Motus Mentis

Good point from Stanley Kurtz just now at the Corner:

This speech was a close reflection of [U.N. ambassador Samantha] Power’s views. The overwhelming emphasis was on humanitarian goals, with a brief, secondary, and noticeably weak effort to buttress that case with talk about threats to our interests.

Power’s core argument is that American foreign policy has historically “refused to take risks’ for humanitarian ends. Power chastises American leaders for declining to “invest the military, financial, diplomatic, or domestic political capital’ necessary to prevent massacres. U.S. officials, she complains, consistently “play up the futility, perversity, and jeopardy of any proposed intervention.’

Well, drawing a humanitarian red line in conformity with Power’s goals has brought us face-to-face with the prospect of a genuinely futile and counterproductive intervention. The president’s speech tonight failed to persuade that the risks mooted in our debates over Syria are not in fact grave. Obama’s line about taking humanitarian steps when it’s merely a matter of “modest effort and risk’ comes straight out of Power’s work. Unfortunately, the risks in Syria are far from modest…

A foreign policy that intentionally subordinates traditional calculations of strategic interest to humanitarian ends will inevitably sacrifice our strategic interests. And having lost strategic position, our ability to sustain humanitarian ends, insofar as we can do so consistently with out interests, will be correspondingly reduced. This is what happened in Libya and Syria when we put Power’s policies into practice. So not only are we now facing a substantial reduction of our influence in the Middle East and the rise of Russia in our place, but the Syrians are unlikely to give up their chemical weapons in the end.

All of this follows logically from Power’s theories. Move humanitarianism to the center of our foreign policy at the expense of traditional strategic concerns, and strategic disaster follows. In the end, that means more humanitarian problems, not less.

Humanitarian interventionism has been tested in the Middle East and found wanting.