The critics of humanitarian intervention who say that the outcome is likely to be messier and more protracted than its proponents imagine are right. You have to be prepared to live with the unforeseen consequences of your acts. NATO and the United States thus have to stay the course not only to deliver the Libyan people from Qaddafi but also to demonstrate that such interventions are not exercises in imperial hubris — or “wars of whim,” as my Foreign Policy colleague Stephen Walt mockingly puts it. ~James Traub

Scoblete labels this a shift of rationale for the Libyan war, and it is. This is a roundabout way of acknowledging that the original rationales for the war have since been discredited. The main stated reason and formal justification for intervention was the protection of civilians, and it is difficult to see how the vast majority of the civilian population of Libya has been protected by the last four months of outside intervention. When Micah Zenko offered a report card on the Libyan war almost two months ago, he had already given the effort to protect civilians a D. If anything, that grade was too generous then, and the grade must be lower now. Other supporting arguments for attacking Libya have fallen apart in the weeks and months that followed the start of the bombing.

Surely, “staying the course” to “deliver” the population from Gaddafi is nothing if not an exercise in imperial hubris. Presuming to dictate the outcome of another country’s civil war by use of military force would seem to qualify as just such an exercise: it is violent, it is arrogant, and it treats the internal politics of another state as if it were our legitimate business. Despite having no authorization or right to do so, a relative handful of foreign governments have decided that the existing government of Libya must be overthrown and power handed to a different group of Libyans. Last Friday, if they had not done so before, the U.S. government and assembled allies endorsed the rebel leadership as the Libyan government. This was not because they actually were the de facto government of Libya, but rather because they were nothing of the sort and because they are nowhere near to becoming so without massive external support. No matter how much the administration insists otherwise, the U.S. and our allies are working to impose a new government in Libya that could never have taken hold without our support.

Gaddafi had been cooperating with these same governments for several years. Five months ago, he cracked down violently on opposition forces, and then these governments decided that his misrule had become unacceptable to them. Up until five months ago, it had not concerned them very much, but starting in February Gaddafi and their connection to him had become embarrassing. These governments never much liked him, he made himself expendable with his crackdown, and now they are in the process of deposing him and installing a more agreeable replacement. To that end, they are prepared to continue jeopardizing the welfare of the civilian population of Libya, and in the process they have exposed their populations to the risk of retaliation and attack in the future. This is entirely consistent with imperial hubris. Seeing the war through to its conclusion for the sake of nothing except reputation and credibility is exactly what one would expect of an exercise in imperial hubris.

Stanley Kurtz thinks he has discerned the secret long-term goal of the Obama administration, and he has done this by completely misreading David Rieff’s article on R2P:

In the early years of the Obama administration, the left dismissed claims of Obama’s radical intentions, frequently offering up his hawkish policies in Iraq and Afghanistan as Exhibit A. Rightly understood, the Libyan intervention explodes these denials, not only confirming Obama’s deeply unconventional intentions with regard to American national interests, but also linking his internationalist vision to his passion for wealth redistribution and equality-of-result at home. And as both Rieff and Feith-Cropsey note, the real long-term goals of the Libyan intervention have been largely hidden from the public by the war’s most influential advocates.

The first thing that Kurtz misses is that the Libyan intervention has not helped the actual R2P doctrine at all. Advancing this doctrine may be what some of the war’s advocates want, but they continue to overlook how Libya is badly undermining the doctrine they have used to justify military action. These goals haven’t been “largely hidden from the public.” Kurtz, Feith, and Cropsey are all very far from the mark.

Rieff’s argument is that Libya has confirmed that it is only the use of military force that R2P can sanction as a last resort that governments are going to use, because it is the one part of the doctrine that they can readily use. Rieff writes:

What Evans has never been willing to entertain is that whatever outcome he and the other architects of R2P might have wished for, its military aspect remains the most usable element of the doctrine because it is the only one that is both coherent and practicable. All the rest—the prevention, the diplomacy, the raising of alarms, the economic and political carrots and sticks—depend for their efficacy on the ability of international actors to identify states at risk and to focus on ameliorating the situation before the horrors R2P was devised to try to prevent begin to occur. That is all very well and good in the abstract, but in reality the list of states where genocide and the like is possible is very long, and the resources needed to attend to all of them are simply unavailable.

