Zack Beauchamp makes the case for staying out of Syria’s conflict by invoking the principles of “responsibility to protect”:

Military intervention in Syria would not only be a misapplication of R2P, but would radically weaken the doctrine’s role in building both a better Middle East and a better world. Our responsibility to protect both Syrians and the R2P doctrine itself demands that we stay out of it.

This is what I and some other critics of the Libyan war said about intervening there, so I certainly agree with Beauchamp about Syria. It seemed clear last spring that the conflict in Libya did not meet the requirements of R2P, and it failed to meet the criteria for military intervention according to the principles of R2P for many of the same reasons that Syria’s conflict fails to meet them. Beauchamp is right that R2P is often perceived as “a convenient excuse for military intervention against atrocities.” One of the reasons it is perceived this way is that its principles were invoked to justify military intervention in Libya, and the obligations and requirements of R2P that undermined the argument for military intervention were more or less ignored. When a doctrine is abused and treated as little more than a pretext for unnecessary war, people are going to start thinking of it as little more than a pretext for unnecessary wars. If all that was true for Libya, the argument against Syrian intervention on R2P grounds is even stronger.

Beauchamp continues:

Many R2P critics are fond of noting all this, and yet in the same breath claim that R2P provides a carte blanche for intervention everywhere and anywhere. But as we’ve seen, the doctrine has clear guidelines in place to prevent precisely this sort of dangerously counterproductive interpretation.

Yes, the doctrine has clear guidelines, and these have bee ignored in practice. If interventionists consistently respected the guidelines of R2P, those guidelines would often bar them from pursuing military intervention. The flaw with the doctrine isn’t that R2P provides carte blanche as such. It is that it is abused to lower the bar for justifying the use of force against other states. The problem is that R2P is mostly invoked to get around the legal protections of state sovereignty without respecting or acknowledging any of its other, more stringent requirements. Like all too many interpreters of just war theory, some interventionists see R2P primarily as a loophole that permits a militarized response to other states’ internal conflicts rather than seeing it as a barrier to unnecessary military action.

If there is not enough of an international consensus in favor of military intervention in Syria, for example, this does not stop agitation for a Syrian intervention. Instead, advocates of some form of military action start ignoring the requirements of R2P and begin looking to older precedents in the interventions of the 1990s. Steven Cook provided one example of this view earlier this year:

Getting a UN Security Council resolution would be tough given Chinese and especially Russian opposition, but without being too Rumsfeldian, does every military intervention require a UN writ? It is certainly preferable, but not a requirement.

According to the principles of R2P, some form of U.N. approval is absolutely required, and the preferred way to get that approval is through the Security Council. The architects of R2P placed great importance on U.N. authorization for meeting the requirement of right authority. They said, “The task is not to find alternatives to the Security Council as a source of authority, but to make the Security Council work better than it has,” and that Security Council authorization should be sought prior to intervention in “all cases.”

Beauchamp is also right that a failed and disastrous intervention in Syria would “taint” R2P in the eyes of rising democratic powers. If it is to become a widely accepted norm, and not just the latest name for Western interventionism, it has to have the support of major non-Western democracies. As Beauchamp says:

A haphazard invocation of R2P in Syria could destroy the doctrine’s international legitimacy just as it was being built, preventing R2P from becoming a shared framework for understanding the legal and moral role of sovereignty.

This is right. This point would be much stronger if he added that the Libyan war has already done this. India doesn’t have any “post-hoc buyer’s remorse” about Libya. India never bought into the Libyan intervention. As Ambassador Singh said in a recent interview:

The South Africans have told me on a number of occasions that their vote for the resolution was a mistake. But they said that their decision was not influenced, but conditioned, by the expectation that Resolution 1973 would help bring peace to Libya. Our assessment was different. Our assessment was that this was going to result in an Iraq kind of situation, with a Security Council rubber stamp. And I think in retrospect we were absolutely right [bold mine-DL].

Refusing to intervene militarily in Syria would increase the legitimacy of R2P principles, and it might possibly make rising democratic states less suspicious of R2P-based arguments in the future, but to some extent much of the damage to the doctrine has already been done.