Category Archives: International Relations

Context-free reporting

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There was an item in the Reuters news feed about an attack in Northern Kenya by al Shabaab guerrillas on a Kenyan police patrol, killing 5 and setting the truck on fire.  The story was essentially context free with the explanation given:

Al Shabaab has also launched other attacks in Kenya targeting civilians, in revenge for Kenya moving its troops into Somalia in late 2011.

The deployment of African Union troops to Somalia as peacekeepers (really peace enforcers since there is no peace to keep) is not really the background of this story.  Somalia is principal irredentist state (now failed state and hole in the political map) in Africa.  Somalia from the start challenged the inviolability of borders enshrined in the Organization of African Unity Charter (now the African Union).  At decolonization, the newly created African states were multi-ethnic.  In fact, Somalia is the rare example of a nearly ethnically homogenous state.  Patriotic sentiment was lacking, states were weak, and therefore, it was instrumental that states agreed to respect each other’s borders in the OAU.  Somalia rejected that position, arguing that all Somalis should be living in a greater Somalia.  It even triggered the Ogaden War between Ethiopia and Somalia (1977-1978).

There are large numbers of ethnic Somalis in Northern Kenya and ethnic unrest has been endemic, spurred on by Somali nationalism.  It is ironic though that Somali nationalism is a strong cultural force, there is in fact no Somali state any longer due to another stronger cultural force, kin-based clans, which have warred for control of the territory for decades now without any victor emerging, hence the fundamental hole in the political map that is the failed state of Somalia.

Hobbes and the Risks in Proxy Wars

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Thomas Hobbes described the state of nature as a “warre of all against all.” That describes the war in Syria. Every player has different goals in the conflict. The Syrian government is fighting to survive and reclaim territory. Russia has allied with the Syrian government to maintain basing in the Mediterranean and disrupt the European Union. The United States wants to remove a terrorist stronghold and strangle in the cradle a nascent Islamist revolutionary state, ISIS. Iran wants to create a crescent of influence that includes Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. The Gulf monarchies want to counter Iran’s plans. Turkey wants to avoid the creation of a Kurdish state in Syria and counter Iran.

The United States has used proxies to fight a war on ISIS. The most effective fighting forces have been Kurdish militias. I had not expected Kurdish forces to move outside their ethnic strongholds and take the fight to ISIS, but they have. The ISIS stronghold of Raqqa has been encircled by Kurdish militias, Syrian Democratic Forces (Turkey’s proxy), and Free Syrian Army (another Turkish proxy).

The United States allied with Kurdish forces, because they were the most capable fighting force. The Kurds allied with the United States with the hopes of support for a Kurdish state in the region. Turkey does not want a Kurdish state, fearing the dismantling of eastern Turkey. Turkey invaded Northern Iraq to limit Kurdish control over territory adjacent to Turkey. More recently, Turkey has shelled Kurdish positions in Syria. The United States has repositioned its special operations forces embedded with the Kurds in order to fend off Turkish advances against Kurdish forces.

The US forces are a tripwire force. Attacking Kurds with US embedded forces risks a wider conflict with the US, something Turkey wants to avoid. This is a dangerous brinksmanship, but necessary to keep the pressure on ISIS. Were the Kurds to withdraw forces to fight Turkey, it would delay the defeat of ISIS.

Let’s war game out a scenario. Raqqa falls to a Kurdish and SDF/SFA turkish proxies. Raqqa becomes like a divided Berlin, carved up into zones of control. The US maintains its presence to police ISIS sympathizers and deter the Russian backed Syrian government and Iranian backed militias from attempting to retake eastern Syria. The Kurds take the opportunity to establish a de facto state in eastern Syria and northern Iraq. The tripwire force is now hostage to the Kurds. Does the United States withdraw and start a new war, this time between Kurds, the Syrian government, and Turkey, or does it back a Kurdish state?

Either way, the fall of Raqqa is really just the end of the beginning of the realignment of the Middle East. Humpty Dumpty cannot be put back together again.

Revising US foreign policy towards Latin America

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Miguel Centeno and Andrés Lajous have an excellent article over at The American Interest. They perceptively diagnose the pathologies and promise of Latin America. They correctly address the diversity of Latin America.

Latin America has lagged global growth rates, even during supposed boom times early in the 21st century before the Great Recession.