The R2P doctrine was supposed to be different from the humanitarian interventionism of the previous decade, and Libya has shown that this isn’t the case. While it has the formal authorization that many of them lacked, Libya represents a reversion to 1990s-style interventions. According to its foremost supporters, that represents the failure of their attempt to make the doctrine into more than that.

It is true that Rieff criticizes the doctrine’s supporters for their unrealistic ambitions:

What Evans is positing are commitments and resources that do not exist and that it is unreasonable to suppose ever will exist.

Kurtz badly misunderstands how this applies to Obama and Libya. According to Kurtz, Libya proves that the administration has embraced the entire doctrine and all of its far-fetched goals. This is almost certainly wrong, and it is definitely not what Rieff claims. Rieff says that Libya shows instead that the only part of the doctrine that the administration is interested in using is the part that gives it justification for using force for ostensibly humanitarian reasons:

Instead, as the Libyan case illustrates, R2P’s most immediate relevance is that it can be used quickly and effectively as a legal and moral justification for military intervention. Evans is correct when he insists that the doctrine’s ambitions are far larger. Where he is wrong is in continuing to claim that, in practice, there has been all that much movement away from the “droit d’ingérence.” Some of his recent speeches suggest that Evans himself realizes this. Having greeted the passage of Resolutions 1970 and 1973 with profound satisfaction, noting on March 24 that the Security Council had “written exactly the right script,” Evans has since worried publicly that as NATO action failed to dislodge Qaddafi, its military operations began to stretch the UN mandate to protect Libyan civilians to its “absolute limit.” For Evans, the great danger is that this mission creep will accelerate the risk “of buyers’ remorse from those who did not oppose Resolution 1973, and of a backlash when the next extreme [responsibility-to-protect] case comes before the Security Council.”

The existence of the R2P doctrine made acquiring authorization for intervention in Libya possible, but it was mainly because the doctrine was useful in facilitating the intervention that France, Britain, and the U.S. made use of it. Whatever the views of individual figures inside the administration, the administration as a whole clearly has no intention of adhering to the doctrine’s limits or following through on its requirements. The Libyan war has long since exceeded its formal mandate, buyers’ (or rather abstainers’) remorse has already set in, and the backlash is already in full swing. Obama has done supporters of the R2P doctrine no favors by linking their goals to the ill-defined war in Libya.

The perverse idea that the U.S. involvement in Libya represents an administration bent on “restraining America” is nothing more than the product of partisan minds.

Ariel Cohen seems to think the “reset” has something to do with advancing political liberalization in Russia. No wonder he keeps being disappointed in it. The purpose of the “reset” was to remove needless provocations that were generating tensions between the U.S. and Russia, and to find areas of common interest where the two governments could profitably cooperate. It was never supposed to make Russia’s political system more liberal or open or competitive, no one claims that it has, and I doubt that anyone believed that it could. To judge the “reset” to be futile because the Kremlin has banned an opposition party and fashioned its own center-right stalking horse, among other things, is to set a standard that it could never meet and was never supposed to meet. It’s rather like complaining that counter-terrorism doesn’t protect people from malaria, or declaring human rights advocacy to be useless because it doesn’t reduce the unemployment rate.

Cohen is applying an unreasonable standard for judging the “reset,” and unsurprisingly finds that it fails his impossible test. I am guessing that he believed from the beginning that the “reset” was misguided. He apparently thinks that promoting political liberalization in Russia ought to be a major goal of U.S. policy, so it’s no wonder that he would find a policy that doesn’t make this a priority to be flawed. That doesn’t tell us if the policy has succeeded on its own terms or not. What we might ask is whether the continuation of Bush-era practices of provoking Russia, promoting confrontational policies on NATO expansion, and hectoring the government on its abuses would have yielded greater internal political reform. In fact, the consolidation of Russia’s authoritarian populist system took place during the years when the U.S. pursued those very policies, so there’s little reason to think that abandoning the “reset” would lead to anything better in Russian politics. When will we acknowledge that the Russian political scene is not something that we can influence constructively, if we can influence it at all?

