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.

The theory of humanitarian intervention is very much a product of the twentieth century. It is, first of all, a response to decade after decade of murder and mayhem, including genocide. Perhaps it is survivor's guilt that motivates democratic countries to wonder whether they could have done more-for the Jews or Cambodians or Kosovars or Rwandans or Sudanese or Timorese. Humanitarian intervention is also dependent on modern technology: on the timely knowledge made possible by modern telecommunications, and on modern military technology. Today we can watch the horrors of mass murder on television in the morning and have troops on the scene by nightfall.

We now know from experience that humanitarian intervention can "stop the killing." But the question remains: when, if ever, should the United States and its democratic allies intervene in the affairs of other sovereign states in order to do this?

Prior to the recent rise of humanitarian intervention, state sovereignty was the organizing principle of world affairs-not least in the United Nations, which is after all a collection of states and not of peoples. As in America "all politics is local," in world politics all crimes, including human-rights crimes, were local. There was no appeal beyond the national capital. The UN Charter makes intervention across state borders well-nigh impossible, allowing only two exceptions: self-defense in cases of "armed attack" (Article 51) and actions taken with Security Council approval as matters of collective security (Chapter 7). Humanitarian intervention without Security Council approval is, under the charter, illegal. The British Foreign Office summed up the traditional view in a 1986 statement:

The overwhelming majority of contemporary legal opinion comes down against the existence of a right of humanitarian intervention, for three main reasons: first, the UN Charter and the corpus of modern international law do not seem to specifically incorporate such a right; secondly, State practice in the past two centuries, and especially since 1945, at best provides only a handful of genuine cases of humanitarian intervention, and, on most assessments, none at all; and finally, on prudential grounds, that the scope for abusing such a right argues strongly against its creation.... In essence, therefore, the case against making humanitarian intervention an exception to the principle of non intervention is that its doubtful benefits would be heavily outweighed by its costs in terms of respect for international law.¹

But the British were fighting a rear-guard action. Indeed, the concept of nonintervention has been under challenge for years, both from international-law theorists and from certain governments. On the level of international law, the Genocide Convention permits, and may even be said to require, intervention. More to the point, the last half-century is replete with instances in which an invading country cited humanitarian concerns as justification for its action: India in East Pakistan in 1971, Vietnam in Cambodia in 1978, Tanzania in Uganda in 1979, and, in the 1990s, the United States in Somalia and Haiti, and NATO (with the British Foreign Office in the lead!) in Kosovo. If, in some cases, the claims of humanitarian motivation seem laughable, they fit La Rochefoucauld's definition of hypocrisy: it is the tribute vice pays to virtue. A century ago, a country needed only to invoke its national interest to justify military action. More recently, it is almost required to mention humanitarian motives as part of the justification.

The turning point was the end of the Cold War. Today we need no longer fear that intervention in local disputes will escalate into a superpower conflict that threatens to become a major war. At the same time, whatever restraints the superpowers placed on their client states during the Cold War are gone also, so that potential abusers as well as potential interveners are far freer to act. The resulting change in the international system is evident; humanitarian intervention is as much a fact of international life as trade treaties. Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine the expansion of humanitarian intervention had the world not become far more integrated economically and were we not now accustomed to a dense web of international rules governing many areas of conduct. Labor standards, environmental regulations, and international human-rights conventions now abound, as do regional bodies such as the European Union and Mercosur, adding layers of new rules to the older set that long governed international commerce.

Trade agreements continue to work pretty well and will no doubt remain in force at the end of the twenty-first century. Humanitarian intervention, a far newer phenomenon, may not. So far it appears to work badly in practice and not at all in theory. Are its flaws intrinsic and unavoidable, or can it be fixed?

The most serious pragmatic problem posed by humanitarian intervention is that the willingness of the intervening country to place lives and resources at risk is determined by the degree of national interest involved. In most cases, vital national interests are not at stake. Author and columnist Charles Krauthammer describes the resulting problem: "The central contradiction-the Iron Law of Humanitarian War-is this: Humanitarian war requires means that are inherently inadequate to its ends."2 Krauthammer believes that humanitarian intervention is "an idea whose time has come, and gone." Why? Because it involves "a contradiction of means: bloodless war."