Latin America has been too dependent on the export of raw materials. The dependence on China as a consumer of raw materials and, in the case of Venezuela, oil exports, means the region does not have an engine for growth if China slows and oil prices fall.

Latin America has made progress in democratizing. Coups d’état have become a rarity. Parties out of power have respected the outcome of elections and there have been peaceful transfers of power from one to another. Although there has been a trend towards Presidents for Life in Venezuela and El Salvador.

Latin America still suffers from tremendous inequality. The economies are still two-speed with urban, trade-related regions with high income and significant rural poverty. Lack of secure property rights contributes to the poverty. (Unmentioned by the authors are the cultural factors that contribute to this pattern.)

Mexico is no longer a source of illegal immigration to the United States (although they fail to note that remittances are still a large source of income for Mexico).

Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras are all struggling with lawlessness and violence driven by the illegal drug trade (also a source of violence in Mexico). This has led to a militarization of law enforcement by those states to reclaim territorial sovereignty (a monopoly on the legitimate use on violence). This drives migrant flows to the United States via Mexico.

Where the authors fail is to advocate the usual liberal internationalist/neoconservative nostrums:

  • Maintaining trade agreements with the region that result in both jobs in the U.S. and economic benefits throughout the region.
  • Recognizing that immigration is not necessarily a burden on the United States but is often a dynamic source of growth.
  • Realistically reappraising the “war on drugs” to take into account what prohibition has cost the region in human, political, and economic terms, and the alternative presented by the legalization of marijuana in several U.S. states.

An alternative that does not assume the United States would continue to be the safety value for people fleeing violence and acquiescence to unequal trade relationships is to:

  • Reform immigration policy like other “normal” countries. Mass unskilled immigration is not a net positive in the short run, contrary to the authors’ contention. Larger amounts of legal immigration for desired skills should be combined with aggressive enforcement of illegal immigration with provision for refugees from Latin America is the most sustainable.
  • Greater levels of the right kind of security assistance is needed in Latin America. That needs to be combined with judicial reform and development assistance to permit the state to exercise sovereignty.
  • The most difficult challenge that the US has little affect except through using trade agreements as the carrot is a transition to Anglo-American legal norms. As the authors correctly note, private property protections are weak. Furthermore, neopatrimonialism is still a prominent feature of the political economy of Latin America. Until government approaches a Weberian rational-legal source of authority, Latin America will continue to lag the world in economic development.

The US needs to avoid stoking anti-Americanism in Latin America. The US needs to avoid creating a continent worth of failed states Central and South America, so a radical restriction on trade would be disastrous, but the status quo is also not working, nor is decriminalization of drugs a solution to the problem of violence. George Washington made a policy prescription in his Farewell Address:

Observe good faith and justice [toward] all Nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all….In the execution of such a plan nothing is more essential than that permanent inveterate antipathies against particular Nations and passionate attachments for other should be excluded.

This may have been appropriate before the United States became a continental power, but the Monroe Doctrine applies now. The principal goal for US foreign policy regarding Latin America is to foster stability and prevent rival powers from using Latin American nations as a base to threaten the United States. In the modern context, this means constructive engagement, but not necessarily pursuing cosmopolitan policy prescriptions.

Trump Presidency the end of the UN?

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It is hard to know if Richard Gowan’s column over at World Politics Review is clickbait  a la Vox or Gowan is serious about Trump being the end of the United Nations if he is elected president.

It is clear that under a President Trump, the U.S. would be changing its relationship with the U.N. and other multilateral institutions. President Trump has promised to deemphasize international engagement. His foreign policy positions are best described as conservative non-interventionism. Animating this non-interventionism are the beliefs that United States interests are not served by multilateral regimes and institutions, they are a threat to the republic, and sovereignty is an absolute good. In some ways Trump’s position is a return to Herbert Hoover’s criticism of the Roosevelt administration: the American republic is fragile and being undermined from within and without.

Gowan gets hysterical about the damage to international institutions Trumps promise of withdrawing from the Paris Agreement is:

This is in part because Trump has repeatedly signaled that he will give the institution short shrift if he takes office. He has already promised to “cancel” the Obama administration’s biggest multilateral achievement: The Paris climate change treaty.

While this might not be quite as simple as Trump claims, many countries could rethink their environmental commitments if they believe that the U.S. will renege on the deal. Unilaterally reversing years of negotiations would also inject a huge dose of distrust into U.N. diplomacy. If Washington trashes such a crucial treaty, it is hard to see why other governments should sign up to any major bargains in future.