Cohen concludes:

As SAIS scholar Donald Jensen and I noted recently, the Obama administration bet on the wrong horse when it engaged Medvedev as the lead contact in its “reset” with Russia. This was a failure to realistically assess who are we dealing with, and who is making key decisions. The United States should take note, as the administration’s “reset” policy demonstrates its futility once again.

This remark about Medvedev is an odd one. Cohen and Jensen did say this in their earlier article, and it still doesn’t make sense. Whatever the real balance of power in the ruling “tandem,” Medvedev occupies the office of president, and he is therefore formally responsible for dealing with other heads of state and making decisions regarding Russian foreign policy. It seems unlikely that the administration could have engaged anyone else as the “lead contact.” If the administration bet on the “wrong horse,” what would the right one have been?

The U.S. government has frozen $30 billion in Libyan assets, and would like to divert some of that money to the rebels. Today’s decision to formally recognize the TNC as the legitimate government of Libya will make it much easier to do so. But the American diplomat I spoke to noted that political recognition is not the same as legal recognition; the TNC may not qualify as a recognizable government according to State Department criteria [bold mine-DL]. What’s more, even legal recognition might not, by itself, permit the assets to be unfrozen. “We’re really grappling with it right now,” he says. ~James Traub

If the TNC doesn’t meet State Department criteria to be considered a recognizable government, and if legal recognition is not forthcoming because of that, what exactly was the point of extending recognition to the council?

David Bosco believesthis post wildly overstates the effect of the Libyan intervention on the future of R2P:

There’s no doubt the Libya experience has made certain Council members averse to meddling any further in the Arab spring. But will that aversion be so strong next year in some other political or regional context? Who knows. Recent history lends little support to the notion that a controversial–or even failed–mission couched in humanitarian terms threatens the entire genre.

I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of future military interventions carried out by ad hoc groups of states, which is what happened in Kosovo and Iraq. We could quibble over how important the humanitarian justification for invading Iraq was. It was part of the pre-invasion rhetoric, but it wasn’t the reason for the invasion. When no WMDs turned up in Iraq, that effectively wrecked the idea of waging a war in the name of preventive counter-proliferation. The Libyan war was principally and almost entirely justified in terms of the “responsibility to protect,” and it was because of this doctrine that the U.N. could claim to have the authority to intervene. If Libya sours enough governments on the doctrine, as it already seems to be doing, there won’t be a consensus in favor of similar interventions.

What I am saying is that Libya has made it very difficult to imagine the Security Council authorizing a similar military intervention in accordance with R2P requirements. As Bosco knows, an intervention would very likely fall short of the standards set down by the creators of R2P if it is not authorized by the Security Council. Having been burned by what they perceive as an abuse of the authorization provided by UNSCR 1973, both the permanent and non-permanent abstaining members are very likely to revert back to outright opposition to such actions. That may not stop the U.S. or other intervening governments from taking action without authorization, but it is this authorization that separates a formally lawful international intervention from an illegal attack on a member state.

There is still a great deal of clamoring for selling F-16s to Taiwan. Sen. Cornyn of Texas continues to put a hold on confirming the nominee for deputy secretary of state until the administration issues a report on Taiwan’s air capabilities and acknowledges Taiwan’s request for the fighters. As Robert Haddick explained, F-16s are not going to do Taiwan much good in the event of a conflict with China. This post at DefenseTech confirms Haddick’s view:

Actually, RAND did the math on this one in a report last year, in typical RAND style, using sophisticated modeling to simulate a Chinese invasion of Taiwan in the 2010–2015 timeframe. RAND’s conclusion was that the addition of a few dozen upgraded F-16s would have little to no impact on the cross-strait balance. In fact, RAND found that in the event of a Chinese attack, “the air war for Taiwan could essentially be over before much of the Blue air force has even fired a shot.”

