Winter 2000
American Purpose
Issue 2, Volume 14

Publication Date: December 1, 2000
Posted: Wednesday, October 10, 2003

This issue offers reflections on humanitarian intervention by two commentators.  Elliott Abrams is the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the current chairman of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.  His essay is adapted from one published in a new book by Freedom House, Freedom in the World 1999-2000, and also in The National Interest (Spring 2000).  Andrew Natsios, whose career has included service as an official of the Christian relief organization World Vision and, before that, of USA1D, is currently in charge of the "Big Dig" project in Boston.  His essay is adapted from a chapter in the Ethics and Public Policy Center's 1998 book Close Calls.


In This Issue :

When—If Ever—Should America Intervene?
The bloodiest century in history has closed with a new idea: that lives can be saved if foreign troops are willing to shoot human-rights violators before they begin-or at least before they complete-their tasks, and that, since lives can be saved this way, morality requires that we not shrink from the task, wherever it takes us.  [More]

Humanitarian Emergencies and Moral Choice
Perhaps the most distasteful moral choice forced upon policymakers during the fifty years of the Cold War was whether to embrace and sustain pro-Western, anti-Communist regimes that were at the same time squalid, corrupt, and abusive towards their own people. The customary justification for this support was that the greater end of restraining Soviet expansionism required it. And indeed, the expansion of the Soviet system in itself, even apart from any realpolitik calculation, should have offended the moral sensibility of anyone familiar with the systematic atrocities committed by Communist regimes against their own people for much of the last century.  [More]