Ted Bromund didn't think highly of Mark Mazower's essay on "The Rise and Fall of Humanitarianism." Bromund writes:
The concept of legal norms is meaningless unless the norms are reciprocal: failure to uphold them must have consequences. Mazower traps himself into incoherence by accepting the fallacious belief that sovereignty is inherent in the state. Wrong: sovereignty is inherent in the people, who then establish the state as an expression of their sovereignty. The U.N. is deeply flawed precisely because it has admitted so many states that are not based on popular sovereignty.It is, of course, quite fair to say that those states should not always â?? or even not often â?? be the target of armed intervention by the U.S. and its allies. Interventions are indeed not sustainable unless they are based on U.S. interests â?? yet as the U.S. is the only nation in the world consciously founded on an idea, it will always have an idealistic impulse in its foreign policy, and one of those interests is the advance of its ideas. There is no way to unravel this contradiction, except to acknowledge the need for balance. But there is one way to make the contradiction worse, and that is to assert that there are no policies between universal armed intervention and â??stability.â? As a matter of practice, there are many â?? ranging from verbal condemnations, to political pressure, to foreign aid policy, to withdrawal of diplomatic privileges, to economic sanctions, to all varieties of support for resistance groups. If the only alternative to constant armed interventions that are not directly in our interests are unenforced legal norms, the mindless pursuit of stability, and the U.N., we are in a very bad way. [emphasis mine]
There are, unquestionably, other policies the U.S. can engage in between armed intervention and "mindless" stability. But do they work? Sanctions haven't liberalized Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Burma, etc. All that and more didn't liberalize Iraq. The revocation of diplomatic privileges, political pressures or, gasp, verbal condemnation doesn't seemed to have moved the needle with Zimbabwe, Sudan, Congo, et. al. And which resistance groups does Bromund believe will usher in durable democratic change should we lend them our support?
What's missing from Bromund's litany is the one thing that could potentially improve humanity's lot - trade policy. Strengthening commercial ties between nations does not guarantee peace, harmony or the flowering of democratic governments. It certainly hasn't - yet - with China. But it does improve people's living standards and their material well-being and could, over time, lead to pressures for reform. Better still, strengthening trade does not require Washington bureaucrats and think tankers to anoint political winners and losers in countries whose cultures, customs and internal dynamics they simply do not understand. No need to drop-ship liberal institutions - they can grow, if they can grow, organically.
In this view, the best way to crack closed societies is not to subject them to toothless hectoring or sanctions - neither of which have proven terribly effective. But to end their isolation through commercial engagement. Again, it may not work, and certainly won't work in every case. But judged against the effectiveness of the other measures Bromund endorses, I have to think it stands a decent chance, provided we're patient.
(Daniel Larison has more here and here.)
