Humanitarian Intervention isn't Humanitarian

There is a fine line between human intervention and invasion (like the crusades) sometimes the western powers take it upon themselves to save people who neither feel it necessary nor want their presence. In general I think the US is a little too arrogant it in its involvement for me.

The US is not a global hegemon; it does not have the undeniable power over all other states in this world, which means it is not the herder and responsible for all of them either.

Sometimes, most times, a state wants to be the herder, democracy is something that was chosen by those in America a long time ago, and it did not fully develop until very recently. Democracy then is not democracy now at all. It came about with time and consideration and cultural shift, and, as much as I am sure we would like to make all other countries and democracies like us because it would definitely make IR easier and we also think it would ‘benefit’ them. That is neither our job nor our business.

Humanitarian intervention is tricky for me because I do not think it can ever be truly humanitarian. I do not think the spending of resources, be that man power, money, or time, can ever be given by a state to another state. For those who would bring up allies, that is when states have the most to lose and have the most to gain from proving themselves worthy to an ally. In cases of enmity, it is in best interests to see them crash and burn. I am a little more lenient about this idea of selfless serving when it comes to non-governmental organizations; I have more reason to believe, since they are (theoretically) not tied to political sides, that they do not have political ulterior motives. But I also don’t think that NGOs have or will ever have the expanse of resources to give and help as states do.

In cases like Iraq and Afghanistan, I am aware that there are a myriad of factors, most of which are above my head, however, some of it was that many believed the citizens there were living under severe oppression from the ruling parties. But, when America says something like ‘we will bring you democracy’ others may hear ‘we are bringing you sin’. Democracy cannot and is not the right answer all the time.

It is not a state’s concern to change people, especially if you need to convince them of that change. We cannot be missionaries for democracy. For this reason I feel that humanitarian intervention should be used, at most, sparingly. It should quite normally be avoided. The same way parents stop bailing out their children at a certain point in time, states cannot continually intervene in other states. The same way it is inappropriate for a peer to keep giving test answers to another, it is inappropriate for states to try and build other states governments. Except my example is extremely reductionistic, not only are the test answers old and outdated (from when democracy was first established in America) but there are thousands more variables that are specific to each state which cannot simply fit nicely into  a formula that always has the same answer: democracy.

Overall, my biggest problem is with the name; ‘humanitarian’ intervention. As discussion in class, there are so many factors, economic gain, potential threat, existing investment, peer pressure, that go into the decision that it is unfair to call it humanitarian. At the scale of the state relationships, there can be no truly humanitarian intervention.