frank nationalism of Biden’s speed on Afghanistan. My view is that humanitarianism is good, and caring about foreigners is good. But the military is neither an appropriate nor effective way to bring this about. If you want to help foreigners, give them money. Or invest in global public health programs. Or let them immigrate. Or let them trade without bullying them into concessions. But really, give them money or invest in global public health programs. This is not what a military is for, and the confusion is dangerous.

In war, you pick sides

This is a point my friend Sam Rosenfeld and I have been making for 15 years, but when the United States intervenes in a war, it can help one side win but it can’t determine what that side does with the victory. In the war with Serbia, we helped stop the ethnic cleansing of Albanians from Kosovo which was great. But the victorious Albanians turned around and committed abuses against Serbs and Roma. There didn’t happen to be a side in that conflict that had an incredibly high-minded commitment to pluralism. You pick a side and you work with what you’ve got.

This has been on full display in Libya, where after Muammar Gaddafi’s government attempted to violently suppress anti-government protestors, some members of the security services defected and an armed rebellion began. The rebellion was completely overmatched militarily and poised to suffer a major defeat.

Western powers felt that the rebellion’s collapse would lead to massacres and other humanitarian catastrophes, so NATO intervened against Gaddafi’s military. That was highly successful, massacre was averted, and Gaddafi was deposed and killed. But the rebel groups that took over the country turned out to have no real cohesion, plan, or commitment to human rights themselves. So ever since the dictator’s ouster, it’s been one tragic turn of events after another for Libya. There was not a “no human rights tragedies here” option available. There was the option of siding with the rebels, which we did. And then you get what you get.

Bad signals

It is difficult to know for certain what was going through Syrians’ heads during the decisive months, but it’s hard not to think that some of the people who took up arms in a doomed rebellion against the Assad government in Syria drew inspiration from what had happened in Libya.

Traditionally you don’t start an armed conflict that you’re going to lose. But the “message” of Libya was that if you picked a fight such that you seemed set to get massacred, NATO would run to your rescue. And indeed over the course of the horrifying and brutal Syrian Civil War, there were a lot of American voices clamoring for just that. Obama, whose Libya intervention I disagreed with, resisted pressure to get more deeply involved in Syria, which I applaud. But both at the time and in retrospect, the policy decisions did not seem incredibly consistent to me. I can understand why a Syrian defector might think Obama had made an implicit commitment to bailing him out.

In general, I think (and most academic experts seem to agree) that message-sending is overrated by foreign policy professionals precisely because the messages are inevitably ambiguous and hard to read.

But I think confusion is a particularly serious issue with humanitarian militarism because everyone understands that it’s not entirely on the level. The Taliban’s horrific mistreatment of women is a real thing. But until 9/11, it didn’t really bother the American government. And even after 9/11, it’s not like the United States became a principled champion of women’s rights in Saudi Arabia. Democracy-promotion never extended to Jordan. It’s not that a little hypocrisy is necessarily the end of the world, but it’s genuinely unclear what the bottom line is.

Now if you really had the messianic humanitarian vision of the fictional senator Laine Hanson from “The Contender,” this is maybe fine. Everyone should rise up against their oppressors, and every oppressor who tries to fight back will get interventioned. But that’s an awful lot of wars you’re signing up for.

Costs and benefits

Fighting wars is incredibly expensive.

When I want to help people, I give money to GiveWell’s Maximum Impact Fund which gives money to charities that smart people have assessed are reliably cost-effective ways to help people in need. Their list of supported charities has gotten pretty big. But it does not include a fund to hire mercenaries who try to solve global problems with bombs and guns. It doesn’t pencil out. And given the funding needs of highly effective charities, it doesn’t really make sense to go reaching for zany ideas.

One of the programs that GiveWell supports is GiveDirectly which basically just gives money to low-income families in Africa. There’s tons of research about how helpful this is. During the years of war, the military spent a low of $405 and a high of $2,891 per person in a country of 37 million.

Now I’m not saying we should have done a cash transfer program instead of fighting a war. What I am saying is that the case for fighting a war has to have something to do with national security. If you’re just trying to help people, give them cash.

