Ellen Bork of the Foreign Policy Initiative has an essay over at The American Interest in which she rebukes the Obama administration’s lifting of the arms embargo on Vietnam, because there has been insufficient progress on human rights by the Communist government there.

She complains that human rights progress has been a requirement for lifting the arms embargo, citing testimony by the U.S. Ambassador to Congress during his confirmation hearing: “We can’t lift the ban absent significant progress on human rights.”

It is fitting that the essay appeared at The American Interest, since Walter Russell Mead, founding editor, had previously written extensively about the incompatibility between Continental European Realpolitik and American traditions of foreign policy:

The Nixon and Ford administrations represented the zenith of Continental realism’s influence in American foreign policy. International life was seen as a morals-free zone… The United States would support any distasteful regime, bar none, in the interests of strengthening our global posture against the Soviet Union…The Nixon-Kissinger approach also took the moral element out of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry. It was as if the United States and the Soviet Union were two rival great powers like Prussia and Austria, and could rech a detente based on common interests while setting aside their philosophical differences, just as Catholic Austria and Protestant Prussia had done. (Mead 2001, 76)

But this was its zenith. The Carter administration was ideologically unable to continue the Nixon-Kissinger pivot and it settled back into a comfortable moralizing anticommunism centered around the Soviet Union’s “abysmal human rights record and principled opposition to what was interpreted as Soviet aggression in Afghanistan.” (Mead 2001, 76)

What Bork fails to realize and which I have explained in a previous post on Obama’s “realism” is that he is a neoliberal institutionalist (NLI). What distinguishes NLI from previous forms of liberalism, like commercial pacifism (Adam Smith, Kant and its apotheosis in Norman Angell), is that the fundamental principles of realism are accepted: in the absence of a Hobbesian Leviathan, the in international states system is anarchic and a self-help system. What distinguishes NLI from realism, is the role that international institutions can play in removing the issue hierarchy that places the state’s security above all other diplomatic initiatives. Remove existential threats and cooperation among states becomes possible.

Obama is following a policy viz. China’s rise that goes back to the Bush administration (Silove 2016). China’s rise to great power status is inevitable and the United States’ diplomatic task is to manage that rise peacefully and integrate China into the current post-Second World War set of international institutions and liberal order. This, by the way, is extremely ambitious, since historically no reordering of relative power of this magnitude has been without war.

Checking Chinese imperial ambitions and preserving United States maritime hegemony in the Pacific dictates that the United States strengthen the relative power of China’s neighbors in order to raise the cost of Chinese assertion of sovereignty over its neighbors. China must be channelled into acceptance of the status quo instead of behaving as a revisionist power. This is very different from a strategy of containment, it but may be interpreted as such by the Chinese and may provoke armed conflict. This is why the strategy is so risky.

Lifting the embargo makes it possible to do selective arms deals with Vietnam along with Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines to increase their defensive and maritime policing capabilities that raise the cost to China of a significant conflict.

Fighting the cause of human rights is noble, but deterring a major war is more noble.

References

Mead, W. R. (2001) Special Providence. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Silove, N. (2016) The Pivot before the Pivot: U.S. Strategy to Preserve the Power Balance in Asia. International Security 40 (4): 45-88.

Samantha Power, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, announced that the United States was signing on to the Kigali Principles for peace keepers that assigns peace keepers the responsibility to protect (R2P) civilians.  The Kigali Principles were established at an international conference in Kigali, Rwanda, on the role of peace keepers in protecting civilians given the Rwandan Genocide in 1994 and the massacre in Srebrenica in 1995.  The 18 points of the Kigali Principles are for peace keepers are:

1. To train all of our troops on the protection of civilians prior to their deployment on missions.

2. To ensure that our sector and contingent-commanders, as well as our nominees for mission leadership positions, have a high level of training and preparedness on peacekeeping operations and, in particular, the protection of civilians.

3. To be prepared to use force to protect civilians, as necessary and consistent with the mandate.  Such action encompasses making a show of force as a deterrent; inter-positioning our forces between armed actors and civilians; and taking direct military action against armed actors with hostile intent to harm civilians.

4. Not to stipulate caveats or other restrictions that prevent us from fulfilling our responsibility to protect civilians in accordance with the mandate.

