'The Leftist Case for Western Military Intervention' - Johannes Haekkerup

'The Leftist Case for Western Military Intervention' - Johannes Haekkerup

The West’s record of military interventions is tarnished and filled with failures, yet also with moments of genuine success in the struggle to create and sustain a democratic and free world. Interventions are successful when they rest upon two robust pillars: a genuine moral case paired with a realistic, feasible long-term solution and vision for post-intervention conditions. The great threat to the success of interventionism is the lack of clarity that stems from the absence of a coherent vision. Where, concretely, are the West’s red lines, and is the West willing to pay the price of its values? The incoherence causes both interventions that should not have happened and also prevents intervention in cases where it would be warranted.

Discussions of the key role of the West’s morality in international politics are often dismissed because they are deemed either hypocritical to the point of worthlessness or irrelevant in a purely security-oriented world system. Both views miss the bigger picture. The West’s values matter because they are worth fighting for and worth asserting when they are genuine. Human rights, democratic liberties, freedom of expression, and popular sovereignty are not just abstract notions. These are values with real weight which bring real, substantive improvements to people’s lives. Fighting against authoritarianism and subjugation is a legitimate and noble cause that should not be abandoned. The very second article of the UN charter is the commitment to eradicating aggressive expansionism as a means to settle disputes or change territorial boundaries, a commitment which, when genuinely followed, unquestionably promotes peace. The West’s interventions must start and end with the protection of liberal and democratic values and opposing expansionary violations of sovereignty.

Nevertheless, it is improper to leave a discussion at just cherishing this ideal vision. Discourses around these liberal values in interventionism should, unfortunately with good reason, ring partly hollow contemporarily because of their systemic misuse in the past. Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, the Latin American death squads, the civilian murders in the drone wars are just a few of sickeningly many examples of crimes that cannot just be dismissed as one-off unfortunate incidents. They are often rooted in perverse manipulation. Whether it be warmongering hawks or the military-industrial complex’s nefarious influence, when the West commits these atrocities, it cannot reasonably claim morality. The moral case must be genuine and not the result of manipulations. Further to this point, some might say they are justified as means to an end, but Western values have to be about not just the end but that liberties and freedom are respected always, not just when it is convenient.

However, these failures are not a reason to outright reject all military interventionism because it does not have to be this way. To intervene militarily does not compel democracies to subvert their own determined rights and principles. There is always a choice. Civilian murder and torture are not needed to win wars. If rejecting these endangers troops, then it constitutes part of the price for preserving our values, because by breaking them we destroy the whole point of the intervention itself. Military intervention must be conducted on the basis that these acts cannot be allowed, and our leaders must factor that in when they make the choice. To do good on the international stage, the West must also genuinely act according to its principles. Always.

But why military? Can the West not choose to rely on interventions that do not require bloodshed and violence? War is without question a terrible outcome when compared to peace, and any decision which brings it must always be extremely thoroughly scrutinized, but economic and diplomatic tools are not always enough. In a world with authoritarian expansionist states and with the relative strength of democracies declining, force must sometimes be met with force. Economic and diplomatic intervention is weakening, as states secure self-sufficiency and immunize themselves from Western sanctions and the formal diplomatic institutions of the world are ignored. Sometimes military intervention is the only option available that upholds liberal and democratic values. Let it be clear, the threat of military intervention is absolutely more powerful than intervention itself. Deterrence is the most effective tool against aggression, but a threat without commitment is an empty threat. The West cannot have it both ways, and any time it uses the threat of intervention it must be ready to take that action. When red lines are drawn only to be walked over without consequence, it undermines all future deterrence. The key lies in having the moral framework which establishes red lines that the West is willing to intervene over. Only then can deterrence contribute to the safety the world desperately needs.

If the choice is without doubt between ignoring oppression, suffering, and the violation of rights on one hand and military action on the other, the West should not hesitate because its values should point to only one answer. It is an unfortunate reality that often it amounts to a choice between two outcomes of harmful consequences, but it is arrogance to refuse to choose. The priority has to be to fight for the better outcome even if it comes at great cost, because stepping away is an abdication of responsibility which will only result in more suffering. However, it must also be realistic in its capacity, as the West cannot fight every state which undermines some democratic values. Instead, it should focus on dealing directly with the most severe and direct breaches of the red lines of these values, and on the smaller breaches exert itself with political and economic pressure. What these both require is the West to be confident in its values and to be willing to take a stand when the time calls for it.

Discussing the morality of interventionism is incomplete if it leaves it at only analysing the West because it is not the only actor which uses and argues for military intervention as a solution to issues. Almost all uses of military force are justified and phrased in the language of intervention rather than expansion. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is argued by the Russian state to be an intervention with a strong moral case, and as such it should be analysed with the same framework as any Western intervention. The question then lies in determining, regardless of the origin of the intervention, whether it is moral. One response would be to stress the importance of UN mandates as a source of relatively objective evaluation of the merits of intervention, but as its Security Council operates currently it is divided by geopolitics. With veto powers for three Western powers, China, and Russia, the only possible instances of UN-approved intervention is when the interests of all these actors align, which has become almost impossible.

