Naturally, Michael Gerson is pleased that Obama is advancing the “responsibility to protect” doctrine by setting a precedent of enforcing it in Libya. Anything that can combine smug moral posturing with the use of military force against other nations wins Gerson’s approval every time. I’ve never quite understood how people combine humanitarian impulses with the vicious willingness to support armed attacks on people who have done nothing to you and yours in decades (or perhaps ever). What is even more strange is just how oblivious humanitarian interventionists are to the perverse and unintended consequences of strengthening the “responsibility to protect” norm and undermining the protections of state sovereignty against outside military attack.

The states that enforce the norm tend to be in North America and western Europe, and the more powerful governments everywhere else in the world regardless of their type of regime usually look askance at anything that could compromise state sovereignty. That doesn’t rule out the possibility that some of them will be willing to adopt the rhetoric and legal pretexts of the “responsibility to protect” when justifying actions that Western states view with alarm. What I find amazing in the debate over intervention in Libya is how incredibly short everyone’s memories are. I’m not talking about Kosovo or even Iraq. Doesn’t anyone remember what happened in Georgia just two and a half years ago?

When Georgia escalated the conflict with South Ossetia, this gave Ossetian militias the chance to expel Georgians from South Ossetia and it gave Russia the opportunity to repel Georgian forces and engage in punitive attacks on the rest of Georgia. Certainly, Russia had some justification in retaliating against the escalation when its forces in South Ossetia came under attack, but from the extent of the campaign that followed we can all understand that Georgia had given Russia the provocation it had been wanting. Moscow turned the bogus Kosovo claims of genocide around on a pro-Western government, and used the logic of humanitarian intervention to support the cause of separatists against Georgia and to expand its influence in the Caucasus at the expense of the U.S.

The Russian response wasn’t just payback for Kosovo. It was also intended to imitate and mock the Kosovo intervention at the same time. A major power may not be seeking payback for the intervention against Libya in the future, but we have to assume that another major power will follow the Libyan example and take advantage of internal political crises in neighboring countries by claiming that it is helping to protect the population against an abusive government. The claims may or may not have any merit, but the Libyan precedent will give these governments significant political cover when they opt to pick sides in an ongoing civil war.

Back in 2008, the inviolability of state sovereignty suddenly became very important for Georgia’s patrons in the West. Many of the people who like to talk about how governments forfeit their sovereignty when they attack their citizens have also been some of the most vocal supporters of Georgia before and after the 2008 war. The point here isn’t to dwell on the hypocrisy of these people, but to remind everyone that justifying military action against a state in these terms is something that can and will be exploited by other states to serve other ends. Weakening the protections of state sovereignty may seem like a necessary thing to prevent regimes from committing atrocities, but the states that will benefit most from this are the states that are already powerful enough to deter interventions against them for their abuses and the states that want to expand their influence over their neighbors.