Krauthammer's point is important, as is his observation that the very effort to avoid bloodshed (your own or the opponent's) may prolong a war. When the motive is purely humanitarian, national interests vague or nonexistent, and the risks high, humanitarian intervention ceases to be an attractive option. But there is no "iron law": in some cases conditions are more favorable for intervention. Sometimes the risks will seem low because of a huge disproportion of power between the interveners and the target state; sometimes a measure of national interest is involved. When the United States intervened in Haiti for "humanitarian" reasons, did we not also want a decent government in place there so that we could in good conscience send back Haitian "boat people"? Purely humanitarian interventions may in fact be the exception rather than the rule. To diminish Krauthammer's gap between ends and means, reduce the risks a bit and raise the national-interest rewards above zero; at some point a balance may be found. Indeed, considering the cases where the world did not intervene or did not do so with much energy, such as Rwanda and Tibet, Krauthammer's problem solves itself: when the ends are too distant from vital national interests to support the means (military casualties), intervention seldom occurs. The decision to intervene is, after all, made most often by political leaders whose pursuit of humanitarian ends will be tempered by their need to win elections.

Absolute certainty of our moral rightness can also break Krauthammer's "iron law" by justifying use of a great deal of force; we may be willing to punish the target country until its leaders are forced to yield. In Kosovo, that is precisely what happened: after a weak beginning, NATO pounded the Serbs with such severity that some complained of the civilian casualties from the bombing campaign. I did myself. The moral arithmetic here became perverse: we were unwilling to risk U.S. casualties in either air or ground combat, but given the rightness of our cause, we felt justified in a high-altitude bombing effort that inevitably killed Serbian civilians. Instead of Krauthammer's limited-war dilemma, we may in the future find ourselves confronted with a much different problem if we choose to ignore the "just war" doctrine of proportionality. That problem will be compounded if we proceed with an unwarranted sense of self-righteousness, something that is especially inappropriate given our declared humanitarian objectives.

These are practical problems: when direct national interests are quite limited, how hard do you fight, how much do you risk, how many do you kill? And how likely is success? To impose hardship and to take lives when there is little chance of resolving a situation is not only feckless but immoral. Krauthammer argues powerfully that few cases will provide any reasonable chance of a positive outcome because the social rifts deep enough to produce massive human-rights crimes cannot be solved by a brief period of international policing. We may stop the killing while we are on the ground as occupiers, only to see it resume when we leave. Often we will know too little about the society to do much lasting good. Or we will be unwilling to meet the costs of the prolonged stay that real change requires. Or our self- interested intervention will be wrongly described as humanitarian; we will thus advance our own national goals even if the locals benefit little (as in the case of Haiti). Often humanitarian intervention fails to achieve much long-term improvement in the lives of the people it claims to help.

But not always. While the practical difficulties remind us that our goal is to do good rather than feel good, they should not block action when there is something useful to be done. The problem may be a dictator: Panama, for example, is clearly better off with General Manuel Noriega in jail (whether one calls the U.S. intervention there humanitarian or imperialistic) and has, as a result of his removal, become a working democracy. Or a period of foreign intervention may open a new phase in the political life of a nation by showing that deep social divisions can exist without causing sectarian violence or mass murder. The "realist" school provides important warnings against allowing moralizing to replace judgment, but prudence does not always dictate indifference and inaction.

As difficult as these practical issues are, the doctrinal problems involved in humanitarian intervention may be even tougher. We may be faced with practice in search of a theory.

Under international law and at the UN, the traditional defense of the practice is that every humanitarian intervention is meant to solve a threat to international peace. This argument, though perhaps useful in UN debates over whether to intervene, is thoroughly unpersuasive. Most local conflicts pose no threat to the rest of the world. While human-rights crises may not all be purely local affairs, neither are they all international in scope. The "threat to peace" argument must be reserved for appropriate cases. In most others, the better defense is the "forfeiture of sovereignty" argument": Sovereignty rests in the people; there cannot be popular consent to severe human-rights violations; hence there has not been such consent; hence the state is acting against the true sovereign (the people) when it commits human-rights crimes. The intervention is then taken on be- half of the "true" sovereign and does not represent a breach of sovereignty.

For Americans weaned on "We the people," this formulation is attractive, and the forfeiture-of-sovereignty doctrine can indeed be applied to many cases of human-rights abuse. But before applying it too widely, we should consider the implications. What about crimes committed willingly by a sovereign majority against a small minority, up to and including genocide? Here the general will may be to slaughter a particular sect or religious or racial group, and so the forfeiture-of-sovereignty argument does not apply. The interveners must instead simply impose their morality on the local majority, insisting that there is now a global standard of human-rights law that no one may breach. The Genocide Convention and the Convention Against Torture are examples of that law, and it may be that in this new century their application, heretofore narrow, will be widened. Courts in England have ruled in the case of General Augusto Pinochet, the former dictator of Chile, that under international law torturers are like pirates: they may be captured anywhere because there is a universal interest in stopping torture. One can imagine broader and broader categories of human-rights violations being brought under international oversight, providing justification not only for court actions against individual abusers but for some form of intervention as well. Why only genocide? Why large-scale atrocities and not smaller-scale ones?