Interventions are often aimed at solving conflicts between actors, each separately supported by one or more of the veto players, meaning any attempt to justify intervention by one side is doomed to fail through the veto of the others.

Without any other real alternative to the dysfunctional UN Security Council for universal moral evaluation of all states, it leaves the evaluation of the moral case of interventions as an ideological struggle. To argue for intervention for democratic values is also to assert that interventions based on authoritarian anti-democratic values are morally wrong. It is not always so binary, but the overarching point remains that for any intervention the moral case must be built on values the intervening society believes is better, and which they believe the people affected by the intervention can agree to. This is of course dissatisfying because it means opposing ideologies cannot easily come to agreements on the morality of actions, but the alternative is worse. To not assert democratic values as beneficial and better for peoples than autocratic values leaves aspiring democracies and movements all across the world alone. It destroys the necessary principles any defence of democracy rests on. In essence, a thorough discussion of which values are best is essential, and for this discussion to reach all societies. There is often a fundamental trade-off between the desire to protect and promote democratic and liberal values through interventions while also ensuring they are supported by the rest of the world. The UN founding charter is a rough beginning, and Responsibility to Protect as a guiding concept are attempts to find a common ground, but they are inadequate when the Security Council is sharply divided on justifications for intervention. Thus, to ensure the West’s values are protected it must sometimes sacrifice the endorsement of China, Russia, and the unanimity of the UN, as illiberal expansionism otherwise can occur unchecked.

The importance of a realistic long-term strategy cannot be overstated, because if absent a genuine moral intervention can turn into a quagmire of suffering that ultimately causes more harm than good. Painful lessons have been learnt from interventions with a solid moral justification which nevertheless ended up creating unstable failed states, because of the lack of a feasible endgame. The long-run consequences must be included in the moral framework, because otherwise we see the West leave behind a destroyed people worse off than had they stayed away, exactly the sort of abdication of responsibility which is so harmful. These interventions are in the end immoral, because when the dust of destruction has settled the benefits from the protection of liberal democratic values amounts to little beside the instability and suffering caused throughout.

Lessons of Success - Korea and the 1st Gulf War

The cases of the Korean War and the First Gulf War represent two cases of clear morality combined with realistic prospects for long-term success in the post World War 2 era. South Korea and Kuwait were by no means democratic states, ruled by the authoritarian Syngman Rhee and Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmad al-Sabah respectively. Yet, the interventions were not so much fought over the principle of democracy within each country, but rather the principle of popular sovereignty as a direct rejection of violent expansionism. They were both battles over the rules that govern international diplomacy. By denying North Korea and Iraq their expansion, the West established a red line that states’ independence and territorial integrity should not be dictated through violence but through institutions and diplomacy. Both interventions were supported by the UN Security Council precisely because they were clearly moral.

The long-term stability of these interventions was also strong as it was an intervention between states rather than within them. Civil wars as the subsequent are inherently more difficult due to the troubles of establishing strong regimes and preventing instability. South Korea and Kuwait were fully-fledged states, and this meant the interventions could end with a clear ceasefire between them and the aggressors. The interventions were fundamentally defensive and not focused on regime change. This allowed the West to establish its red line and leave behind a relatively stable condition. Overall, these interventions should be evaluated as successes because the cost of these conflicts were less than the suffering North Korean and Iraqi aggression would have continued to cause both to the people who would have been subjugated, but also importantly through the complete undermining of the principle of popular sovereignty which might have galvanised authoritarians across the world and let to further aggressions.

Lessons of Failure - Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, and South America

These four interventions failed because they were either premised on uncertain moral grounds or lacked the long-term endgame that is required for an effective intervention. It is imperative to scrutinize and learn from these failures as they demonstrate how crucial having both factors in place are to advancing Western values.

Afghanistan and Vietnam are similar interventions in that their failure stems from the lack of a sustainable outcome rather than from a weak moral case. In Vietnam, the war was against the totalitarian and oppressive Viet Cong, in Afghanistan the similarly reprehensible Taliban. The Vietnam war initially appears to be similar to the Korean and Gulf War case, with an expansionist attack on a sovereign nation, the Republic of Vietnam. Nonetheless, it is a false equivalence because the Vietnam war resembled a civil rather than inter-state war. The Republic of Vietnam was rife with popular discontent, and not a fully coherent state. It was propped up by the Western intervention, much more so than in Korea where each side were nations in their own right. Both wars involved a common people at odds with each other, but the North - South Korean divide had existed for five years by the time the conflict started, and each side was an established state. Vietnam was different, because the war was less clearcut, and the divisions extended within each side.