It’s not the Chinese air fleet that would deliver the knock out blow to Taiwanese air power. Rather, its China’s massive arsenal of ballistic missiles that in an opening salvo would destroy most Taiwanese aircraft, even those in hardened shelters, and wreck its runways before Taiwan was able to launch its fighters.

Adding new F-16s to China’s inventory does little to change the ultimate outcome. Well, more Taiwanese aircraft would make a small contribution RAND found: “Taiwan’s air power can at least contribute to the anti-invasion defense by absorbing as much of China’s air effort as possible in the process of being put out of action.” In other words, parking more fighters on Taiwan’s ramps would make the Chinese deplete more of its missile magazines.

The answer to the cross-strait military balance will not come in the form of more short range tactical fighters sat on ramps within range of China’s massive missile force. As the RAND study conclusively shows, selling Taiwan more capable F-16s does nothing to change the military balance.

If these analyses are correct, there would seem to be no real gain in terms of Taiwanese security. That leaves the even more dubious argument that selling the F-16s now will be politically useful. Matt Anderson made the political argument in a recent article calling for the sale to go ahead:

There’s also a political impetus to get this arms sale done now. In Taiwan, the sale would bolster Ma in the next election. As alluded to before, the arms sale could preclude Ma from taking provocative actions by providing cover from accusations that he’s selling out Taiwan’s security with his pro-mainland policies. In regard to the other two relevant actors, an arms sale now could possibly take the issue off the table before the political transition takes place in Beijing and the US political climate becomes combustible with a presidential election.

If the fighters wouldn’t actually enhance Taiwanese security, selling them to Taiwan would be a waste of Taiwan’s money and a useless provocation. It is one thing to argue over whether the U.S. should be willing to rile Beijing for the sake of providing for Taiwan’s defense, but to do so when the sale doesn’t make Taiwan any more secure makes no sense at all. The sale might very well boost Ma in the next election, but U.S. policy should not be dictated by trying to keep the current Taiwanese president in office. Some Taiwan-related issue is always going to be on the table. If political transition in China initially leads to a more assertive Chinese military during the early days of Xi Jinping‘s tenure, as Anderson supposes might happen, that is all the more reason not to have created a breach in the previous year.

According to the 2011 NIT report, Ukraine’s rating for electoral processes stands at 3.50 and is identical to the rating it had in 2005, the first year of Orange rule, and the same as in 2009, the last year of President Viktor Yushchenko’s presidency.

Moreover, the 2011 survey’s assessment of the strength and independence of civil society shows Ukraine at 2.75 (the same rating as in the Yushchenko years 2006-2010) and a better rating that the 3.00 registered in 2005 – the year of the Orange Revolution. Media independence declined from a rating of 3.5 to 3.75, a judgement justified by the increasingly uncritical tone of television news (though balanced by the freewheeling discourse on popular political talk shows).

However, even this decline means Ukraine’s media freedoms are on a par with EU members Bulgaria and Romania, and incipient EU member Croatia.
Moreover, Ukraine’s electoral processes are sounder than in Georgia, Moldova, and Kosovo. And Ukrainian civil society operates with greater freedom and vitality than Georgia’s.

In the end, according to Freedom House, Ukraine remains the most open of the non-Baltic Soviet states with an overall democracy score significantly better than that of Georgia. But few people in Washington or Brussels would assert that Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili is dangerously close to becoming another Lukashenko. ~Adrian Karatnycky

No, they wouldn’t. Even though Saakashvili has had no problem aligning himself with Lukashenko in recent years when the latter was antagonizing Moscow, no one would want to think of them as anything other than opposites. Granted, that has more to do with the perception of Saakashvili as “pro-Western” and therefore more “democratic” by default. Political conditions may be largely unchanged under Yanukovych, and integration with Europe may be proceeding, but these things aren’t nearly as satisfying as vilifying Yanukovych as nothing more than a Kremlin stooge. It turns out that the last Ukrainian presidential election was not quite the harbinger of democratic retreat that some made it out to be.