Such questions raise the broader issue of whether anyone is prepared to advocate intervention in the many, many countries that fall short of peaceful and democratic politics. There are also issues of doctrine to consider. Who has the right to decide that a human-rights crime is being committed and that it rises to the level of offense covered in an international treaty or convention? Who has the right to organize an intervention force? If the moral criteria that justify intervention are redefined to allow military action against lower-level human-rights crimes, then the procedures for intervention must be improved. Almost every intervener claims some moral basis for its action, and expanding the opportunities for intervention inevitably means enlarging the possibilities for mischief-making as well.

In recent years, the intellectual argument has been largely advanced by human-rights activists favoring intervention. They have in the main strung together arguments justifying action by the great democracies to rescue people in the more backward parts of the world. In the not so distant future, these same people may wish to redirect their attention to standards and procedures aimed at preventing misbegotten military ventures whose goals are flimsily clothed in the language of humanitarianism. Stopping a bogus humanitarian intervention may come to be as pressing a challenge as launching a genuine one.

What will the coming decades bring? There is reason to believe that humanitarian intervention will be needed more rather than less often. The last decades of the twentieth century suggested that ethnic and religious identities, long expected to decline in the face of "modernity," are instead becoming more salient to millions of people, not just in the former Yugoslavia or in East Africa but around the globe. Sectarian strife may well become more prevalent, especially when combined with renewed nationalism. The collapse of the Soviet empire and the end of the Cold War have unquestionably unleashed and intensified in many peoples the desire to form a state coterminous with the nation and representing its true aspirations-whether in Eritrea, East Timor, Kurdistan, or Chechnya. Moreover, increased religious devotion has in some areas led to human-rights violations against nonbelievers, and in others has combined with nationalism in an explosive brew that threatens minority rights. It seems that as the world economy becomes more integrated, feelings about religious and national identities intensify. And when identity politics becomes violent, the preconditions for large-scale human-rights abuses and thus for humanitarian intervention are greatly enhanced.

It is probably true as well that the "creative destruction" we associate with capitalism will exacerbate these trends. Globalization of trade and finance can often disrupt society in a beneficial manner and hasten the arrival of democracy; it did so in South Korea, Taiwan, and Chile, to take three familiar examples. But modernization may also be disruptive to local cultures and produce a counterreaction: a desire for stronger traditional identities, for the reassurance and security of group membership, and for the comforting exclusion of those who are different.

The concept of sovereignty, already on shaky ground, will be further weakened if both human-rights crimes and the demands for intervention increase. Having already "pierced the veil" of inviolable state frontiers, the international community is less likely to shrink from humanitarian intervention in future cases. Practical objections to a particular armed intervention will sometimes prove persuasive, but the kind of international indifference to crises within sovereign states that prevailed in the past is no longer possible. For example, it is highly unlikely that the Western democracies will forever ignore the plight of Christians who are being oppressed in various Third World countries. Since the world claims to believe in the equal dignity of all mankind, affluent and predominantly white societies can no longer ignore the suffering of the poor and darker-skinned peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In addition, humanitarian nightmares that are the product of nationalism are very likely to involve border wars or border changes and therefore legitimately to involve other countries and the international community.

Finally, the so-called revolution in military affairs may play a role as well. Until now, the greatest practical limit on intervention has been the unwillingness of potential interveners to bear great risks and to take many casualties. New generations of weapons, however, may lower the cost of intervention both in resources and in manpower. Pilotless planes, robot vehicles, smart bombs, information warfare, and the like can reduce the risks for the intervener to a politically acceptable level. The war in Kosovo, like the Gulf War against Iraq, may be a harbinger of a new era in warfare in which powerful states are free to intervene without much risk of sacrificing soldiers. Who would not want to rescue thousands of desperate people if the only risk was that a few robots would have to die for their country?

Curiously, even the efforts to establish rules and limits for intervention will erode traditional views of sovereignty. It is difficult to imagine what practical standards can be written into international law. When should a large-scale human-rights violation be handled with speeches or boycotts, and when is armed force justified? The words international lawyers choose will never provide much guidance or much restraint. What is far more likely is a requirement of collective action. That is, armed intervention will justified under international law when some group of nations-the Security Council, the General Assembly, NATO, or an ad hoc combination assembled in a particular case- says so.