The battle against authoritarian expansionism was largely the same, and therefore the moral case remained intact, but by being less-inter state it made the chance of quagmire much greater. Despite winning essentially every major battle, the Western forces could not create a long-term solution because the war was not as clear-cut as the inter-state cases. This meant greater and greater escalation with more casualties, more napalm, and no end in sight. The ‘forever-war’ dynamic was exactly the same in Afghanistan, where having overthrown the Taliban rulers, exporters and haven of terrorism throughout the Middle East, the Western coalition remained for twenty years, only for their created state to collapse in two weeks. However good the moral case for intervention, it has to be backed with a vision of the long-term outcome, and one that has a realistic chance of being realised, however the situation changes during the consequences of the intervention itself. Eight years in Vietnam and twenty in Afghanistan both amounted to outcomes worse than had there been no intervention, because the vision for post-intervention was flawed, and because whichever plan there was it did not survive the conflict itself.

The intervention in Iraq in 2003 is the worst of these four failed Western interventions because it was both without a long-term strategy and was built on dubious moral ground which led to the immense suffering in Iraq still today. Saddam Hussein and his brutal regime was incontestably horrid, but that is not enough by itself to warrant military intervention. There are ill-willed despots across the world, and for that to be a sufficient red line would mean an almost constant state of war between much of the world and democracies, an indefensible condition. Yet, the real killer of the moral justification for the intervention were the lies about weapons of mass destruction (WMD). To fabricate intelligence for generating a moral case is already by itself an indefensible breach of Western values, but combined with the absence of any other key reason, the war in Iraq was inexcusable. To compound the issue, the regime change in Iraq had no feasibly stable outcome. Nation and democracy-building in Iraq lacked broader organic grassroots movements, and it meant the created state was a hollow apparatus. Democracy cannot be exported, it has to develop from local sprouts that can be supported, and the subsequent disintegration of the Iraqi state and absorption into Iranian influence is testament to the failure.

The South American case is different from the other three because in many cases the results were actually relatively stable post-intervention outcomes, but the moral foundation for the interventions was flawed. These were failed interventions. However stable the final regime, if it does not respect democratic values the whole purpose of the intervention has failed. To illustrate the point, following CIA backed intervention in Chile against the democratically elected Allende government in 1973, the new authoritarian Pinochet regime was stable for nearly twenty years. An American backed coup in Brazil in 1964 similarly established a 21-year military dictatorship, in Bolivia it lasted 15. The point is that the interventions, albeit less directly militarily involved, were not failures because of a lack of stability of the regimes they created, but rather because of the absence of morality in these interventions. The case for South American interventions as advancing or protecting Western values is plainly wrong. The regimes established were brutal right-wing dictatorships which oppressed their people with little care for rights or popular sovereignty. Blinded by geopolitical paranoia of the Cold War, the United States pursued a strategy which crippled South American societies and undermined its own commitment to values. Rightfully it should be questioned how a state which supports these forms of regimes could ever truthfully be a moral actor.

Thus, the lessons of failure have to be that intervention must only occur when there is a moral case and a long-term strategy. However, in circumstances when there is the moral case but no plausible long-term outcome vision with a likelihood of creating a stable democratic value respecting regime, should nothing have been done? Absolutely not. Diplomatic and economic sanctions should have been used, but on the question of military intervention, they were mistakes.

The Dilemma of Yugoslavia

The interventions in Yugoslavia are controversial because they skirt the edges of the moral framework, even when considered in its purest essence without any manipulation. A point to be stressed again is the dangers of an inconsistent response and vision. The conflict began in 1991, and coordinated Western intervention continued to grow throughout the following years. Yet, these interventions were always one small step at a time. It started with peacekeeping, strengthening of the forces with armour and heavy weaponry, then instances of direct confrontation with separatist forces, and continued to escalate with airstrikes against Serbian-backed forces. If the West’s convictions held that intervention was justified as it began to take action, it should have done so with certainty. The conflict’s nature changed throughout the conflict, but the overarching core issues at stake remained the same: the sovereignty of each people to govern themselves and their rights to be free from oppression and torture. Violence certainly escalated as the conflict continued, but the broad pieces for and against intervention were already in place when Western peacekeeping began.