Or don’t! Remarkably, GiveWell has identified a bunch of public health charities that they regard as even more cost-effective than giving money to the desperately poor. Programs to give children medication to prevent them from being infested with intestinal worms cost less than $2 per kid and in many cases less than $1. The parasitic worms are not “bad guys” in the same way that the Taliban is — they’re just worms, they don’t know any better — but from the standpoint of a child suffering malnourishment or blindness due to parasites, that’s a huge deal. And our tools for fighting the worm enemy are just really good and cheap, while unintended consequences are minimal. There are no friendly fire incidents with de-worming, no collateral damage.

And here’s the really mind-boggling thing. The total cost of closing the entire verified funding gap of all their favorite worm, malaria, cash transfer, etc. projects is almost trivial compared to the scale of the Pentagon. They are looking for amounts of money in the low eight figures per year rather than the tens of billions the war in Afghanistan cost.

Why not both?

Note that the price of really cost-effective humanitarian interventions is so low compared to the scale of fighting wars that it’s not even a choice. It’s not like you’d have to disband the military to win the war on worms.

The point is just that if the thing that you want to do is get the U.S. government to help more foreigners, go advocate for that. It is not hard for an entity operating on the financial scale of the United States of America to do a lot of good for a lot of people. Beyond those very most cost-effective ventures, we ought to be putting more cash into George W. Bush’s PEPFAR initiative that saves tons of lives. Good options are not that hard to find, and they also don’t raise murky questions or send questionable signals to the world.

Then you can think about the military in traditional military terms. It’s good to have a military. It’s good to have NATO. Keeping the sea lanes open is good. The nuclear deterrent seems useful. You want the Taliban to be afraid that if they host terrorists again, they’re going to get invaded again. Military stuff. But if the mission starts creeping into humanitarian terrain, then send some worm pills instead.

Many ways to help

These days there’s a lot of talk of refugee admittance which is of course a great way for developed countries to do good in the world.

And I would make the case for thinking bigger here, at least in the abstract. As the economist Michael Clemens likes to say, international labor mobility is the multi-trillion-dollar bill lying on the sidewalk. The U.S. and other western countries should help Afghans who helped us, the sympathetic figures who there might be political will to assist. But more broadly, we should try to build an immigration politics that isn’t about irregular flows of asylum-seekers and refugees but instead centers legal, well-organized paths to either immigration or temporary work visas.

Trade policy is another classic case. Instead of using the carrot of access to the American market as leverage to try to get poor countries to adopt American intellectual property rules, we could just drop America’s arbitrary and regressive mess of tariffs and let people sell us stuff. We have all these rules stopping Central American countries from selling us more sugar. I don’t think legalizing all sugar imports will fix everything that ails Central America, but it wouldn’t hurt.

These things don’t have the stellar humanitarian impact of insecticide-treated bed nets to fight malaria, but they don’t really cost us anything.

Thinking more big picture, the United States has somewhat unique contributions to make a big impact on a lot of issues of global concern. These are often situations where helping ourselves also helps the world. Imagine we could quadruple the output of mRNA vaccines — that’s great for America but with significant spillovers. It’s insane that we’re still shortchanging pandemic preparedness.

Defense is for defense

I’ve always thought there was something a little Orwellian and weird about the decision in the 1940s to rename the Department of War as the Department of Defense.

Either way, though, the name conveys something important and basic about a military. What a military does is fight wars. A good reason to fight wars is national defense. There’s nothing wrong with dispatching the Navy to do humanitarian response work during a tsunami. But when you think about the Navy and how many ships the United States ought to build and what kind of ships and what capabilities they should have and how much money is worth spending, you really ought to be thinking about fighting wars and defending the country.

My guess is we don’t need nearly the volume of resources we are currently dedicating to this mission, that lots and lots of U.S. military spending is only tenuously related to a serious national defense goal. But that’s a conversation worth having — maybe every penny really is needed to defend our freedoms.

But if we’re having a different conversation about abstract humanitarianism, then the military is a terrible tool — it’s too expensive, it’s too blunt, it’s too confusing, and it’s simply fantastical to believe that the world has so few problems that admit of more straightforward solutions that we ought to be bombing for the human good.

Miscellany Central

Thursday, August 19, 2021

The failure of humanitarian militarism

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