The requirement for group action revives the ideals of collective security we associate with the League of Nations and the UN, and appeals to the hope that the burdens of intervention will be widely shared. But its main effect will be to disallow a unilateral decision by any one country to use armed force. This itself represents interference with a right once thought to be at the very heart of sovereignty. This requirement of collective action is an inevitable and, on the whole, a positive development. Humanitarian intervention is defined not by means but by ends. The tools of both humanitarian intervention and blatant aggression are military, so we can distinguish the moral from the immoral intervention only by making a judgment about motives. An armed action aimed at repression or characterized by aggressive intent is unlikely to capture much international support, while an action aimed at saving lives is un- likely not to elicit such support. To return to realpolitik, in the foreseeable future a powerful American diplomatic effort will almost certainly be able to drum up support for any action that we feel we must take. Moreover, U.S. military dominance will make it difficult and even impossible to intervene without American approval and participation.

For Americans, this most idealistic of discussions cannot be separated from the debate over the uses of our extraordinary power. Those who fear that the United States leans always to imperial adventures and to the support of repressive regimes will continue to urge great restraint, but this camp has shrunk a good deal since the end of the Cold War. As we saw in Kosovo, many who attacked American interventionism repeatedly during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s- even many who voted against U.S. intervention in the Gulf War-were calling loudly for widespread U.S. intervention in the 1990s.

Today the more consequential debate is between those who believe power is bolstered when it is used sparingly and those in the "use it or lose it" camp. The former group argues that the United States is uniquely able to mount an operation like Operation Desert Storm or to counterbalance growing Chinese power in East Asia, and that it should save its powder for large tasks like these. To use our resources in interventions that could be undertaken by lesser powers is to squander them-and to weaken the political will to intervene in cases where our national interests are clearly involved. The interventionists counter that it is the moral leadership of the United States that will be squandered if we stand aloof when massive human-rights abuses are being committed and our allies are considering action. Successful interventions, they argue, breed confidence in our will and our ability, engendering more political support at home and abroad while at the same time deterring tomorrow's human-rights abuser.

So commanding are the current power and reputation of the United States, so remarkable its cultural and military dominance, that the future of humanitarian intervention depends largely on what course America decides to follow. The coming decades will certainly see their share of cases where violent human-rights crimes occur, outside intervention is tempting, and no serious obstacles to success appear. We will then be faced with a myriad of practical and legal objections, for America's moral standards have gotten ahead of international law and practice and far ahead of our ability to change the world. We will return again and again to the same debate, amongst ourselves and with other democratic nations that share our desire to deter and punish human-rights violators. If we sometimes find a case where the decision to intervene seems easy, we will more often find ourselves wondering whether intervention will achieve anything useful. At the back of our minds we will worry about the costs we must pay, the effect on our reputation and self-esteem of action or inaction, and whether in the end we would be better off in a world where national sovereignty has all the legitimacy of the divine right of kings.

This is exactly the debate we should be having, and these are exactly the doubts we should be entertaining. If the theory of humanitarian intervention is a product of the twentieth century, its practice is the product of the unique circumstances at the century's end. The current international debate over humanitarian intervention reflects important progress in moral standards, but it reflects more fundamentally a single fact: that for the first time in human history a democratic society is the dominant world power. We are all engaged in a novel enterprise, judging whether and how that nation's power, combined with the power of like-minded allies, can be used to eliminate or at least reduce abuses of the rights of man.

During the past century, those rights were more and more carefully elaborated in international conventions that were usually not worth the paper they were printed on. These high-sounding agreements, signed by the likes of Stalin, coexisted with a vast empire of repression that encompassed much of the world's population. We can now envision-indeed we are actively engaged in-making those words real for an ever-increasing portion of mankind. Not surprisingly, this effort, tangled as it is with the great debate over the uses of American power, confuses and divides Americans as it does friends of human rights everywhere. We must get used to that, for this effort and this debate will define international politics, and our own, in the coming decades.

1.UK Foreign Office Policy Document No. 148, reprinted in BybIL (1986) 614.

2. Charles Krauthammer, "The Short, Unhappy Life of Humanitarian War," The National Interest, Fall 1999 (emphasis in original).

3. See Peter L. Berger, ed., The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Ethics and Public Policy Center/Eerdmans, 1999).