Joshua Keating ponders the U.S. recognition of the TNC in Libya, and suggests that Woodrow Wilson’s policy towards Mexico may have provided a precedent. If I were a Libyan war supporter, I’m not sure that I would be encouraged by the comparison to Wilson’s inept responses to Mexico’s civil war, but what I found more interesting was the justification Wilson gave for not recognizing Huerta’s government. Wilson said:

Mexico has no Government. The attempt to maintain one at the City of Mexico has broken down, and a mere military despotism has been set up which has hardly more than the semblance of national authority. It originated in the usurpation of Victoriano Huerta, who, after a brief attempt to play the part of constitutional President, has at last cast aside even the pretense of legal right and declared himself dictator. As a consequence, a condition of affairs now exists in Mexico which has made it doubtful whether even the most elementary and fundamental rights either of her own people or of the citizens of other countries resident within her territory can long be successfully safeguarded, and which threatens, if long continued, to imperil the interests of peace, order, and tolerable life in the lands immediately to the south of us.

The comparison with Wilson’s response to Huerta isn’t quite as helpful as it seems. That was a case of refusing to extend de facto recognition to a regime created by seizing power. Despite Huerta’s de facto control of the country, Wilson would not agree to recognize his regime. Had there been a coup against Gaddafi, and a new dictator had established himself in Tripoli, this would offer some guidance as to how an earlier President handled the question of recognizing a coup government. What we have here instead is the decision to use recognition as part of the campaign to aid an armed insurrection against the established government. In this case, the U.S. is extending recognition to a rebel group that does not have de facto control of most of the country, but which the U.S. favors in the civil war despite its weakness and dependence on outside help.

The reasons Wilson gave for refusing to extend recognition to Huerta would be good arguments for not extending recognition to the TNC right now. If Libya has no functioning government in many parts of the country, it is because of a rebellion backed by outside intervention. The TNC certainly has little more than “the semblance of national authority,” it originated in rebellion against the established government, there is a “condition of affairs” in Libya “which has made it doubtful whether even the most elementary and fundamental rights either of her own people or of the citizens of other countries resident within her territory can long be successfully safeguarded,” and this condition “threatens, if long continued, to imperil the interests of peace, order, and tolerable life” throughout the country.

Others on the Security Council might favor it, but Russia and China would veto a resolution calling on the Syrian government to restrain itself. “This is very much a blow-back from the Libyan episode,” explained Gowan. “Russia and China — and also India — feel that the West pushed them into a corner over Libya. . . . They fear that they accepted a precedent for Western interventionism that they now want to erase, and Syria has been the test case for that.”

The current stalemate in Libya only adds to their resistance, added Gowan, who said any reconciliation at the U.N. is unlikely, barring a significant escalation of the internal violence in Syria. “It would have to be an escalation that potentially created major problems for Turkey, or perhaps for Lebanon,” he said. “You would really have to see large-scale refugee flows out of Syria before you could shock the skeptics on the Security Council into action.” ~Guy Taylor

Something that continues to amaze me about the Libyan intervention is that its advocates gambled the credibility and viability of the “responsibility to protect” doctrine for the sake of taking sides in a civil war that was not all that exceptionally destructive or threatening to international security. By dropping the bar for intervention so low that it would justify attacking Libya, France, Britain, and the U.S. not only created a possible precedent for later interventions, but did so in a way that would make almost any internal conflict around the world qualify. This naturally drove the abstaining members of the Security Council into total opposition to any kind of action on Syria. Exceeding the mandate that the Security Council provided made sure that no such authorization would be granted again anytime soon, which has almost certainly rendered R2P a dead letter. According to what many of the Libyan war’s supporters wanted it to accomplish and said that it would accomplish, it has failed on almost every count. The one thing that the war likely will accomplish sooner or later is regime change, which the intervention’s defenders claimed was not the goal.

Zakheim expresses the bewilderment that many Americans feel about the Libyan war:

The Libyan civil war is nothing more than a tribal blood feud, stoked by hatreds, grievances and desires for revenge that go back decades if not longer. In such circumstances it is a fool’s errand to determine which of the warring parties has right on its side. That the United States and NATO chose to interject themselves into this conflict is simply incomprehensible.

Update: Follow-up post here.