To judge the merit of the intervention the moral framework should be closely considered. At its root, the core dilemma is whether the cause was just and respectful of the need for long-term stability. I believe the answer is yes. It would be simplistic to say the question of sovereignty and violence were straightforward and intervention could protect and solve them. The peoples of Yugoslavia were so mixed that sovereignty for one group or area in many cases would come at the expense of another. In Bosnia, the core dilemma was that Bosnian Serbs in Srpska demanded unification with Serbia, while the Bosniaks’ sovereignty entailed an independent Bosnian state, and Croats pushed for their own autonomy. However, where the moral case for intervention becomes clear is through the violence and genocide of the war. Under absolutely no circumstances could the genocide against the Bosniak people at the hands of the Serbs ever be moral, and the West standing by was facilitating this immorality. Western intervention could not be fully morally justified on the grounds of sovereignty, as any action would undermine one groups’ one way or another, but as the war crimes and genocide escalated it should have become clear early on that it would only get worse, and that these clear violations presented a moral case which warranted heavy action. Once these absolute breaches of the moral red line were clearly committed and with no internal resolution in sight, the Western intervention should have been at its full level. The intervention was to prevent this, even in its stepby-step form, and these moral reasons made it justified.

As for long-term stability, the final Bosnian state as it came to be is an incomplete compromise on the sovereignty of the three peoples. It is a state that has functioned, and one that has done so despite long bloody years of war. If the West had launched a fully-fledged intervention as soon as the horrors of the conflict became clear and brought the invasions of Bosnia and Kosovo to an end, it could begin to focus its attention on healing the rifts of society and build a more secure state. In other words, the intervention in Yugoslavia resembled Korea and Kuwait more than it did Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, or South America because it had both a moral case and a feasible long-term vision for resolution. There was a moral justification based on the rights of citizens against genocide and violence, and the endgame was feasible and stable enough to mean the benefits of intervention far exceeded the cost.

Lessons for the Contemporary - Eastern Europe and NATO

I began writing this piece during the Russian build-up of troops on the Ukrainian border, and now as I reach its conclusion the gruesome invasion is happening, Ukraine’s fate hanging in the balance. However this ends, and I fervently do hope it is with Ukrainian victory, the lessons of interventionism are more important than ever. The fundamental two questions the West must ask are: does Western intervention genuinely have the moral high ground and is there a plausible stable endgame. The answer is undoubtedly yes. The West should have a formidable military presence in Ukraine to stop the Russian aggression and its annihiliation of all the West’s principles, but the nuclear weapons of Russia make such a strategy too dangerous. With the nuclear constraint, the West must instead resort to military aid of the highest possible level to Ukraine as a substitute for its own boots on the ground or fighters in the sky.

However, a greater consideration is perhaps to think about how and why this situation arrived. Putin is one answer, but the war in Ukraine did not start in 2022 but in 2014, and the overall tension in Ukraine originates from the very beginning of Ukraine’s sovereignty after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The tragedy is that this would have been avoided if the West had its moral framework in order. When NATO expanded in the 1990s and early 2000s it was a statement of values. The sovereignty of the post-Soviet states and their freedom were paramount, important enough for the other Western countries to take them in and work together on their security. Why then did these principles stop at the Ukrainian and Georgian border? If the West’s morals were in order, Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova, states already then under threat of Russian expansionism, would have been given security guarantees that compelled intervention. Would it have enabled an even better deterrent? Absolutely. More importantly, it was morally the right thing to do. Once the West agreed NATO expansion was right, there was not sufficient justification for not extending the guarantees. Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in 1994 as part to the Budapest Memorandum in exchange for security guarantees by Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom, but these guarantees were far too weak. With a clear moral framework, the negotiations should have resulted in solid defensive commitments rather than vague guarantees, as it would have given the Western powers the clarity to negotiate with the Russians for a value-protecting security structure.

To make matters worse, the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014 was a crossing of the red line. Still bearing in mind the nuclear constraint, if the West had not been in a moral muddle devoid of vision it would have treated it as the direct attack on democratic international norms it was. The West would have intervened as it has only just begun now, supporting Ukraine indirectly with all its power and sanctioning Russia to the extent it is doing. The nuclear threat prevents the direct expansion of NATO or conventional Western military engagement, but the sanctions, advice, military aid, and importantly political will should have started in 2014 with the crossing of that line. It was all too little too late because the will to act decisively upon the moral framework was not in order.

Military interventionism can be a force for good when the moral framework is right as the lessons of success show. The lessons of the failed interventions are not to say liberal values can never be spread or be protected with force, but instead that the scrutiny of these decisions must always be vigilant because there is no guarantee that the moral framework is always respected. Every time it is ignored its value is weakened, which is why it is imperative that it is followed not just in some cases but always. To give up on interventionism is to let the torch of freedom extinguish. Authoritarian regimes will only grow more assertive with the option off the table. Democracies must be ready to fight for freedom. There must be a well-defined red-line somewhere, a time when democracies have to stand against expansionism, and this line should not lie at purely national self-defence. By building the moral framework, the West can establish red-lines that protect democracies and their values, but also promote peace by stopping expansionism in its tracks. The West must be ready to intervene militarily because sometimes this is necessary for a freer, more peaceful world.

[Johannes Haekkerup is a second--year PPE student at the Queen’s College]