First of all, the Paris Agreement does almost nothing over current law and treaties. If that is the Obama administration’s biggest multilateral achievement, the administration sure hasn’t achieved much in eight years when compared to the Clinton administration. The Paris Agreement merely reaffirmed existing articles of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). For this reason, it was deemed an executive agreement and not a treaty under constitutional law requiring ratification. The Paris Agreement is “Green Theater” nothing more. The “crucial treaty,” is the original Framework ratified in 1992. The UNFCCC does provide a mechanism for withdrawal in Article 25. Would U.S. withdrawal from the UNFCCC pose an existential threat to the U.N.? It is unlikely. Since the United States never acceded to the Kyoto Protocol with binding emissions limits, the UNFCCC poses little threat to the U.S. economy.

The only thing that could break the United Nations is a concerted effort to create a parallel IGO with greater legitimacy with respect to liberal democratic norms. One such proposal has circulated on the Right for years: a concert or league of liberal democracies, or possibly an even more narrow concert of the Anglosphere. However, given the non-interventionism of Trump, such an IGO would never be considered. No, the likely outcome of a Trump presidency is withholding U.N dues, as previous Republican administrations had due to U.N. support for contraception, as a sign of defiance. It would make good theater, but once a Democrat came into office, the arrears would be repaid. Trump does not pose an existential threat to the United Nations.

What will suffer is the already creaky liberal international order that had been constructed after the Second World War. The relative power the United States has declined, and the American public is weary of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These two things are contributing to a breakdown in the liberal international order. Dissatisfied revisionist powers—for example, North Korea, China, Iran, and Russia—are testing the limits of that order and even creating alternatives to that order. The United States appears poised to abandon maintenance of the liberal international order. In some ways, this is a return to type, where prior to WWII, the United States was content to enforce the Monroe Doctrine against European encroachment in the Western Hemisphere, but leave Europe to itself. Europe is no longer the bottle of scorpions it once was; the Middle East is that bottle of scorpions, but with the U.S. close to becoming energy independent thanks to technology and the post-industrial economy, the U.S. will likely pivot to its own period of “splendid isolation.”

AKP and GM Competing Theologies

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The always iconoclastic Edward Luttwak had an article in Foreign Policy on the Gulen Movement (GM) coup in Turkey. He cites the reason for the failure of the alliance between the AKP and the GM is competing visions of Islam and Islamism.

In 2013 the alliance between the AKP and GM was dissolved. Luttwak accurately describes the theological difference between the AKP and GM is over the issue of pluralism. The GM is theologically pluralist. It is willing to accept that the world is not Sunni Muslim: however much the GM is about raising a “Golden Generation” of exemplars to humanity, it is not about coercion.

Luttwak is perceptive in identifying the class differences between the GM and average AKP supporter. The GM is an educated elite, and served to staff the technocracy of the government and military. The AKP’s base of support has always been the lower-classes/peasantry of Anatolia. There was utility in an alliance with the GM when the AKP came to power, because it was a cadre of educated islamists which could form a functional islamist bureaucracy. He writes:

So when Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) won the 2002 elections, it was able to govern Turkey successfully, remaining in power until now, instead of being forced out or dissolved by military order, as with all previous attempts at forming Islamist governments. It was not Erdogan’s brawlers and provincials who implemented the AKP’s economic policies but rather Gulen’s competent technocrats, achieving good results that dissuaded a military intervention, along with obdurate European pressures in the name of democracy, and the vigilance of disguised Gulenists within the officer corps.

This was doubly true after the secularists were purged from the government and military by the Islamists in the Ergenekon (2008) and Sledgehammer (2010) arrests and trials.

Now that the AKP is fully entrenched in the machineries of government, it is now in the business of purging the heretics of the GM from government, and precipitated a failed coup. Analysis to date has focused on a competition for power between two rival patronage networks. This is the standard explanation of Third World politics, but that is intellectually lazy. Luttwak has gotten to a deeper ideological (theological) understanding. Read the whole thing.

Beware the Fracklog

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If Saudi Arabia intentionally crashed the price of oil in order to strangle the infant U.S. fracking industry, it didn’t work. In the world of Nietzsche: that which does not kill us makes us stronger. It spurred innovation and culled marginal players from the industry rather than killing the industry.