5. To identify and communicate to the UN any resource and capability gaps that inhibit our ability to protect civilians.

6. To strive, within our capabilities, to contribute the enabling capabilities (e.g., helicopters) to peacekeeping operations that facilitate improved civilian protection.

7. To avoid undue delay in protecting civilians, by investing our contingent commander with the authority to use force to protect civilians in urgent situations without the need for further consultations with capital.

8. Not to hesitate to take action to protect civilians, in accordance with the rules of engagement, in the absence of an effective host government response or demonstrated willingness to carry out its responsibilities to protect civilians.

9. To demand clarity from the UN and mission leadership on our rules of engagement, including under which circumstances the use of force is appropriate.

10. To seek to identify, as early as possible, potential threats to civilians and proactively take steps to mitigate such threats and otherwise reduce the vulnerability of the civilian population.

11. To seek to enhance the arrangements for rapid deployment, including by supporting a full review of the UN’s standby arrangements, exploring a system in which earmarked units from troop and police contributing countries could be placed in readiness in order to ensure rapid troop deployment, and encouraging the utilization of partnerships with regional organizations such as the African Union and its RECs.

12. To be vigilant in monitoring and reporting any human rights abuses or signs of impending violence in the areas in which our personnel serve.

13. To take disciplinary action against our own personnel if and when they fail to act to protect civilians when circumstances warrant such action.

14. To undertake our own review, in parallel to any after-action review, in the event that our personnel are unable to protect civilians, and identify and share key lessons for avoiding such failures in the future.

15. To holder own personnel to the highest standard of conduct, and to vigorously investigate and, where appropriate, prosecute any incidents of abuse.

16. To better implement protection of civilians mandates and deliver on our responsibilities, we request better, regular and more extensive consultations on the mandating of peacekeeping missions.  When mandates of peacekeeping missions are under review and may change, it should also be mandatory for the Security Council to consult all troop and police contributing countries deployed to the mission.  We commit to bring our own ideas and solutions to these consultations that can strengthen the implementation of protection of civilians mandates.

17. To urge the Security Council to ensure that mandates are matched with the requisite resources, and to commit to support a process that addresses the current critical resource gaps in several missions.  We support a more phased mandating process that can ensure a better alignment of resources and mandates.

18. Noting that any well-planned mandate implementation may be undermined by inefficient mobility, logistics or support; To call for effective support of all military plans, including contingency plans; and to commit to work with the Secretariat to review the current support arrangements, including possible transfer of authority over more of the logistical capability to the military component, where appropriate.

Why this is this important

This is a big deal, because the United States, a Security Council permanent member is supporting these principles.  The United States has always had an uneasy relationship with intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) like the U.N. because it jealously guards its sovereignty and the protection of its troops.  However, at the same time, the principles address the failings that the United States has found in other peacekeeping operations, including: the need to properly train peacekeepers, discipline, giving field commanders more independence from home country, resourcing, logistics, and rapid reaction.  Training and resourcing have always been challenges in peacekeeping.  Peacekeepers are typically equipped with small arms and have nothing heavier than armored personnel carriers.  This limits mobility, when rapid reaction is required and limits the firepower that can be deployed for self-protection.  Helicopters are a pre-requisite for any kind of rapid reaction force.  Having a permanent member on board and with the resources of a great power, more effort in properly training, equipping and supplying peacekeepers is more likely.

Why this is not important

The principles are non-binding.  R2P, depending on how it is defined, can violate fundamentals of the UN Charter such as national sovereignty, sovereign equality, and impartiality. These tend to be stressed by pariah states like Iran, but are legitimate concerns for great powers, since lesser powers use IGOs to tie down great powers.

India and Pakistan, who do a lot of staffing of peacekeeping missions around the world, are not on board with the Kigali Principles.  In particular, the countries do not want to risk their peacekeepers’ lives for others.  Reasons for participation in peacekeeping operations include national prestige, a source of funding, maintenance of military readiness, and the ability to shape the outcomes of conflicts with geopolitical importance.  They are not existential and therefore must carefully guard against the loss and political revolt at home–cf. the precipitous withdrawal from Somalia by the US after the “Blackhawk Down” incident.