Generic commentary on foreign interventions and US diplomatic role

increasingly determined to hold their governments to account. This value-based argument was inextricable from the interest-based argument. So enough with the accusations of bleeding heart liberals seeking to intervene for strictly moral reasons. We also now know how different intervention looks when we help forces who want to be helped. East Timor, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Libya — all cases where force evened out odds between a brutal government and a widespread and legitimate social or national movement. It is difficult to know when a state has failed in its responsibility to protect its people, particularly when secession is involved. This is why international authorisation is both required and difficult to obtain. But the contrast with Iraq and Afghanistan, where external invasion saw the US often labelled as an enemy, is enormous. Another clear lesson: the depiction of America as “leading from behind” makes no sense. In a multi-power world with problems that are too great for any state to take on alone, effective leadership must come from the centre. Central players mobilise others and create the conditions and coalitions for action — just as President Barack Obama described America’s role in this conflict. In truth, US diplomacy has been adroit in enabling action from other powers in the region, and then knowing when to step out of the way. That said, we must not focus just on states, because Libya also shows that social forces are increasingly powerful drivers of foreign policy. Those forces have now pushed both the west and Arab governments into taking a much harder line than simply geostrategic logic would dictate against Bashar al-Assad’s brutality in Syria, and even (albeit timidly) against torture and killings by the Bahraini government. Social movements are also beginning to reshape politics in Israel and India. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_024600