David Bosco challenges Walt on his recent Libya/Syria remarks:

But there is something profoundly disorienting about a self-proclaimed realist making this kind of argument. Is Walt saying that the West should have not pursued its strategic goal of ousting Gaddafi out of deference to the fine points of a Security Council resolution? (From a narrow national-interest perspective, the Libya campaign seems to be a model: a limited investment to secure the ouster of a troublesome national leader without any committment to prolonged nation-building in the aftermath.) And since–from Walt’s perspective–international relations is all about interests, why can’t one simply turn on and off the rhetoric about multilateralism and law? It’s all rhetoric in any case, isn’t it? Surely Walt doesn’t believe that uber-realist Russia and China are actually offended by the abuse of multilateral institutions?

Walt might object that ousting Gaddafi didn’t actually serve the national interest, since Gaddafi had ceased to be particularly “troublesome” as far as U.S. and allied interests were concerned several years ago. As another example of undesirable and unintended consequences of elective military action, he might point to the significant problems that the aftermath of the intervention is creating for another state (Mali) with which the U.S. cooperates on counter-terrorism. Walt’s view is best understood by looking at the last two lines from the passage that Bosco cites:

But a commitment to multilateralism and international law is not something you can invoke when it suits you and ignore when it doesn’t, at least not without paying a price [bold mine-DL]. Powerful states like the United States can (and do) act with impunity on occasion, but they shouldn’t be surprised when such behavior backfires later on.

Put another way, it doesn’t really work to promote a “rules-based international order” unless the governments that claim to support that order are scrupulous in their adherence to the rules, and that includes not exceeding U.N. authorization. Enforcers of a new international norm lose credibility when they pick and choose which other rules they are going to respect, and they stoke the resentment of more skeptical governments when it appears that they acted in bad faith in how they presented the international intervention they were asking other states to support. The more basic objection that he is making is not that Walt invests multilateralism and international law with so much importance, but that the advocates of the “responsibility to protect” do at the same time that they interpret international law and U.N. resolutions as broadly and loosely as necessary. Such overreaching has consequences that undermine the very norms that the overreaching was intended to uphold.