It isn’t entirely clear that the U.S. fracking industry was the prime target, Russia, Saudi Arabia’s adversary in Syria, and Iran, Saudi Arabia’s adversary in control of the Persian Gulf, may have also been targets as well.

As detailed in this article by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, what Saudi Arabia did succeed in doing is destabilizing undercapitalized petro states around the globe like Nigeria and Venezuela. The destruction of offshore production projects may have an effect in the future since they require years to come on line, and supplies may be tight a decade from now, but for now petro states need to beware the fracklog. To quote AE-P:

Worse yet for Opec, consultants Rystad Energy say that 90pc of the 3,900 drilled but uncompleted wells – so-called ‘DUCs’ – are profitable at $50. This implies an overhang of easy supply waiting to hit the market.

If it is true that the majority of the world’s petro states need an oil price above $100/barrel, then political instability is only going to get worse. Imagine the Saudi regime failing or Iran’s perpetual revolution slipping into civil war.

Understanding the Turkish Pivot to Russia

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TRT is reporting that Turkish President Erdogan will be meeting with Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg on August 9. After Turkey shot down a Russian fighter-bomber and Russia increased support for Kurdish separatists, what accounts for the rush to normalize relations?

In a word: triangulation.

Turkey’s relations with the West are trending in a negative direction. The EU has slow-walking accession talks due to the increasingly authoritarian direction of Turkish state. Concerns over corruption has led the EU to abjure direct cash payments to the Turkish state under the immigration deal in favor of funding relief organizations directly. NATO withdrew Patriot missile batteries from Turkey as the Syrian civil war heated up. And, in the wake of the crackdown following the attempted coup, NATO broached the subject of ejecting Turkey from the alliance should the government cease to be a democracy. The United States for its part has been using the YPG as proxy warriors in the fight against ISIS, yet the YPG has ties to the banned Kurdish separatist group PKK, which is even on the State Department list of terror organizations.

Russia, and before Russia the Soviets, have always wanted to pry Turkey out of alliance with the Western powers, because Turkey controls Black Sea access. Turkey is signaling the threat of a major realignment, if the EU and United States push Turkey and Erdogan and the AKP too far. If there are ministerial level meetings between Turkey and China on greater commercial ties, that would be the signal that a realignment is in the offing and they would sacrifice their customs union with the EU to secure the regime. The broad roundup of political opposition in Turkey makes it that much more likely that Turkey, who currently runs a trade surplus with the EU. The AKPs political power stems from twin pillars of economic prosperity and Islamism. The AKP’s appeal would not be as broad were it to cease delivering prosperity. At that point authoritarian one-party rule is the likely result and Turkey will need new friends.

Given the geostrategic importance of Turkey, the United States and EU need to reset their calculus on the amount of diplomatic leverage they have and acquiesce to Turkish domestic politics. Turkey will not be liberal democratic republic, but rather will trend towards a religiously motivated majoritarianism and possibly a president for life in Erdogan.

Brexit and Parliamentary Supremacy

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Commentary has been voluminous and at times breathless on the results of Brexit referendum and I have little to contribute on the immediate challenges of choosing a new Prime Minister, negotiating withdrawal, keeping The City competitive with Frankfurt, and the risk of Northern Ireland and Scotland seceding from the United Kingdom.

Financial markets are in turmoil.  Because the world economy is so dominated by finance, what happens on Wall Street does affect Main Street.  The turmoil will settle when the outcome of negotiations becomes more certain.  What financial markets hate more than anything else is uncertainty.

It is possible that other states on the continent may hold votes on continued membership.  My guess is that the next states will be Netherlands and Italy.  The vote in the U.K. was not a surprise to me.  Given that the UK was late joining the EC and joined to be part of the customs union (the EC, now EU, is a customs union, not an ordinary free trade area, which means that member states cannot make their own trade agreements with external states).  For Britain, complete surrender of sovereignty in the creation of a European superstate offends Britain’s democratic traditions.

The remain campaign claimed that leave is motivated by a reactionary portion of the electorate that pines for empire.  It is not empire, but the spirit of parliamentary sovereignty.  Britain does not have a separation of powers the way say the United States or Germany structures the government.  That the European Court of Justice is granted by treaty judicial supremacy (some claim that it has arrogated powers beyond its mandate in treaty), makes the EU incompatible with British tradition.

Human Rights versus Maintenance of Order

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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.

US signs on to Kigali Principles

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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.